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by seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 17, 2017 10:52 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 18, 2017 10:23 am
Michael Flynn’s Resignation Is Just the Start of Trump’s Legal Drama With Russia
Andrew Kent
4:00 AM CST
Although the Trump administration and congressional Republican leaders surely hope that the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Tuesday will put an end to controversy about connections between Russia and President Trump's circle, that wish will probably not come true.
First of all, Flynn himself is likely already under FBI investigation and may be in legal jeopardy.
In late December, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering with the presidential election to boost Trump while he was running for president. Putin did not retaliate for the sanctions, breaking with precedent and shocking the Obama White House and U.S. diplomats and intelligence professionals. An explanation soon emerged. Flynn, still a private citizen but tapped to be Trump's national security adviser, had had multiple communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States about the sanctions the day they were imposed.
The speculation is that Flynn may have promised that the incoming Trump administration would go easy on Russia, and so hinted that an aggressive response by Putin would be unnecessary. Whatever was actually said, Flynn then lied to Vice President Mike Pence and others about having discussed sanctions with the ambassador, and Trump spokespeople repeated those lies publicly.
But U.S. counter-intelligence wiretapping of the Russian ambassador had recorded the communications involving Flynn, and sanctions were very much a topic of conversation. Soon after the inauguration, the Department of Justice informed Trump and the White House counsel about the recordings, saying that Flynn's false denial that they occurred opened him up to Russian blackmail. Trump did nothing publicly until the above details were leaked to the press. And then Flynn was abruptly gone.
It has been reported that Flynn was interviewed by the FBI in late January. But his individual status is unclear. He may have been considered a mere witness in a counter-intelligence investigation designed to simply gather information about contacts between Russia and the Trump team. Or he may have been questioned as part of a criminal investigation. In that case, he may be a witness (meaning an informational interview only), a subject (meaning he was interviewed because his conduct was within the scope of the criminal investigation, and he might be suspected of wrongdoing), or the target of the investigation (meaning that the interview was designed to gather additional information to further a criminal prosecution). There is obviously a world of difference between these different possibilities.
There has been much talk that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act by talking about sanctions with the Russian ambassador. The Logan Act is an obscure 1799 statute that makes it a crime for a U.S. citizen, without authorization from the U.S. government, to communicate with a foreign government "with intent to influence the measures or conduct" of that foreign government. It seems that Flynn's conduct, as reported in the press, likely falls within the terms of this criminal statute. The problem is that modern constitutional doctrines of free speech and due process almost certainly do not allow a prosecution under this statute, of Flynn or anyone else.
That may not be the only applicable criminal statute, however. There have been news reports that Flynn misled the FBI when he was asked about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. If so, that is likely a federal crime, and one that is prosecuted all the time without constitutional controversy. Not surprisingly, federal law enforcement and prosecutors hate being lied to. Flynn should be worried.
There could be other problems for Flynn, or other Trump aides with ties to the Russian government. During the transition, Trump and some of his aides including Flynn began to receive classified information about national security matters, to prepare them to assume office. If any of this information—or similar information received once Flynn took office as National Security Adviser—was passed on to Russian government contacts or others who were unauthorized to receive it, it would likely violate the Espionage Act, a criminal statute.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has the authority to quash any particular investigative steps that FBI agents or prosecutors might want to take with regard to Flynn. Maintaining both an appearance and reality of independence in a politically-fraught situation, like this one involving Flynn, is a dicey proposition for any attorney general. The attorney general is an at-will employee of the president, and can be fired by the president at any time for any reason. In addition, Sessions was an early backer of Trump and a trusted campaign surrogate and adviser. He surely got to know Flynn during the campaign too.
Even if a criminal investigation does not ensnare Flynn, there are other reasons that the Trump-Russia scandals are not going away. Despite tepid support from the Republican leadership in Congress, some Republican senators are initiating investigations of the election hacking, contacts between Russian intelligence and Trump campaign advisors prior to the election, and perhaps other Russian-related matters. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the chair and ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, have launched an investigation. So too have Republican senator Richard Burr of North Carolina and Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Some on the Democratic side have called for an independent special counsel or special commission to investigate. These are two different ideas, and would have very different implications.
A special commission, if it occurred, would likely be a congressionally-created, bipartisan entity, like the 9/11 Commission that was created following the terrorist attacks in 2001. Congress might or might not give such a commission legal power to compel testimony and documents. The 9/11 Commission did have subpoena power. The personnel and powers of such a commission, along with the level of cooperation it received from the FBI and other government agencies, would determine how effective it would be. But ultimately, even an aggressive and effective commission can only report and recommend.
A special prosecutor is a very different beast. In the wake of Watergate in the 1970s, Congress passed an independent counsel statute, designed to allow an independent person, outside the usual Department of Justice chain of command, to investigate alleged wrongdoing in the upper reaches of the executive branch. Attorneys general are often close confidantes and allies of the president who appointed them. A special, independent prosecutor is meant to avoid the appearance or actuality of an attorney general using his or her powers over the FBI and federal prosecutors to shield a friendly president or other senior executive branch colleagues from investigation.
Even though Congress allowed the independent counsel statute to lapse in 1999 in the wake of the Ken Starr-Bill Clinton imbroglio, the attorney general still has authority to appoint an independent, special prosecutor. When White House advisers Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were caught up in the investigation about disclosure of Valerie Plame's CIA status, Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself—after much criticism for failure to do so, since he was close to Rove and close to Vice President Dick Cheney, Libby's boss. Deputy Attorney General James Comey (today, the director of the FBI) took over control of the Plame investigation, and in 2003 appointed a special, independent prosecutor to lead it. Libby ended up being convicted of obstruction of justice and lying about the Plame affair.
If Sessions bows to pressure and appoints an independent prosecutor, or recuses himself in favor of a deputy who then does so, the legal woes for Flynn—and potentially other people in the White House or Trump campaign—are just beginning. Such a prosecutor would have the enormous legal powers to gather information and compel testimony that all federal prosecutorial offices possess. There are two kinds of special prosecutors—one governed by DOJ regulations, who can be overruled by the attorney general, and one who is delegated all of the authority that the attorney general has, and so is answerable to no one in the executive branch. The Plame prosecutor was of the latter kind. In practice, even the former kind of special prosecutor would have very substantial if not total independence.
A final reason that the Russia-Trump story is unlikely to go away with Flynn's resignation is that key segments of the intelligence and national security bureaucracy appear to actively distrust the Trump people, and have been leaking damaging information to the press. This leaking is likely to continue until such officials feel that responsible people are in charge of the nation's security—people without favorable views of and back channel ties to the malevolent Putin regime. Rather than seeking a truce with this "deep state," there are signs that Trump may be going to war with it. His allies have been making comments about criminal investigation of the Flynn leakers, and there is talk of appointing a hedge fund billionaire with no national security experience—Stephen A. Feinberg, a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management—to a White House job, tasked with whipping the intelligence community to heel. Most likely, Flynn's resignation is just the beginning of a protracted crisis about ties between Russia and Trump.Andrew Kent is a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law in New York City.
http://fortune.com/2017/02/17/michael-f ... ald-trump/
by 82_28 » Sat Feb 18, 2017 11:48 am
by seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 18, 2017 11:56 am
Mr. President: ‘Just who the hell do you think you are?’
President Trump is chafing under the limits to his executive power.
BY LEONARD PITTS, JR.
Dear Mr. So-Called President:
So let me explain to you how this works.
You were elected as chief executive of the United States. I won’t belabor the fact that you won with a minority of the popular vote and a little help from your friends, FBI Director James Comey and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The bottom line is, you were elected.
And this does entitle you to certain things. You get your own airplane. You get free public housing. You get greeted with snappy salutes. And a band plays when you walk into the room.
But there is one thing to which your election does not entitle you. It does not entitle you to do whatever pops into your furry orange head without being called on it or, should it run afoul of the Constitution, without being blocked.
You and other members of the Fourth Reich seem to be having difficulty understanding this. Reports from Politico and elsewhere describe you as shocked that judges and lawmakers can delay or even stop you from doing things. Three weeks ago, your chief strategist, Steve Bannon, infamously declared that news media should “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”
Just last Sunday, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared on CBS’ “Face The Nation” that “our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
What you do “will not be questioned?” Lord, have mercy. That’s the kind of statement that, in another time and place, would have been greeted with an out-thrust palm and a hearty “Sieg heil!” Here in this time and place, however, it demands a different response:
Just who the hell do you think you are?
Meaning you and all the other trolls you have brought clambering up from under their bridges. Maybe you didn’t notice, but this is the United States of America. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Nation of laws, not of individuals? First Amendment? Freedom of the press? Any of that ringing a bell?
Let’s be brutally clear here. If you were a smart guy with unimpeachable integrity and a good heart who was enacting wise policies for the betterment of all humankind, you’d still be subject to sharp scrutiny from news media, oversight from Congress, restraint by the judiciary — and public opinion.
And you, of course, are none of those things. I know you fetishize strength. I know your pal Vladimir would never stand still for reporters and judges yapping at him.
I know, too, that you’re accustomed to being emperor of your own fiefdom. Must be nice. Your name on the wall, the paychecks, the side of the building. You tell people to make something happen, and it does. You yell at a problem, and it goes away. Nobody talks back. I can see how it would be hard to give that up.
But you did. You see, you’re no longer an emperor, Mr. So-Called President. You’re now what is called a “public servant” — in effect, an employee with 324 million bosses. And let me tell you something about those bosses. They’re unruly and loud, long accustomed to speaking their minds without fear or fetter. And they believe power must always answer to the people. That’s at the core of their identity.
Yet you and your coterie of cartoon autocrats think you’re going to cow them into silence and compliance by ordering them to shut up and obey? Well, as a freeborn American, I can answer that in two syllables flat.
Hell no.
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn- ... rylink=cpy
by crikkett » Sat Feb 18, 2017 12:18 pm
seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 06, 2017 11:31 am wrote:Conway used 'Bowling Green massacre' days before MSNBC interview
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... -interview
by crikkett » Sat Feb 18, 2017 3:24 pm
82_28 » Fri Feb 17, 2017 3:37 pm wrote:crikkett, just dump the pertinent cookies -- not all of them! I don't know what browser you use but it works for me when I hit the pay-wall. For instance I check out seattletimes.com and you can only "get" 5 articles a month. All I do is just erase the cookies in question. I use Firefox. But it works every time. Five more "free" articles. What browser you use? Oh also, I do not believe it is IP addy based since many IPs can be on one node.
by SonicG » Sat Feb 18, 2017 9:06 pm
The first casualties of Trump's trade wars are Texas cattle ranchers
....
Now, even the investor class is starting to feel the headwinds of economic war. Despite a rally at the stock market, the president's policies are now proving logically incoherent when they're put together. The border wall was to be budget-neutral, meaning no new taxes or spending, but now it turns out to cost an estimated $20 billion, which the Mexicans will, in fact, not pay. That means increasing deficit spending or raising taxes, both of which seem non-starters.
A wall and a spending spree on infrastructure will not, it turns out, be free because debt-to-productivity ratios are climbing. Banks are tightening lending conditions, anticipating a profitable credit crunch. Fitch Ratings has warned that the president's erratic foreign and trade policy is causing so much uncertainty that even foreign government debt is starting to look shaky.
"The Trump administration represents a risk to international economic conditions and global sovereign credit fundamentals," according to Fitch. "U.S. policy predictability has diminished, with established international communication channels and relationship norms being set aside and raising the prospect of sudden, unanticipated changes in U.S. policies with potential global implications."
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comme ... e-ranchers
by SonicG » Sat Feb 18, 2017 9:53 pm
"I salute that every single day and I pray and I tell him, 'Mr. President, I pray for your safety today,' " Huber said. "And I'm not lying,I do that every single day to the president, but he's cardboard."
by 82_28 » Sun Feb 19, 2017 12:01 am
crikkett » Sat Feb 18, 2017 11:24 am wrote:82_28 » Fri Feb 17, 2017 3:37 pm wrote:crikkett, just dump the pertinent cookies -- not all of them! I don't know what browser you use but it works for me when I hit the pay-wall. For instance I check out seattletimes.com and you can only "get" 5 articles a month. All I do is just erase the cookies in question. I use Firefox. But it works every time. Five more "free" articles. What browser you use? Oh also, I do not believe it is IP addy based since many IPs can be on one node.
thanks 82_28 - clearing cookies seems to work!
PS regarding that article I posted ...it reads like a bad tv show. Lighting documents with cameraphone flashes, snapshots posted to facebook...
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 19, 2017 9:56 am
The Empty-Headedness of K.T. McFarland
by Jim Lobe
When Gen. Robert Harward (ret.) rejected Donald Trump’s offer to succeed Gen. Michael Flynn as the president’s new national security adviser (NSA), a variety of sources reported that the general’s real reason was that he couldn’t pick his own staff. He would have been required to work with Stephen Bannon as Trump’s chief White House strategist, who finagled himself onto the Principals Committee of the National Security Council. Worse, his second-in-command would have been Flynn’s deputy NSA, K.T. McFarland, a former Fox News national-security commentator who distinguished herself at the cable station for, among other things, Islamophobia, Sinophobia, and conspiracy theories. Although Harward, a former Navy SEAL, publicly cited the familiar family and financial reasons for regretfully turning down a U.S. president, he was reliably reported to have privately told his friends that the package—mainly McFarland but presumably also some other political appointees on the NSC—offered by Trump constituted a “shit sandwich.”
Last night, the estimable Laura Rozen produced a string of tweets on the situation, the most notable of which read “contact says, Just was told Trump told KT McFarland to pick her new boss. She named Bolton. See where this goes. If true, this would mean that Trump, whose family has reportedly developed close personal ties to McFarland over recent years, has delegated to the deputy NSA to choose the NSA, a bizarre arrangement to say the least. That John Bolton should be her favorite for the job, although not surprising in itself given her ideological tendencies, should, of course, scare the hell out of everyone, but let’s leave that until a final decision is made. (As noted by Greg Thielmann, the State Department’s former senior weapons of mass destruction (WMD) expert, if Trump is so riled by the intelligence community’s mistakes on Iraq’s WMD, he should be really, really outraged by Bolton’s heavy contribution to that fiasco.)
I generally avoid cable or any television news, so I had never seen McFarland on Fox. But I did witness her participation in the all-day “Passing the Baton” conference that took place at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) on January 10, videos of which can be seen here. McFarland appeared on the last panel of the day, entitled “America’s Role in the World.” Moderated by Politico columnist Susan Glasser, the panel also included former undersecretary of defense for policy Michele Flournoy; former NSA under George W. Bush, Stephen Hadley; and top Hillary Clinton foreign-policy aide, Jake Sullivan.
I was deeply impressed by McFarland and left the presentation completely and irrevocably persuaded that she was totally unfit for the job. It wasn’t because of her ideological predispositions, which she didn’t address. Instead, she just struck me as the epitome of a ditz, a flibbertigibbet, an airhead. She blabbed on and on and on—often nonsensically—with the hoariest of clichés, non-sequiturs, circular reasoning, run-on sentences, and abrupt detours in mid-sentence. Bear in mind that the function of the deputy NSA is to ensure that the day-to-day operations of the NSC run smoothly. The person in that position also convenes and chairs the Deputies Committee from all relevant departments to discuss and decide on options for critical foreign-policy decisions, some of which are decided at the Deputies level and the most important of which are sent to the Principals for final presentation to the president. The post requires a sharp-as-a-tack strategic mind; organizational discipline; efficiency in preparation, discussion, and decision-making; verbal precision and coherence; and adherence to a process in which all relevant points of view are given due attention and weight. You should watch the video to see her range of facial and hand gestures—and to see that she is likely to fail at all the qualifications for the job. These meetings often leave remotely competent participants in a state of utter frustration. Of course, rendering the Deputies Committee useless will only serve to reinforce the current pattern of ignoring the departments and centralizing more power in the White House’s upper reaches, specifically in Bannon’s office.
Because the video is long, and McFarland’s interventions are sporadic, I’ve taken the time to transcribe her remarks as best I can. She’s a very fast talker, so there may be a few individual words lost or missed or misunderstood, but I tried to be very careful. This transcript will give you a good idea of why I reached the harsh conclusions above. Note that some sentences don’t make grammatical or syntactical sense. That’s how she spoke. She is completely unfit for the job, and it’s terrifying to consider that she has veto power over the next NSA, let alone that she will choose him or her.
Question: Will Trump Represent Break with Previous U.S. Foreign Policy?
First of all, I want thank you for that question and tell you that I’m not going to answer it because my boss is sitting right here in the front row.[Laughs] Gen. Flynn, who gave a terrific speech earlier is sitting right there, so I’m going to speak in just general terms.
I think in all seriousness, on a human level, I think it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room, and that’s me [points to herself with both hands] and the Trump administration. I don’t think anybody—probably most of the people in this room—didn’t support Donald Trump, maybe not at first or maybe ever. And I suspect most of the people in this room didn’t think he’d win. But he has, and the fact that you’re all here—even though you didn’t support this candidate, even though, as you said [pointing to Glasser], people have questions—I think it really speaks to who you are, and the professionalism and the seriousness with which you’ve taken the profession which you’ve all given your lives to—so I want to applaud you, and I particularly want to thank the people I’m on the podium with, because, if the election had turned out differently, everybody would’ve have had a different job. And the fact that you’re here today and not on some desert island somewhere speaks to your character. [Chuckles] So I want to get that out on the table…
What I would like to do—because I’m not going to tell you about the Trump administration policies because that’s what a new administration does; it takes time to rethink things and to come up with its policies. But I will tell you about the mindset and why I, as an untraditional New Yorker, thought Donald Trump was the guy I wanted to support early on. And that’s because I think we’re at a unique moment in American history, and to me, he was the one candidate who would seize that moment. And here’s why I say a unique moment. We have the opportunity—it only happens once every 40 years, more than every generation, every two generations—where the United States has an opportunity to reinvent itself and recreate itself. Now Mike Flynn earlier talked about American exceptionalism as our values and we stand for liberty and freedom and that we are the indispensable nation—we are the one indispensable nation.
But I think there’s another part to American exceptionalism, and that’s that we’re the nation of reinvention. Every one of us in this room probably didn’t start out in the life that you’ve lived. You’ve created yourself out of the opportunities that you’ve had in this country. And that’s what I think has made America truly exceptional. Most countries rise, shine and eventually decline. And America rises, shines, and maybe declines a little bit but rises again in an even better and greater form.
And that’s the moment we’re at because the stars have aligned to make this unique historic movement, and for the following reasons: tax reform. Donald Trump has talked about a pro-growth economy. Tax reform is probably going to liberate—particularly the corporate tax reform—$2 or $3 trillion that will come back to the United States, to be repatriated to invest in infrastructure and new inventions. Secondly, regulatory reform. We saw in the Reagan administration, where I was a foot soldier, that regulatory reform really did encourage the development of small business. The third thing is we have cheap energy—cheap and abundant and secure energy. We have been in this quest as America since the 1970s—where can we find cheap and abundant and secure energy sources. And then finally, we have a dozen disruptive technologies. How many people in this room have an iPhone? [Raises hand for a show of hands] Right, everybody’s got an iPhone except the people at Samsung. We don’t let them in the room [laughs], but, if you’ve got an iPhone, that didn’t exist ten years ago. And yet think of how it’s changed your lives. It’s not just calling somebody; it’s how you access information; it’s how you shop. It’s all aspects of your lives have been changed by the iPhone. Well there are a dozen iPhone-like technologies that have been invented in America; they’re going to be manufactured in America; and they’re going to be sold not only to America, but to the world. And it’s stuff like wearable medical devices; it’s self-driving cars; robotics, nanotechnology, bio-engineering, it’s DNA-designed medicine—all of these things are just waiting to be mass-produced in America, so I look at this and I’m a glass half-empty person. I studied nuclear weapons systems at MIT—you know, you’re not supposed to be thinking about the good news in that field. But I look at this and say we’re in America where the glass is half full because, with a few political decisions—which is why I like Donald Trump because I think he’s the guy to make those decisions—we’re going to have an economic renaissance.
Secondly, it’s not just the economy, stupid, but it’s also American national security, and it’s the rebuilding of America’s defenses. I don’t think a lot of people think—and we can say later who, why, who blame, that blame—but American foreign policy in the last 15 years has not been a happy story. Yet if we have the opportunity now to rebuild our defenses—as Gen. Flynn said, “Peace Through Strength”—when Ronald Reagan chose those words, he did it very deliberately. It wasn’t peace through capitulation or peace through conquest, and it wasn’t economic strength, military strength, diplomatic strength, moral strength—it was all those things together. And I think we have another opportunity to do that again. So when I look at the future and ask what is the mindset and where does America go from here, I think we have a new president who’s going to seize this unique historic moment and he’s going to rebuild America’s defenses. And not only does it make our lives better as Americans, but it gives us leverage and opportunities and options that we’ve not had for over a generation. And that’s not just to rethink American foreign policy—nobody’s talking about giving up the things that have been a part of the American post-war period—but it’s maybe to recalibrate, as Gen. Flynn said, or see what other opportunities exist to strengthen them.
And so the three bedrock principles that we want—you know, what is the Trump foreign policy—I think you can talk about the things that have been tried and true. You know when Steve Hadley and I were junior NSC staffers together, or when you’ve been in government [gestures to Flournoy) or when you’ve been in government (gestures to Sullivan). And it’s things like—you know, it’s America’s values—that’s going to continue to be the bedrock of American foreign policy. It’s American global leadership, it’s going to continue. It may have a different form, and we may have more options and more opportunities to do it. And finally, it’s the alliance structures that have kept the peace for as—did you realize since World War II, this is the greatest and longest period of world-power peace since the fall of the Roman Empire?—75 years that we have not had global wars. And a lot of that is because of our alliances. So I would say, all of you, relax. It’s going to be great. We’re going to make America great again. [Laughs] And welcome along for the ride. Thank you.
Question: Russia and China Policy?
You know, I think one of the biggest problems that we as Americans—and it’s not a partisan thing—the mistake that we make, it’s that we constantly tell other countries how they should think. You know, “it’s in your best interest to do this [pointing to the right], or you know, what you should do is that [pointing to the left].” And you know, American foreign policy has had the luxury of being the most powerful economic, political, diplomatic power certainly in the last several centuries, probably of all time. And the fact that we kind of assume everybody thinks the way we do is to make a fundamental mistake. And it’s not so much what we’re thinking—but how are they thinking, how do they see the world? Maybe they see the world the way you’re [nodding to Hadley] talking about. But maybe we spent way too long trying to tell them what to think.
And, what I’m hoping in this period—which, again, I think is a very transformational period, not just for the United States, but for the world—is that we can start seeing things through their eyes. I mean, our old boss, Henry Kissinger, and he was an expert at this—he was a genius at seeing what did they think, what were their needs, how could we give them their needs but at the same time advance American foreign policy and American national security interests. When I look at the world today—and not how they should think, but the reality, where things are going. You know, China has been an ascendant rising power economically and in other ways, but ascendancy, particularly built on economic growth, is starting to slow down. Russia has had Vladimir Putin. Go look at his graduate dissertation that he wrote in the late 1980s as the Soviet empire was collapsing, and he wrote a graduate thesis that said I’m going to rebuild, Russia can rebuild itself by using its natural resources, bring them under state control, and then when the prices of energy rise, Russia will be in a dominant position. And he’s followed it to the letter, EXCEPT, what he didn’t anticipate was fracking, and he didn’t anticipate the energy revolution so that the price of oil has gone down. What does that mean for him? What does that mean for Russia’s long-term future? At the same time, I look at the Middle East where we have been tethered to the Middle East since the 1970s in the quest for cheap and abundant, secure energy. And yet the Middle East—I don’t think anyone in this room thinks that peace is going to break out any time soon. So all of these things are—the chessboard is moving, the tectonic plates are shifting. And what is America’s opportunity, whether it’s with Xi Jinping or whether it’s with Vladimir Putin or whoever it is in the world, I think it gives us an opportunity. I can’t tell you what those moves are; I can just tell you that the nimbleness with which America can conduct its foreign policy, particularly after a period of economic growth, will give us options and leverage to take advantage of all of those opportunities as they present themselves [Hadley nods sagely throughout this last disquisition].
Question: Reconciling Trump Policy with Kissingerian Realpolitik and Reagan’s Democracy Promotion
I always think of the eagerness that most graduate students take to try to put everybody in this kind of category and catalogue. I just don’t think that; I mean it’s a different world. Things change. What Henry Kissinger was able to do is a different world than what Ronald Reagan was able to do. I mean I look at the post-war period and, say, during the post-war period, we emerged from the post-war period with two adversaries that were existential threats to the United States in the sense of nuclear weapons, and that was the Soviet Union and China, and that was the Sino-Soviet alliance. So what was the Kissingerian foreign policy? Well, he was able to put a wedge between the Sino-Soviet alliance. What did Ronald Reagan do? He was able to take the Soviet Union, which was the remaining existential threat to the United States and turn that around. How did he do it? Not by fighting. You know, this was a war that was won without firing a shot. The one thing I can tell you about Donald Trump is that, if you listen to what he says, when he talks about things like deterrence, he doesn’t use the word deterrence. He didn’t go to grad school where most of you guys went. Um, he’s a businessman. But when he talks about let’s build America’s defenses so we don’t have to use them, that is the essence of deterrence. That is peace through strength. That is not build up your military so you go use it; it’s build your military up so that nobody picks a fight with you. And that was Ronald Reagan philosophy. On the other hand, there are parts of Nixon and Kissinger that I think Donald Trump has also advocated. So I’m not going to be put into the little academic grad school box because I think it doesn’t suit and it doesn’t apply in a rapidly changing world.
Question: How Is World Reacting to Trump and Trump Effect?
Let me answer a little differently because I really don’t want to get into the Trump administration foreign policy. Let me talk about the Trump effect. To me, the greatest threat to American national security in the last, let’s say, 20, 30 years has not come from abroad but has come from within. And that is that the assumption of American democracy is predicated on participation. We’re in it together. Somebody wins, somebody loses. We go home; we decide we’re going to support the other candidate. We come back again and we decide to support somebody different again. And the real problem with the American community is that the last, you know, for decades, 40% of the population just checked out. They may have had opinions, but they never went to the polls; they didn’t vote. You’d ask people, and they’d say, “Well, I’m not political. I’m not gonna go vote. It’s not for me.” And that I think was the greatest threat to the country because, again, a democracy is predicated on participation, and, in 1776, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution that was written assumed that we would take not just the opportunities of democracy and the privileges, but the responsibility for self-governance. And when I look at the American political landscape, the thing that I think is the Trump effect is, a lot of that 40%, they’re back in the game. Now, you may not like some of the things that they believe in or you might love some of the things that they believe in. But the fact that they’re in the game is something that strengthens democracy because you never want to get to the point where people don’t participate. They don’t feel it’s them. They feel disconnected from the country because we have been given the gift of the responsibility for democracy falls on our shoulders, and some of the population in this country have decided it wasn’t for them. They’re back in the game, and I think if you got that going for you, if the American public feels that they’re back participating, they’ve got a piece of the action, they’ve got skin in the game, then I think there isn’t any problem that’s too big for us to solve, because look at American history. I mean this is tough, I get it. The civil war was tougher. Valley Forge was a lot tougher. The Depression was worse, and when the American people are together, we are not only the indispensable nation, we’re unstoppable because we’re inventive, we’re creative, we’re entrepreneurial—all of those things, and yet we’re never any of those things if 40% of the nation checks out. They’re back in the game, and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the Trump effect, and that’s the single most important thing that I take away from this election.
Question: Most Underrated and Overrated Accomplishment of Obama Administration.
{When discussion moves to McFarland, she asks to be reminded of the question and then abruptly interrupts Glasser and jumps right in.]
You know, one of the things that struck me—I did not support President Obama when he first ran or the second time he ran. But one of my colleagues at Fox News—which is where I used to work until about a month ago—one of my colleagues was Juan Williams—African American man who’s a very respected journalist and somebody I think very highly of as a human being—and he said the night that Barack Obama was elected—he said, “you don’t understand what this means. You don’t understand what this means to me,” and I thought, “God, I don’t really get this.” And he said, “I’m an African American, and there have been times—a lot of times—when I haven’t felt that I’ve been treated equally or considered equally.” And so he said when Barack Obama won the presidency, it was a change that he felt in a fundamental way.
And I kept thinking back to when Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman to be on a national ticket and when she was vice president [pause] in the Democratic Party to Mondale, I didn’t support her either. But I sure felt great about the fact that a woman was breaking through that glass ceiling. So whatever else you say about you did like his foreign policy [or] you didn’t, you did like Obamacare, you didn’t, I think that just the fact that a man like that, that people a generation before would never have thought an African-American man could win. I don’t think that’s the only thing I want to remember Barack Obama for, but it showed to me the same kind of pride in my nation that I felt when Geraldine Ferraro got the nomination. And then it was the same pride that I felt when Sandra Day O’Connor was nominated to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, a woman I did get to know and consider a friend. But it was that same notion, that stuff you didn’t think was going to happen a generation before has happened. And when I look around today at the kind of people who are assuming national leadership roles, it, again, to rise above the partisanship and all the rest, it makes me really proud that I’m a member of this country where people can rise on their own qualities, and there is just no limit to what they can do if they’re willing to work hard, be a little bit lucky, and follow their dreams. So, I’d like to leave it there.
Question: Advice for Trump about Syria?
Boy, that’s a really tough one. Well, first of all I think I wouldn’t want to say in a public forum what kind of advice I would give to President-elect Trump. But Syria and what it represents in a greater sense [as] a failed state is going to be one of the greatest challenges. You know, throughout history, you worry about countries that get too rich and too powerful and then come to take a piece out of you. In this case, failed states present one of the greatest challenges, and, as you said, Jake, failed states potentially—or as you said, Jake, people who get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, fissile materials—so, the advice I would give is not specifically about that, but about the understanding that failed states (or) weak states which have historically never been a threat to great nations—we are in a new era where failed states, the weakest states in the world community, or even sub-national groups, now can present the greatest threat to world peace and to their neighborhood. Thank you.
Question: Trump’s Failure to Criticize Russia
[Questioner from audience makes reference to just-breaking news about the infamous “dossier” prepared by the British former intelligence agency and what assurances she can make about the incoming administration’s concerns about Russia.]
I don’t know about the story you’re talking about that’s broken and so I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to have any comment about something about which I know nothing. And I know in Washington, people prefer to talk about something about which they know nothing, but I’m going to refrain [and] am not going to take that temptation. I think what Donald Trump has said on a number of occasions is what you just said, Jake, although not in relation to sub-national groups as much as about the Soviet Union—the Soviet Union, now Russia—and its nuclear weapons. I’ve heard him say on a number of occasions, “Nuclear weapons change everything.” So that, I assume, is what is going to carry him on, and when you talk about existential threats to the United States, the existential threat to not only the United States but to people in the world is nuclear weapons in the hands of people who want to use them. Um, throughout the nuclear age, deterrence has kept the peace. We are now in a new era where deterrence may not keep the peace. And I think that, again, I’m going to refrain from jumping right in and giving an opinion about which I don’t know the subject, but thanks.
[Glasser directs a question at Sullivan about what affect the Russian intervention may have had on the election outcome. But McFarland interrupts, preventing a somewhat stunned Sullivan from answering.]
Tell you what, let me say something. You never want to trust a reporter, and I say that as somebody from the media. We talked earlier, Susan, about not wanting to get into Donald Trump’s foreign policy. What I will say, however, is (pause), you know I’m not going to say what Donald Trump thinks about, say, the election and what involvement the Russians had. I would say just what Mr. Clapper said, which is that there is no evidence that whatever the Russians did had any effect on the outcome of the election. And for any political leader who is looking at what you’ve said is a change election and what you’ve said—the American people saying, “Hey, you heard us yet?”—that for anybody who wants to sort of blame the loss of Hillary Clinton or the Democrats or the governorships or the senators or the House of Representatives or the Democratic Party, you’re making a mistake if you think that it’s because of some other thing. It’s the American people talking, and I just think it’s a mistake that the Democrats are making if they continue to try to look for a scapegoat. Sometimes it’s just better to look at what their positions are that have lent [sic] to the dissatisfaction of the country because it’s not just one election. If you look at the past several elections, it’s been governorships that have been lost; it’s been state legislatures that have been lost; it’s been senators that have been lost; it’s been congressional seats that have been lost. And so I’m really not going to jump into the middle of that.
[Glasser asks McFarland for final remarks]
In 1970, I went to the White House for the first time. I was a college freshman, and my poor family from the Midwest—my parents hadn’t gone to college, my grandparents (inaudible)—I had to pay my way through college, I had a part-time job, working in the White House Situation Room. I was the night-shift secretary on Henry Kissinger’s staff, and when I had that job, if you had told me that I was going to live to see a Michele Flournoy in the positions you’ve had [pointing to Flournoy], or a Madeleine Albright or Hillary Clinton or a Condi Rice, I would probably have just said, “Really, you know?” In my era, women, you could get a college degree, and that was terrific. You could probably be an executive assistant, and maybe you could be, you know, a super-secretary. You might even be a research assistant. But I never would have thought that 45 years later—and, by the way, I am probably the oldest person in this room—but, 45 years later, that it would not only be de rigueur, but, you know absolutely nobody bats an eyelash at the thought that a woman could do any of those things. So I look at this [as] I’ve stepped on the shoulders of some great women. Some of them are older than I am, but some of them are [pause], and the idea that America is passing the baton is not that we’re arising out of nothing, and that history began when we walked into the White House. It’s the fact that we’re standing on the shoulders of the people who came before—the women who came before certainly, but everybody who came before. And so the way this new administration is going to take traditional American values, take a traditional American global leadership role, take the traditional alliances that have served so well for 75 years, I do see this is a building upon something, and it is a passing of the baton. And that is one of the great reasons to celebrate this institution, the bipartisan, fractious [laughs] nature of our politics. But I think it’s a great testimony to the experiment that is America and that continues to be the shining city on the hill.
http://lobelog.com/the-empty-headedness ... mcfarland/
DHS memos describe aggressive new immigration, border enforcement policies
By Tal Kopan, CNN
Updated 4:19 AM ET, Sun February 19, 2017
Mom in tears after she is denied stay in US
US presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves after a joint press conference with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto (out of frame) in Mexico City on August 31, 2016.
Donald Trump was expected in Mexico Wednesday to meet its president, in a move aimed at showing that despite the Republican White House hopeful's hardline opposition to illegal immigration he is no close-minded xenophobe. Trump stunned the political establishment when he announced late Tuesday that he was making the surprise trip south of the border to meet with President Enrique Pena Nieto, a sharp Trump critic.
/ AFP / YURI CORTEZ (Photo credit should read YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
DENVER, CO - FEBRUARY 15: Undocumented immigrant and activist Jeanette Vizguerra, 45, hugs her youngest child Zury Baez, 6, while addressing supporters and the media as she seeks sanctuary at First Unitarian Church on February 15, 2017 in Denver, Colorado. Vizguerra, who has been working the United States for some 20 years, and her children will be living in a room in the basement of the church hoping to avoid deportation after the local office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied a stay of her case which would lead to her immediate deportation. (Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)Now Playing
US presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves after a joint press conference with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto (out of frame) in Mexico City on August 31, 2016.
Donald Trump was expected in Mexico Wednesday to meet its president, in a move aimed at showing that despite the Republican White House hopeful's hardline opposition to illegal immigration he is no close-minded xenophobe. Trump stunned the political establishment when he announced late Tuesday that he was making the surprise trip south of the border to meet with President Enrique Pena Nieto, a sharp Trump critic.
DENVER, CO - FEBRUARY 15: Undocumented immigrant and activist Jeanette Vizguerra, 45, hugs her youngest child Zury Baez, 6, while addressing supporters and the media as she seeks sanctuary at First Unitarian Church on February 15, 2017 in Denver, Colorado. Vizguerra, who has been working the United States for some 20 years, and her children will be living in a room in the basement of the church hoping to avoid deportation after the local office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied a stay of her case which would lead to her immediate deportation. (Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)
arizona-guadalupe-garcia-de-rayos-daughter-speech-orig-mg_00005601.jpg
Daughter makes emotional plea for deported mom
The border security guidance expands the use of "expedited removal" proceedings for unauthorized immigrants.
The enforcement memo leaves deferred action for childhood arrivals intact.
(CNN)The Department of Homeland Security is set to release guidance on President Donald Trump's immigration and border security executive orders that has sweeping implications for undocumented immigrants in the United States and those seeking to enter in the future.
The memos from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to agency chiefs, obtained by CNN, are the first step to putting Trump's aggressive immigration policies in place, with provisions that could make substantial changes to how immigration laws are enforced.
The guidance will tighten immigration laws on asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors entering the country and could send individuals awaiting immigration proceedings in the United States back to Mexico.
While the documents do not change anything in the executive orders on border security and interior immigration enforcement that Trump signed during his first week in office, they do explain how the administration plans to put those orders in place, signaling a hard-line position on undocumented immigrants that will please the right wing on immigration policy.
The memos could also further inflame tensions with immigrants, their advocates and Democratic lawmakers who have been highly critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's arrests of nearly 700 immigrants nationwide this month. While ICE said 75% of those arrested had criminal records and insisted the "targeted" enforcement was consistent with what the Obama administration had done, the department also said officers who encountered individuals not on the list of targets were given latitude to decide whether they should also be arrested for removal.
Fear in immigrant communities had already been running high based on Trump's pitched rhetoric against illegal immigration on the campaign trail, and only increased during the ICE enforcement actions.
The new guidance makes it more difficult to seek asylum in the US, allows the detention of substantially more undocumented immigrants and gives more authority to immigration officers -- all of which could add up to a huge increase in the number of undocumented immigrants held in detention facilities by the US government.
A department spokeswoman, Gillian Christensen, said she could not confirm the guidance is final and would not comment on documents before they are publicly released, but she did not dispute their contents. The documents have yet to be published and could change before they're officially issued.
The border security guidance expands the use of "expedited removal" proceedings for unauthorized immigrants, allowing them to be deported more quickly with limited court proceedings.
In doing so, the memo allows for the quick removal of immigrants who cannot prove they were in the US continuously for two years before being apprehended and determined to be unauthorized.
Previously, ICE and Customs and Border Protection had used "expedited removal" only for immigrants caught within 100 miles of the border within 14 days of entering the US or by those who arrived by sea but not at a port of entry.
The border security guidance also expands upon ending the so-called "catch-and-release" policies that allow individuals to be paroled from detention while awaiting immigration court proceedings, which can take years. The memo orders a surge in immigration judges and detention facilities to accommodate the holding of these individuals and lays out high thresholds for people to be released pending immigration proceedings.
The memo gives room to tighten the standard for meeting the initial "credible fear" test for immigrants to be considered for asylum in the US, a threshold that tens of thousands of asylum seekers now meet each year.
Past Department of Justice guidance has given some leeway to those who perceive a risk of persecution or torture in their home countries. While the memo does not explicitly raise the standard for finding a "significant possibility" that an immigrant could be granted asylum, it places a high bar on whether the perceived threats are credible.
"The asylum officer shall consider the statements of the alien and determine the credibility of the alien's statements made in support of his or her claim and shall consider other facts known to the officer, as required by statute," the guidance states. "The asylum officer shall make a positive credible fear finding only after the officer has considered all relevant evidence and determined, based on credible evidence, that the alien has a significant possibility of establishing eligibility for asylum, or for withholding or deferral of removal under the Convention Against Torture, based on established legal authority."
Further, for immigrants to be released pending asylum proceedings after meeting the credible fear threshold, the memo requires that an ICE immigration officer is satisfied the person "affirmatively establishes" his or her identity and that he or she presents no security or flight risk and agrees to conditions imposed by ICE for public safety reasons.
The guidance also makes it more difficult for children entering the country without authorization to be treated as "unaccompanied alien children." Under the law, the designation is for those under 18 years old who do not have a parent with them or available to care for them in the US.
The executive order notes that in some cases, individuals continued to receive protection as unaccompanied alien children even when they had a parent or guardian living illegally in the US, saying it led to "abuses" of the system. Kelly's memo calls for new guidance to end those "abuses."
The executive order also instructed DHS to enforce of a little-used provision of the law to return asylum seekers to the contiguous territory from which they entered the US, namely Mexico. The measure would potentially send non-Mexican asylum seekers from Central America over the southern border while they await asylum proceedings instead of letting them wait in the US, a policy with which Mexico would likely take issue.
Kelly's memo orders the implementation of that policy and the creation of a video conferencing system to allow those removed individuals to appear at hearings without being brought back into the US.
Significantly, the interior safety order explicitly leaves intact President Barack Obama's executive orders on deferred action for childhood arrivals, known as DACA, which protects undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children from being removed and orders the low prioritization of undocumented immigrants who are parents of US citizens. The memo says, however, that the latter policy "will be addressed in future guidance."
The memo re-articulates Trump's enforcement priorities from his executive order, which prioritizes for the removal certain serious criminals and others posting public safety threats, but it also broadens the scope beyond the Obama administration's measure to include virtually any undocumented immigrant in the US if they are even suspected of a crime.
At the same time, the memo declares: "The Department no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement," which could imply that those protected by DACA could still be subject to removal proceedings.
The memos also expand what's known as the "287(g)" program, which allows the federal government to empower state and local law enforcement agencies to perform the functions of immigration officers. The language in the memo authorizes the CBP and ICE "to accept state services" on enforcement, but makes no mention of the National Guard, as an early draft reported by The Associated Press on Friday had done.
The memo gives broad leeway to immigration officers to make immediate decisions about whom to arrest and says officers should begin actions against individuals they meet in the course of their official duties.
"This includes the arrest or apprehension of an alien whom an immigration officer has probable cause to believe is in violation of the immigration laws," the implementation guidance reads, giving officers broad authority to arrest those they suspect of being undocumented.
The guidance also takes any money being used by DHS to advocate on behalf of undocumented immigrants to establish the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office, which is mandated by the executive order to report crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and to advocate for victims of those crimes.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/18/politics/ ... -security/
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 19, 2017 8:26 pm
Trump explains odd rally reference to Sweden terror attack
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... /98129506/
Kurt Eichenwald @kurteichenwald 2h2 hours ago
More
Trump says he got his info on Sweden by misunderstanding a Fox report. Doesn't he know he would have gotten intel briefing on such a thing?
413 replies 1,690 retweets 3,636 likes
Reply 413 Retweet 1.7K
Like 3.6K
MadlyMad
@Madly_MadPray for Sweden. #LastNightInSweden #SwedenIncident
MyTooSense
@Gittelrock
MyTooSense Retweeted MadlyMad
@Madly_Mad The horrific #swedenincident makes#BowlingGreenMassacre look like child's play.I am sickened #NotTheEnemyMyTooSense added,
Dale Shaver@DaleRShaver 14h14 hours ago
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Thank God someone discovered the Secret Plans for the #SwedenIncident #SwedenAttack that #AgentOrange warned us about! pic.twitter.com/iHZqGNNCtY
Linda Stollings
@stollingsl
Prayers for Sweden #swedenattack
John @AnGobanSaor 5h5 hours ago
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BREAKING: Swedish police issue first photofit of heavily-armed terrorist.
#lastnightinsweden #swedenattack pic.twitter.com/xauLq9kjGN
Sean Spicer Facts @SeanSpicerFacts 5h5 hours ago
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Since the FAKE NEWS refuses to address it, Monday we will be briefing the American people directly about the #SwedenAttack Period. pic.twitter.com/sYocnH1THh
22 replies 342 retweets 646 likes
by JackRiddler » Sun Feb 19, 2017 8:50 pm
82_28 » Sat Feb 18, 2017 10:48 am wrote:
Mark Cuban trolls Trump by wearing ’46’ jersey at NBA celebrity game
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/02/18 ... rity-game/
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 19, 2017 9:17 pm
Jeanna Skinner
@JeannaLStars
After the terrible events #lastnightinSweden , IKEA have sold out of this:
A Big Shoe Just Dropped
Cliff Owen
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublished
FEBRUARY 19, 2017, 4:54 PM EDT
I don't know how much attention it's received. But the appearance of the name of Felix Sater in this new article in the Times is one of the biggest shoes I've seen drop on the Trump story in some time.
The new story explains that a group of Trump operatives, including top lawyer Michael Cohen and fired former campaign manager Paul Manafort, along with a pro-Putin Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andrii V. Artemenko and Mr. Sater are pushing President Trump on a 'peace plan' for Russia and Ukraine.
Cohen recently met with Sater and Artemenko; and Cohen agreed to personally deliver the peace plan (actually a sealed envelope with documents detailing it) to the President when he met with him at the White House. Cohen says he left it with General Flynn days before Flynn was forced to resign.
The backstory to all this is amazingly byzantine and murky. Let me try to cover the key points as simply as I can.
Having spent some time studying the matter, the biggest red flags about Donald Trump's ties to Russia and businessmen around Vladimir Putin have always been tied to the Trump SoHo building project in Lower Manhattan, from the first decade of this century. I base my knowledge of this on this rather cursory but still quite good April 2016 article from the Times and my own limited snooping around the Outer Boroughs Russian and Ukrainian emigre press. (I summarized the most salient details of the earlier Times article in Item #3 of this post.) This was a key project, perhaps the key project in the post-bankruptcy era in which Trump appeared heavily reliant on Russian funds to finance his projects. Sater was at the center of that project. The details only came to light after the project got bogged down in a complicated series of lawsuits.
After the lawyers got involved, Trump said he barely knew who Sater was. But there is voluminous evidence that Sater, a Russian emigrant, was key to channeling Russian capital to Trump for years. Sater is also a multiple felon and at least a one-time FBI informant. Bayrock Capital, where he worked was located in Trump Tower and he himself worked as a special advisor to Trump. Again, read the Times article to get a flavor of his ties to Trump, the Trump SoHo project and Russia. For my money there's no better place to start to understand the Trump/Russia issue.
On its own, Trump's relationship with Sater might be written off (albeit not terribly plausibly) as simply a sleazy relationship Trump entered into to get access to capital he needed to finance his projects. Whatever shadowy ties Sater might have and whatever his criminal background, Trump has long since washed his hands of him. (Again, we're talking about most generous reads here.)
But now we learn that Sater is still very much in the Trump orbit and acting as a go-between linking Trump and a pro-Putin Ukrainian parliamentarian pitching 'peace plans' for settling the dispute between Russia and Ukraine. (Artemenko is part of the political faction which Manafort helped build up in the aftermath of the ouster of his Ukrainian benefactor, deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.) Indeed, far, far more important, Cohen - who is very close to Trump and known for dealing with delicate matters - is in contact with Sater and hand delivering political and policy plans from him to the President.
Were Cohen not involved, one might speculate that Sater is just up to yet another hustle, looking to parlay his one-time association with Trump into influence with the new President. Cohen hand delivering his messages to the President changes the picture considerably. How or why Cohen would do this, if for no other reason than the current massive scrutiny of Trump's ties to Russia and Sater's scandals, almost defies belief. But here we are.
To get a flavor of some of the details here, I need to quote these three paragraphs at the tail end of the Times article ...
Mr. Cohen said he did not know who in the Russian government had offered encouragement on it, as Mr. Artemenko claims, but he understood there was a promise of proof of corruption by the Ukrainian president.
“Fraud is never good, right?” Mr. Cohen said.
He said Mr. Sater had given him the written proposal in a sealed envelope. When Mr. Cohen met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in early February, he said, he left the proposal in Mr. Flynn’s office.
As we've all tried to make sense of this very murky meta-story of just what's up with Donald Trump and Russia, there's always been the complicated and messy business ties then and the suppliant, fawning attitude and relationship with Putin now. Are they connected? I have yet to see anything more tightly tying them together than Sater's reappearance in the story.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-b ... st-dropped
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 19, 2017 10:05 pm
Human rights lawyer Scott Horton reported "Among the powerful facts that DNI missed were a series of very deep studies published in the [Financial Times] that examined the structure and history of several major Trump real estate projects from the last decade—the period after his seventh bankruptcy and the cancellation of all his bank lines of credit. ... The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources. He was their man.
"... his real estate deals were used to hide not just an infusion of capital from Russia and former Soviet states, but to launder hundreds of millions looted by oligarchs. All Trump had to do was close his eyes to the source of the money, and suddenly empty apartments were going for top dollar.... real estate has an arbitrary value. Is that apartment worth $1 million? Two million? Why not $3 million for a buyer who really wants it? When the whole transaction is just one LLC with undisclosed ownership paying another LLC with undisclosed ownership, it’s even neater than hiding the money in an offshore account."
Donald Trump used the mob-controlled concrete company S&A Concrete to build Trump Plaza condos. The company used underpaid undocumented Polish workers, most of whom entered the country illegally, lacked hard hats, and slept on the site. Trump avoided labor troubles, like picketing and strikes, and job safety inspections. But Trump and his associates were found guilty in 1991 of conspiring to avoid paying pension and welfare fund contributions.
The relationship beteen Donald Trump and Felix Sater, whose father is a reputed Russian Organized Crime boss, represented a rather direct link between the presidential candidate and Russian Organized Crime. The Russian émigré — a twice-convicted felon with ties to the Mafia — appeared in photos with Trump, and carried a Trump Organization business card with the title “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.” Trump confused when asked under oath in a 2013 about his relationship to the Russian émigré.
Sater served prison time for a grisly 1991 assault at the El Rio Grande restaurant and bar in New York. According to court documents, Sater allegedly told a man at the bar, “I’ll kill you. I’ll rip your f****** head off and stick it down your throat.” Sater then allegedly grabbed a frozen margarita from the bar, flung the contents in the air, smashed the glass on the bar, and stabbed the man in the cheek and neck, breaking his cheek and jaw, lacerating face and neck and severing nerves. He was convicted of first degree assault.
Bayrock Group LLC was a real estate development firm that partnered with Trump on numerous projects after renting office space from the Trump Organization. Sater is a top Bayrock executive in the Bayrock Group, which is headquartered in Trump Tower. The founding chairman of Bayrock is Tevfik Arif, who has reputed Russian organized crime ties. In 2010 he was charged in Turkey for smuggling underage girls into the country for prostitution. Another principal in the deal is Russian émigré Tamir Sapir, who also lives in Trump Tower. Sapir’s executive vice president and top aide, Fred Contini, pled guilty in 2004 to “participating in a racketeering conspiracy with the Gambino crime family for 13 years.”
Sater pled guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Bonanno crime families. The connection to Felix Sater dated to the early 2000s. After Sater's criminal history and past ties to organized crime came to light in 2007, Trump distanced himself from Sater. Less than three years later, Trump tapped Sater for a business development role that came with the title of senior adviser to Donald Trump.
Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, FL, describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world”. In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries. Trump uses a recruiter based in upstate New York, Peter Petrina, to find foreign workers for his resorts, golf clubs and vineyard. Petrina is of Romanian descent and has an office in Romania.
Trump pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs. Guest workers can be attractive to employers because they are essentially a captive work force, since they can work only for the company that sponsored the visa.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... -crime.htm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 19, 2017 11:04 pm
Donald Trump walks out over questions about his mafia connections during BBC Panorama interview
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Out of prison, Mr Sater went on to take part in a $40m (£27m) stock market scam in the 1990s involving four mafia families. He gave evidence against his co-accused and pleaded guilty; in return the FBI kept his role secret. Mr Sater then moved into property development, which is how he came into contact with Mr Trump.
Despite Mr Sater’s previous mafia links becoming public, Mr Trump remained involved with him in a property deal in Florida for another year.
Mr Sater’s LinkedIn webpage claims that he is a “senior adviser to Donald Trump”. The Trump Organisation says this is not true.
It was questions about Mr Sater which led to Mr Trump walking out of an interview with the BBC’s Panorama team.
“Shouldn’t you have said: ‘Felix Sater, you’re connected with the mafia and you’re fired’?” Mr Trump was asked.
In response, underlining that the link between himself and Mr Sater was merely a “very simple licensing deal”, he said: “Maybe you’re thick but when you have a signed contract, you can’t in this country just break it… Sometimes we’ll sign a deal and the partner isn’t as good as we’d like but that does happen, and by the way, I hate to do this but I do have that big group of people waiting so I have leave…”
Mr Trump then walked out of the interview
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 95855.html
Real Estate Executive With Hand in Trump Projects Rose From Tangled Past
By CHARLES V. BAGLI
DEC. 17, 2007
It is a classic tale of reinvention, American style.
Born in the Soviet Union in 1966, Felix H. Sater immigrated with his family to Brighton Beach when he was 8 years old. At 24 he was a successful Wall Street broker, at 27 he was in prison after a bloody bar fight, and at 32 he was accused of conspiring with the Mafia to launder money and defraud investors.
Along the way he became embroiled in a plan to buy antiaircraft missiles on the black market for the Central Intelligence Agency in either Russia or Afghanistan, depending on which of his former associates is telling the story.
But in recent years Mr. Sater has resurfaced with a slightly different name and a new business card identifying him as a real estate executive based on Fifth Avenue. And although he may not be a household name, one of the people he is doing business with is: Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Sater — who now goes by the name Satter — has been jetting to Denver, Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and elsewhere since 2003, promoting potential projects in partnership with Mr. Trump and others. In New York, the company Mr. Sater works for, Bayrock Group, is a partner in the Trump SoHo, a sleek, 46-story glass tower condominium hotel under construction on a newly fashionable section of Spring Street.
But much remains unknown about Mr. Sater, 41, and determining the truth about his past is a bit like unraveling the plot of a spy novel: Almost every character tells a different tale.
A federal complaint brought against him in a 1998 money laundering and stock manipulation case was filed in secret and remains under seal. A subsequent indictment in March 2000 stemming from the same investigation described Mr. Sater as an “unindicted co-conspirator” and a key figure in a $40 million scheme involving 19 stockbrokers and organized crime figures from four Mafia families.
The indictment asserted that Mr. Sater helped create fraudulent stock brokerages that were used to defraud investors and launder money. Mr. Sater and his lawyer, Judd Burstein, repeatedly refused to discuss in detail his role in the stock scam.
But a onetime friend, Gennady Klotsman, who is known as Gene and who was accused with Mr. Sater as a co-conspirator, contends that they both pleaded guilty in 1998, and that Mr. Sater began cooperating with the authorities. Prosecutors are unwilling to discuss either the 1998 complaint or the 2000 indictment.
“I’m not proud of some of the things that happened in my 20s,” Mr. Sater said in an interview. “I am proud of the things I’m doing now.”
Mr. Sater, who has an untitled position at Bayrock, said he started spelling his name as Satter to “distance himself from a past” in an age when anyone can look up a name on Google. But he continues to use the name Sater on the deed to his house on Long Island.
Mr. Burstein added, “He does not hide his past, and difficulties he had, from anybody he does business with.”
But Alex Sapir, president of the Sapir Organization, a partner in Trump SoHo, said he was “not happy” to have just learned of Mr. Sater’s past on Thursday. “This is all news to me,” he said.
Mr. Trump also said he was surprised to learn of Mr. Sater’s past. “We never knew that,” he said of Mr. Sater. “We do as much of a background check as we can on the principals. I didn’t really know him very well.”
Mr. Trump said that most of his dealings with Bayrock had been with its founder, Tevfik Arif, and that his son Donald and his daughter Ivanka were playing active roles in managing the project. Neither Bayrock nor Mr. Trump has been accused of wrongdoing.
Mr. Sater has generally kept a low profile on the Trump projects, although he mingled with guests and the owners at the September party introducing Trump SoHo. Mr. Trump and Mr. Sater were also together in Loveland, Colo., in 2005, where they were interviewed by a reporter for The Rocky Mountain News about potential development deals in nearby Denver. Mr. Trump said he did not recall Mr. Sater’s being there.
“They seemed to get along just fine,” said Justin Henderson, a Denver developer who worked with Mr. Trump and Mr. Sater on an ultimately unsuccessful deal to build the tallest towers in Colorado. “It seemed that Mr. Trump relied heavily on Mr. Sater’s opinion on certain markets.”
Mr. Sater’s latest transformation could prove to be a cautionary tale for Mr. Trump, who has carefully molded his image into an international brand that has extended from real estate to bottled water, men’s suits, steaks, vodka, a television show and, in his latest invention, the Trump Hotel Collection.
The hotel collection, a hotel management company, includes two projects with Bayrock: Trump SoHo and Trump International Hotel and Tower in Fort Lauderdale. A third joint project, in Phoenix, is also in the works.
“Trump is a name associated with a certain cachet and bravado, I suppose, that will attract certain kinds of people,” said Rita Rodriguez, chief executive of the Brand Union, a corporate branding and identity agency.
“The brand is a strategic and financial asset,” she said. “It has to be taken care of very similarly to any other asset you have on your balance sheet. Anything that would detract from that could jeopardize the brand impression the brand makes.”
Mr. Sater was born in the Soviet Union, the son of Rachel and Mikhail Sater, according to public records, court testimony and the federal indictment. He has said his parents, who are Jewish, moved first to Israel, then to Baltimore and finally to New York in the early 1970s to escape “religious persecution.”
Mr. Sater was born Haim Felix Sater, but he once testified in court that he “Americanized” his name to Felix Henry Sater in the early 1990s.
Mr. Sater took classes at Pace University but dropped out at 18 to work at Bear Stearns. Like Mr. Klotsman, he rose quickly, moving from firm to firm selling stock.
Mr. Sater’s first brush with the law came in 1991. Mr. Sater and Mr. Klotsman were at El Rio Grande, a Midtown watering hole, celebrating with a friend and eventual co-conspirator, Salvatore Lauria, who had just passed his stockbroker’s exam.
Mr. Sater later told a judge that he was in a good mood, having made a quick $3,000 in commissions that day. But he got into an argument with a commodities broker at the bar, and it quickly escalated. According to the trial transcript, Mr. Sater grabbed a large margarita glass, smashed it on the bar and plunged the stem into the right side of the broker’s face. The man suffered nerve damage and required 110 stitches to close the laceration on his face.
“I got into a bar fight over a girl neither he nor I knew,” Mr. Sater said in an interview. “My life spiraled out of control.” Mr. Sater was convicted at trial in 1993, went to prison and was effectively barred from selling securities by the National Association of Securities Dealers.
But according to the 2000 federal indictment in the fraud case, Mr. Sater, Mr. Klotsman, Mr. Lauria and their partners gained control in 1993 of White Rock Partners, which later changed its name to State Street Capital Markets. Although the companies “held themselves out as legitimate brokerage firms,” the indictment states, “they were in fact operated for the primary purpose of earning money through fraud involving the manipulation of the prices of securities.”
The trio would secretly gain control of large blocks of stock and warrants in four companies through offshore accounts, the indictment said. In an illegal “pump and dump” scheme, they would inflate the value of the shares through under-the-table payoffs to brokers who sold the securities to unsuspecting investors by spreading false information about the companies. Brokers were prohibited from acting on sell orders from investors unless they found another buyer, the indictment said.
The partners would then sell large blocks of stock at a steep profit. Investors suffered substantial losses as share prices plummeted. Despite the prohibition against selling securities, a subsequent complaint by regulators at the N.A.S.D. recounted how Mr. Sater “cursed, yelled and screamed” at the firm’s brokers in an attempt to motivate them. He also offered cash rewards to brokers who sold the largest block of house stocks.
At the same time, Mr. Sater, Mr. Lauria and others sought protection and help from members of the Mafia in resolving disputes with “pump and dump” firms operated by other organized crime groups. In 1995, for instance, Edward Garafola, a soldier in the Gambino crime family, sought to extort money from Mr. Sater. Mr. Sater, in turn, got Ernest Montevecchi, a soldier in the Genovese crime family, to persuade Mr. Garafola to back off, according to the indictment.
The denouement of Mr. Sater’s career on Wall Street began in 1998 at a locker at a Manhattan Mini Storage in SoHo, where investigators discovered two pistols, a shotgun and a gym bag stuffed with a trove of documents outlining the money laundering scheme and offshore accounts of Mr. Sater and his partners. According to a law enforcement official, as well as Mr. Klotsman and another defendant in the case, Mr. Sater had rented the locker and then neglected to pay the rent. Mr. Sater denied having anything to do with the locker or the guns.
At the time investigators opened the storage locker, Mr. Sater and Mr. Klotsman had gone to Russia, where their wheeling and dealing continued, they said. Their most interesting stories, however, are hard to assess.
Mr. Sater and Mr. Klotsman tried to cut a deal with the C.I.A., according to a book co-written by Mr. Lauria, “The Scorpion and the Frog: High Times and High Crimes.” In exchange for leniency, the book said, they offered to buy a dozen missiles that Osama bin Laden had placed on the black market. The deal later collapsed.
Mr. Lauria has since renounced his book, which also details the false stock brokerage scheme, calling it largely a work of fiction. He even tried unsuccessfully to block publication. However, his co-author, David S. Barry, said he documented all the stories in the book with records and other interviews.
Mr. Klotsman said that Mr. Sater did obtain information for the United States about another set of black-market missiles, and that those efforts “bought Felix his freedom” from prison.
Mr. Sater, Mr. Klotsman and Mr. Lauria eventually returned to New York. Mr. Klotsman and Mr. Lauria agreed to cooperate with the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn and pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in connection with the fraudulent stock brokerages, other defendants and lawyers in Mr. Sater’s case said. The information they provided helped prosecutors obtain guilty pleas from all 19 of their former cohorts, including six with ties to the mob.
Mr. Klotsman and his lawyer assert that Mr. Sater also pleaded guilty and cooperated. “Felix was one of the significant participants in the fraud,” the lawyer, Alexi M. Schacht, said.
Mr. Klotsman, who grew up with Mr. Sater, now lives in a $600-a-month apartment in Moscow. In an interview, he said he was paying the American government $625 a month in restitution for the $40 million lost by investors. He questioned whether Mr. Sater was paying a dime.
But Mr. Sater and his lawyer, Mr. Burstein, avoided many questions concerning his legal problems involving the Wall Street scam, including whether he pleaded guilty and cooperated. “I challenge you to find any official government document anywhere demonstrating his indictment or conviction for any crime other than the assault,” Mr. Burstein said.
Mr. Sater said he joined Bayrock in 2003 at the urging of the company’s founder, Mr. Arif. A neighbor of Mr. Sater’s in Sands Point, on Long Island, Mr. Arif is a former economist for the Soviet government who built a chain of five luxury hotels in Turkey and Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Within a stone’s throw of the Manhattan Mini Storage building, the Trump SoHo is rising rapidly at the corner of Spring and Varick Streets, another new glass tower amid the somewhat grubby industrial buildings of what had been the city’s printing district. The tower has generated opposition from some local residents and preservationists.
It is, for Mr. Sater, an emblem of his new life. “I’m trying to lead an exemplary existence,” he said. “Old, bad luggage is not something anyone wants to remember.”
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