4807

Oh, to have zombie Leslie Nielsen as president now…

4808

The White House! What is it?

It’s where racist asshats destroy our nation from the inside out, but that’s not important right now.

4809

Nothing really breaking here, but worth a glance.

Glenn Simpson, whose firm compiled an infamous and salacious dossier about President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, told Senate investigators Tuesday that he “stands by” its findings. The private investigator and former reporter spent more than 10 hours being questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee after Chairman Chuck Grassley withdrew a subpoena when Simpson agreed to testify behind closed doors.

4810

Washington (CNN) - Congressional investigators have unearthed an email from a top Trump aide that referenced a previously unreported effort to arrange a meeting last year between Trump campaign officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

The aide, Rick Dearborn, who is now President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, sent a brief email to campaign officials last year relaying information about an individual who was seeking to connect top Trump officials with Putin, the sources said.

The person was only identified in the email as being from “WV,” which one source said was a reference to West Virginia. It’s unclear who the individual is, what he or she was seeking, or whether Dearborn even acted on the request. One source said that the individual was believed to have had political connections in West Virginia, but details about the request and who initiated it remain vague.

The same source said Dearborn in the email appeared skeptical of the requested meeting.

Sources said the email occurred in June 2016 around the time of the recently revealed Trump Tower meeting where Russians with Kremlin ties met with the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

4811

The ONLY thing that MIGHT come from any Russia evidence is a slight increase in willingness by several congress members to impeach. Basically, Trump is already above the law. He’s also set the stage to claim voter fraud and nullify the results of the 2018 and 2020 elections.

4812
4813
4814

Dawsey and Schor write that shortly after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) introduced a bill that would let Mueller appeal his firing in court, Trump called up Tillis, signaled he was “unhappy” with the bill and said he didn’t want it to pass.

Tillis is a first-term senator who hasn’t been particularly known as a moderate or really for taking any high-profile stances at all. So it was a bit surprising when, earlier this month, he co-wrote a bill with Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) to protect Mueller from Trump, and went on television to tout it.

Justice Department regulations already state that the special counsel can only be fired for “good cause,” but Tillis and Coons’s bill — the Special Counsel Integrity Act — would make that regulation the law of the land. It would also state that the special counsel could only be fired by a Senate-confirmed official.

Perhaps most importantly, the bill would also let a special counsel appeal his firing in court. If judges find that the firing was improper, the special counsel would be reinstated.

On August 6, Tillis appeared on Fox News Sunday and said there was “no question” that the bill was designed to prevent Trump from improperly firing Mueller. He also appeared on ABC’s This Week and said he wasn’t sure that he agreed with Trump that the Russia investigation was a “witch hunt.”

Trump called Tillis the next day to communicate that he didn’t want the bill passed.

4815

Not a lot of actual meat here, but worth watching. (Video only, under 3 min.)

4816

As CIA director, Mike Pompeo has taken a special interest in an agency unit that is closely tied to the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, requiring the Counterintelligence Mission Center to report directly to him.

Officials at the center have, in turn, kept a watchful eye on Pompeo, who has repeatedly played down Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and demonstrated a willingness to engage in political skirmishes for President Trump.

Current and former officials said that the arrangement has been a source of apprehension among the CIA’s upper ranks and that they could not recall a time in the agency’s history when a director faced a comparable conflict.

“Pompeo is in a delicate situation unlike any other director has faced, certainly in my memory,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a CIA official for 23 years who served in Russia and held high-level positions at headquarters, “because of his duty to protect and provide the truth to an independent investigation while maintaining his role with the president.”

4817

Trump’s trade policy benefits Russia?

The trade in softwood lumber between the U.S. and Canada has been an intermittent source of friction for years, but tensions escalated in April when the Trump administration set countervailing duties of up to 24 per cent on Canadian imports. Additional duties of as much as 7.7 per cent followed in June…

…The U.S. is importing more softwood lumber from overseas after it slapped tariffs on Canadian supplies, making them more expensive. Russian shipments are 42 per cent higher so far in 2017, according to U.S. government data.

To be sure, Russia accounts for a relatively small proportion of the total, while European countries such as Germany and Sweden are among the biggest suppliers to the U.S. But the shift in volumes illustrate how a political spat has quickly altered the flow of international trade.

Normally, just cause and effect, but in Trump’s case? Pretty much everything Russia related needs to be at least somewhat looked at.

4818

Someone on reddit pointed out that Russia represents only a tiny fraction of our total lumber imports. We have bigger scandals to worry about.

4819

Today’s scoop doesn’t contain much we didn’t already know, but the fact Mueller’s team is taking this seriously is pretty significant.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/special-counsel-examines-possible-role-flynn-played-in-seeking-clinton-emails-from-hackers-1503694304

Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining what role, if any, former national security adviser Mike Flynn may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The effort to seek out hackers who were believed to have stolen Mrs. Clinton’s emails, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was led by a longtime Republican activist, Peter W. Smith. In correspondence and conversations with his colleagues, Mr. Smith portrayed Mr. Flynn as an ally in those efforts and implied that other senior Trump campaign officials were coordinating with him, which they have denied. He also named Mr. Flynn’s consulting firm and his son in the correspondence and conversations.
[…]
Investigators working for Mr. Mueller have been conducting interviews and collecting information as they seek to determine whether Mr. Flynn was involved in Mr. Smith’s effort, and if his son, Michael G. Flynn, and the consulting firm Flynn Intel Group had a role, the people said. At the time Mr. Smith was trying to find the emails, Mr. Flynn was a senior adviser to the Trump campaign and had been on a short list of potential vice presidential candidates.

A lawyer for Mr. Flynn and a lawyer for his son declined to comment. Mr. Flynn’s firm has been dissolved.
[…]
U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence said investigators also have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.

4820

WASHINGTON — Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued grand jury subpoenas in recent days seeking testimony from public relations executives who worked on an international campaign organized by Paul Manafort, people directly familiar with the matter told NBC News.

This is the first public indication that Mueller’s investigation is beginning to compel witness testimony before the grand jury — a significant milestone in an inquiry that is examining the conduct of President Donald Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, among others.

It is also further indication that Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, could be in serious legal jeopardy.

According to one executive whose firm received a subpoena, Mueller’s team is closely examining the lobbying campaign, which ran between 2012 and 2014. Some of the firms involved in the campaign received subpoenas for documents weeks ago, the executive said, and now the Mueller team is seeking testimony.

“We think they are trying to figure out, was this a legitimate project?” the executive said. “From our perspective it was — we did a lot of work. We took it seriously.”

4821

Yah, the article points that out too (as well as the portion I quoted).

4822

WASHINGTON — A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.

The business associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin and predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would be a political boon to Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
[…]
In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting in Moscow. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote.

4823

This is just surreal.

Mr. Sater presented himself as so influential in Russia that he helped arrange a 2006 trip that Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, took to Moscow. “I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,” he said.

Ms. Trump said she had no involvement in the discussions about the Moscow deal. In a statement, she said she that during the 2006 trip, she took “a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin but I have never met President Vladimir Putin.” She did not say whether she sat in his chair.

4824

Remember when the BBC asked Trump about Sater’s mob connections?


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.

4825

“Stupidity and greed getting in the way”

Certainly none of that at play here!

4826

Another early scoop:

A top executive from Donald Trump’s real estate company emailed Vladi­mir Putin’s personal spokesman during the U.S. presidential campaign last year to ask for help advancing a stalled Trump Tower development project in Moscow, according to documents submitted to Congress Monday.

Michael Cohen, a Trump attorney and executive vice president for the Trump Organization, sent the email in January 2016 to Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s top press aide.

“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower - Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote Peskov, according to a person familiar with the email. “Without getting into lengthy specifics the communication between our two sides has stalled.”

“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote.

Cohen’s email marks the most direct interaction yet documented of a top Trump aide and a similarly senior member of Putin’s government.

The email shows the Trump business official directly seeking Kremlin assistance in advancing Trump’s business interests, in the same months when Trump was distinguishing himself on the campaign trail with his warm rhetoric about Putin.

In a statement Cohen submitted to Congressional investigators, he said he wrote the email at the recommendation of Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who was serving as a broker on the deal.