Donald Trump’s administration made a crucial mistake when they started banishing certain reporters from their press conferences? They don’t get it. Real news isn’t made in press conferences. Real news comes through dogged reporting. And it’s dogged reporters who now have ahold of the Trump-Russia connections, and the news continues to flow.
Today it an AP story reporting a $10 million per year contract between a Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin and Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager during the crucial months around the GOP convention.
AP quotes Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif, a member of the House Intelligence Committee: “This is not a drip, drip, drip” situation, she said. “This is now dam-breaking with water flushing out with all kinds of entanglements.”
The bits and pieces are coming together, and they are pretty damning so far.
Russian interference in the elections. Extensive contacts between key Trump campaigners and the Russians.
Key and unexpected Trump policy shifts favoring Russia. David Corn, writing for Mother Jones yesterday, described how Manafort lied to reporters while trying to gloss over Trump’s new skepticism about Nato and a willingness to abandon mutual defense agreements with Europe and an openness to Soviet agggression (“How Paul Manafort Tried to BS Me—and the World“).
Now Reuters reports Secretary of State Tillerson is reportedly planning to skip his first meeting with NATO allies in April and instead go to Moscow later in the same month.
Charles Pierce, writing for Esquire, says we should recognize the framework of all these revelations.
Anybody who’s spent five minutes covering a state capital can recognize the basic infrastructure of the shady dealings under examination. Rich guy of dubious provenance needs a political power player to get richer. Political power player needs rich clients to acquire more power. Guys in expensive suits up in the Commonwealth (God save it!) have been operating this way literally for centuries. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a contract to build a new highway or a deal to subcontract the nation’s foreign policy. The fundamental human venality doesn’t change. Only the stakes do, and the size of the collateral damage.
This is all mind-boggling, isn’t it?
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Yep. The old “Fifth Column” of yesteryear has now reach “nuclear level” [Russian military’s words] cyberattack capabilities in undermining the Fourth Estate and the validity of political discourse to the detriment of democracy.
The pathological lies of the Trump administration will catch up with them. Whether the investigations uncover anything real, the American public needs to wake up and vote Trump out of office (about half of eligible voters do not vote in the presidential elections). Carl Bernstein said that Trump is more dangerous than Nixon, for all of Nixon’s criminal acts. At least Nixon knew something about foreign policy and governing.
Dear Ian,
You were always good at following the money. Keep it up!
Barbara
Mind boggling indeed! I asked my husband today, “Do you think Trump didn’t really believe he would be President and he just wanted to make as much money as he could out of all the connections he made while running, including with Russia?” I came to believe him a total liar when I saw him say in an interview that he’d sent “investigators” to Hawaii and nobody here knew Obama. We all knew people who knew him or had gone to Punahou with him, so we knew what a lie he was spinning. And it just never stopped.
Former Russian MP Denis Voronenkov has been shot and killed in Kiev.
Police said an unidentified gunman had shot Voronenkov dead at the entrance of an upmarket hotel in the Ukrainian capital. Voronenkov, 45, a former member of the Communist faction in the lower house of the Russian parliament, had moved to Ukraine last autumn and had been granted Ukrainian citizenship.
He left Russia with his wife, the singer Maria Maksakova, who was also an MP. He said he had to leave the country because the Russian security agencies were persecuting him, and he renounced his Russian citizenship.
Voronenkov gave a number of interviews after his defection that were sharply critical of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Kremlin policy in Ukraine. However, the decision to grant him citizenship after he had taken part in the parliamentary vote to annex Crimea was strongly criticised in Ukraine.
Witnesses say they heard seven shots fired outside the hotel. The attack was most likely a contract killing, Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko told 112 Ukrayina TV.
President Petro Poroshenko went further, accusing Russia of “state terrorism”. He also linked the shooting to the series of explosions at a munitions dump near Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s north-east, describing it as the “signature style of Russian special services”