I’m so old that I remember when Michael Caputo resigned from the Trump campaign. It was the same day that Corey Lewandowski was forced out as the campaign manager in favor of Paul Manafort. Caputo was a little too exuberant about Lewandowski’s departure, which you can tell by what he tweeted.
Ding dong the witch is dead! https://t.co/pSqQwmAGz1 pic.twitter.com/5dE7GMeEK6
— That Michael Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) June 20, 2016
Caputo promptly fell on his sword, sending Manafort the following as his resignation letter.
I regret sending out a tweet today alluding to the firing of Corey Lewandowski. In hindsight, that was too exuberant a reaction to this personnel move. I know this is a distraction from the kind of campaign you want to run, so I’m resigning my position as director of communications for caucus operations at the 2016 Republican Convention. Let’s make this immediate.
At his LinkedIn page, Caputo lists himself as a “Senior Advisor” to the Trump campaign from April 2016 to June 2016. He also lists himself as President of The Florence Group from November 1994 to November 1999, an organization that he says “played a pivotal role in electing Boris Yeltsin to his second term as President of the Russian Federation.”
Back on October 23rd, 2012, before Caputo knew that he’d one day serve on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign or be called to testify about collusion with the Russians, he tweeted about visiting Lefortovo Prison during his time working “for” the Kremlin:
@eric_ervin I worked for the Kremlin at the time. The visit was not obligatory.
— That Michael Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) October 24, 2012
He freely referred to working for the Kremlin on a few other occasions, too.
@GlennThrush DC is for kittens! Between White House, Kremlin, Albany & NYC, NYC the worst. Albany close 2nd. @ZekeJMiller @CapitalTonight
— That Michael Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) December 23, 2011
@mikewren Deadhead 1st, operative 2nd. J-school grad, Army PAO. Never reporter but worked with all Congress, White House & Kremlin greats.
— That Michael Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) August 19, 2011
@Nicki_Doyle I get that. But I went from Beacon Theater 1976 to White House 1992 to Kremlin 1995. @markdjarvis @pollarama
— That Michael Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) November 6, 2011
It appears that he worked “for” the Kremlin during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin and returned home to the United States around the time that Vladimir Putin took over. So, we need to keep that in mind. Yet, how many Americans have worked “for” the Kremlin and then gone on to be “senior advisors” to an American presidential candidate from one of our two major parties?
Now, before we go any further, let’s fill in some blanks by going to the New York Times report:
Michael Caputo, who served as a communications adviser to the Trump campaign, has been asked by the House committee investigating Russian election meddling to submit to a voluntary interview and to provide any documents he may have that are related to the inquiry.
The House Intelligence Committee, which is examining possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, made its request in a letter on May 9. Mr. Caputo, who lives near Buffalo and spent six months on the Trump team, worked in Russia during the 1990s and came to know Kremlin officials. He also did work in the early 2000s for Gazprom Media, a Russian conglomerate that supported President Vladimir V. Putin.
At the top, I have him referring to himself as a “Senior Adviser” and a “director of communications for caucus operations at the 2016 Republican Convention.” Directing the caucus operations was the job Manafort initially took (with no pay) for the Trump campaign. But the New York Times describes him more vaguely as “communications adviser.” They also say that he spent six months on the campaign, while his LinkedIn page pegs his time served at only three months. As for Lewandowski, when he was asked on MSNBC about Caputo’s Wizard of Oz tweet, he said “I don’t know Michael Caputo, and he was never paid by the campaign. He was a volunteer, and so he’s welcome to tweet anything he wants.” Finally, the New York Times reveals that Caputo worked for “Gazprom Media, a Russian conglomerate that supported President Vladimir V. Putin” in the early 2000’s.
Let’s talk about that last part.
Caputo’s LinkedIn page says that he worked at Allegiance Telecom as a vice-president from June 2001 to June 2003. It doesn’t list any other employment for him until he shows up as the publisher of PoliticsNY.net in January of 2013. He apparently spent all the intervening time as the president of his own public relations firm, aptly named Caputo Public Relations with clients like Sergio’s Restaurants, Princeton Strategic Communications, the Job Creators Network, Carl Paladino for Governor, and Bloc Lytvyn.
What is Bloc Lytvyn, you ask? Let’s see. It must have something to do with this guy Volodymyr Lytvyn who received the Russian Order of Friendship Award back in 2011. Or, if you prefer, you can go here to see a picture of Lytvyn shaking hands with Vladimir Putin in 2002. There are Ukrainian politicians, and then there are Ukrainian politicians who win Russian friendship awards. Michael Caputo worked on behalf of the latter.
This got me thinking that maybe Caputo’s interest in Ukraine might have been related to his former work “for” the Kremlin.
But what do I know?
A Democratic member of the [House Intelligence] panel, Representative Jackie Speier of California, raised Mr. Caputo’s name during the March 20 hearing where James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, testified on Russia’s interference in the election. She noted Mr. Caputo’s work for Gazprom, and the fact that he met his second wife, who is Ukrainian, while working in 2007 on a parliamentary election in Kiev.
Presumably, he took time off from doing public relations for the Job Creators Network in order to go to Kiev and lobby on behalf of Mr. Lytvyn’s bloc. Congratulations on finding a second wife on the trip! How he got this contract when he was just a self-employed publicist from Buffalo is an interesting question to ask. I am sure many Ukrainians were able to find him on Google and figured he was as good as any other guy who used to work “for” the Kremlin.
Somehow he wound up being chummy with Donald Trump. I know this because he says “The only time the president and I talked about Russia was in 2013, when he simply asked me in passing what it was like to live there in the context of a dinner conversation.” Why was Donald Trump having dinner in 2013 with this obscure publicist who worked for Sergio’s Restaurants?
I don’t know. I know he worked for Russian-friendly Ukrainian politicians just like Paul Manafort. I know that he worked for Gazprom, a major supporter of Vladimir Putin’s political career. I know that he used to work “for” the Kremlin.
What I don’t know is why any of this would particularly interest Donald Trump in 2013.
Maybe the House Intelligence Committee can get me the answer.
With this group, everywhere you go, there’s a Russian at the end.
Just the things that we KNOW are true, the personal connections, the admitting to ‘working for….’, Jesus….just the amount of times individuals have visited a known corrupt country run by oligarchs, would in any time in our history be a scandal that would cause people to hide their faces in disgrace.
Ayn Rand has won. Do anything for personal gain…..even sell you own birth place down the river.
I swear, I have never seen a more disgusting group of people..and those that defend them.
.
You write:
“…a known corrupt country run by oligarchs.”
You mean…the U.S., right?
Oh.
You don’t?
Nevermind…I misread. I thought you wrote “oiligarchs.”
My bad…
AG
On the flipside of the record, Trump supporters guilelessly explain that, when it comes to the White House scandals (including all the Russian stories), they “choose not to listen”:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/18/15659394/trump-supporters-motivated-ignorance
As was emerging in the previous BooMan thread today, the masochistic, moth-to-flame fascination we on the Left have with those Trump voters (“The most fascinating people in the world,” as Digby vengefully calls them, since she’s so justifiably sick of their reverential canonization in The New York Times and elsewhere) leads up against this same brick wall over and over.
“I choose not to listen” is the exact yin-yang reciprocal companion to “fake news.” It’s like those psych experiments where they give subjects glasses that flip the image upside down and make them wear them all day. After a while it starts to look normal (because the human brain can really do anything) and taking off the glasses provides an inverted image.
Hmm.
The biggest problem with this method of dealing with unpleasant reality is that it does not make the reality less real (any more than ignoring that nasty pain in your tooth makes the cavity go away). All it does is to disable you from dealing with reality — and while you’ve “checked out,” the unpleasantness is growing at compound interest.
With regard to the political aspect of this kind of thing, Robert Heinlein nailed it decades ago in “Starship Troopers” (a book with some worthwhile, if flawed, political thinking): “The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority . . . other than through the tragic logic of history. If [they] voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead–and responsibility was then forced on [them] willy-nilly and destroyed both [them] and [their] foundationless temple.”
Well, of course the basic problem with shutting out reality is that it means (by definition) that you’re living in a fantasy, right?
But what’s more egregious about the Trump supporters is the way they’re encouraged to cherry-pick the “scandals” they want to be true (Benghazi, Whitewater, Vince Foster’s “murder,” Obama’s birth certificate) while disregarding the ones they don’t like (Trump/Russia, Kushner, etc.) and — even more astoundingly — have been successfully convinced to invert the scale of legitimacy when judging sources, so that Breitbart and email chains are considered to be trustworthy while The New York Times and CNN are “fake.”
Heinlein’s fascistic musings are valuable only as unintended satire (as in the Verhoven movie of Starship Troopers, the brilliance of which would have been more widely appreciated had it come out after 9/11 rather than a couple years before). I don’t need Heinlein telling me that democracy leads irrevocably to blindness and myopia; what the hell does he know about it? Those are the childish ideas that bring us Mussolini or Idi Amin or Trump.
<BLOCKQUOTE]>But what’s more egregious about the Trump supporters is the way they’re encouraged to cherry-pick the “scandals” they want to be true
Not just scandals, it is all reality.
Not just Trump supporters, almost all Republicans. Politicians too, not just their voters. So they are flying blind as to how their behavior is playing with the overall public.
The “post-truth” simpletons would disagree.
Everything’s phony!
Burn it all down!
I was working in Russia in the Yeltsin Era (for USAID) during the same time he was. I spent more time in the Russian Far East than in Moscow but working for the Kremlin is a bit like saying you work for the White House; it’s not clear he worked directly with Yeltsin (or was even contracted directly by them; I have no idea personally). He seems like the type of guy who needs to pump himself up. Point is that the ’90s in Russia were kind of an amazing period of sudden and shocking change. I myself worked with a former KBG colonel who was the Soviet’s first environmental economist and she was a terrific liberal partner who was so scared that her son would end up doing his obligatory military service with the Russian savages fighting the Chechens (the first time). There were a huge number of cowboys coming in during that time as was the case, as we know, during the Iraq “liberation”. As for Gazprom, remember that Victor Chernomyrdin was its chairman before he became Russia’s Prime Minister in 1992. In fact, he was the Russian PM during most of the 1990s. As such, Chernomyrdin was part of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission which was a swords to ploughshares effort of the two former enemies (in which I participated as a minor participant). Point is that Gazprom was an important asset of the Yeltsin Administration even though it was privatized. Chernomyrdin was key to that. He was also Russian Ambassador to the Ukraine for most of the 2000s (almost to his death in 2010, actually). So, if there’s a Caputo linkage there, it may involve Chernomyrdin whether in the ’90s or the ’00s. Or he may be a bullshitter. As for Trump, I wonder just how long the Donald has been a sleeper asset for Russia. Maybe longer than we think.
An asset before the donald took that Oath of Office and compromised after taking the oath. But, it would be simpler to just follow the money.
Now you’re cooking.
Maybe they can force declassification of the key evidence that whoever “knows” there’s a scandal knows.
But that presumes that in a multinational information war, there is any political body that can deliver authoritative and factual evidence. We’ve been in information wars before, just not with internet social media as the medium of debate. When did the Manchester Union-Leader turn against Nixon, for example?
I would be interested in other connections that Caputo has that would bring him into Trump’s circle of common connections. Has he, for example, done any work for the sorts of businesses that run with casino operators, NY real estate operators, or NY construction companies? How did he obtain the seemingly accurate information that New York and Albany are competitive on the corruption front with major players like Washington and the Kremlin?
You write:
Precisely.
Thank you.
In a post-factual world, truth is the first victim.
Also:
Well…that’s pretty simple, Tarheel. All you need to do is pay attention. Especially in Albany, which is such an out-front, crooked, provincial little city that the stench of its corruption wafts over the Hudson like a smoldering dump.
AG
In the pre-post-factual world, everything that is flawed is identical … and everything is flawed.
And in one sentence you’ve distilled Arthur’s entire oeuvre. Bravo.
Or…”everything” is perfect, and it all works out as it should.
A process of slow evolution, where “the negative” only impedes the progress so that a balance is maintained and things don’t go flying out of control.
The story of the universe, some teach.
My teacher taught me that. It is still hard to live it, 30+ years later. But I do keep trying.
AG
While your critics focus on your acceptance of an information war framed as a general post-factual world, you accurately key in on my argument that what is needed is a process that actually outs facts instead of repeats allegations. Thank you.
My hint apparently was too subtle. I was interested in how much hands on experience Caputo had in Albany and New York and the networks that both he and Trump share in relation to these two political cities. Corruption in the US is at least as interesting as corruption in Russia and often share some network connections. Sad that there is such a lack of curiosity about the specifics of Caputo’s go-fer work.
My critics here?
Phfffft…
There are only about 5 or 6 regular posters here…including you and Booman…who have the slightest clue about how this conspiracy clothed as a nation goes about its work. Maybe another 8 or 10 occasional posters/up-raters and quite possibly some lurkers who just stay silent. You all have different views of what’s going on, but you also know damned well that what the major media says about it is generally so skewed from the truth that it verges on creative fiction.
I pay strong attention to all of you. We are way outnumbered on this site, but compared to the percentages in the real-life U.S. population we are in pretty good shape here in terms of numbers.. Try approaching random people on the street and telling them what you believe to be true.
Go ahead.
And…bring some really good bodyguards with you. if you don’t you’ll get smacked not because they disagree with you, you’ll get smacked because they won’t have a clue about what you are saying and it will piss them off.
Just like here, only…more physical and a much, much higher percentage of fools.
So it goes.
Keep on thinking, Tarheel.
And keep on communicating.
It’s good for all of us.
Thank you…
AG