Probably the most stunned people in the world in March 2016 were the members of the Washington Post editorial board after they got done interviewing Donald Trump. Of course, if you read the transcript of their interview at the time, you were probably left almost insensate from your close contact with 151 proof Stupid. Things didn’t start out in an obviously ridiculous manner, however, or, at least it wasn’t immediately obvious how insane things were from the moment Trump opened his mouth.
FREDERICK RYAN JR., WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHER: Mr. Trump, welcome to the Washington Post. Thank you for making time to meet with our editorial board.
DONALD TRUMP: New building. Yes this is very nice. Good luck with it.
RYAN: Thank you… We’ve heard you’re going to be announcing your foreign policy team shortly… Any you can share with us?
TRUMP: Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names… Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives caucus, and counter-terrorism expert; Carter Page, PhD; George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy; the Honorable Joe Schmitz, [former] inspector general at the Department of Defense; [retired] Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg; and I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do, but that’s a representative group.
The folks at the Post’s editorial board are fairly connected people, but they didn’t know who the hell Carter Page and George Papadopoulos were. I kind of doubt that Donald Trump knew who they were, either. Apparently, he just pulled a card of his suit coat and started reading names. With the breaking news that Papadopoulos has been a cooperating witness for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who possibly has been wearing a wire, we may be getting closer to finding out who was responsible for putting his name on that card.
It’s been known for a couple of months that “between March and September [2016], the self-described energy consultant [Papadopoulos] sent at least a half-dozen requests for Trump, as he turned from primary candidate to party nominee, or for members of his team to meet with Russian officials,” including Vladimir Putin. For the most part, though, much more attention has been paid to how Carter Page got on Trump’s list. Was Page introduced to Sam Clovis by Corey Lewandowski, as the Daily Caller reported in April? Was the Washington Post right when they reported that Page volunteered his services and Clovis did no more vetting than a Google search before welcoming on board? We know that Lewandowski and Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, were also in attendance at the meeting with the editorial board. We know that Clovis had a role. But we also know that it was ultimately Sen. Jeff Sessions and some of his top aides who were responsible for putting together a foreign policy team for the candidate.
Why were two minor unknown people with major Kremlin ties on that list?
It’s a bigger question than it might seem, and I’ll try to explain the full context in subsequent posts. What seems certain is that Papadopoulos got caught in a major lie and decided to cooperate with the Special Counsel in an effort to reduce his penalty. He can explain a big part of the puzzle. I’m sure he has told Mueller’s investigators exactly how he was recruited or infiltrated the Trump campaign and what he was expected to do. He may have bolstered the credibility of his story by getting others to confirm aspects of it in ways that were recorded.
Where that leads us, I don’t know. But I’ll be exploring the possibilities.
It seems every sleazy Russian operative came out of the woodwork to approach Trump’s team.
Whatever could it be that attracted them? What is the one overwhelming sin they all seem to have, from the lowest all the way to the top?
Greed.
.
Manafort’s greed got him 75 million. Think the Russians might take their money back?
If they do it will be out of his hide, so to speak. For his own safety, Manafort might be better off in custody.
We only have the WaPo’s so-called ‘recording’ to prove that Trump ever said that, and given the limits of human knowledge, can we truly be certain that Papadopoulos was arrested or, indeed, even exists?
I assume this leads us to multiple presidential pardons as Trump dares the GOP electeds to turn on him.
He can’t get out of this with pardons. I have to say Meuller is playing Trump like a fiddle here. He has Manafort on charges that could be immediately mirrored in the state of NY after a federal pardon. He announced the Manafort indictment in the morning, let Trump and his surrogates go out and motherfuck Manafort and how the money laundering happened before he joined the Trump campaign and made it clear that he was planning to hang the guy out to dry…
Then the Papadopoulos plea deal hits the news. He’s confessed to dealing with Russians promising hacked Clinton emails (which is weird because the Russians totally weren’t behind the hack amirite guise???). He’s confessed that the Trump campaign approved meetings in response. He knows where the bodies are buried (and might have been wearing a wire lololololol).
Trump’s caught totally flat-footed. Manafort knows he’s falling without a net. You think he’s not going to flip?
Is the Papadopoulos case effectively a warning shot for Trump? “I have more where that came from – if you try to shut us down, the other indictments roll.”
I was thinking that Mueller had one chance at the king but maybe he has found another path.
This stuff is all fake news. Just ask Arthur Gilroy.
Yep. It’s all about Mueller and his laywers getting paid. Even though most of them WERE getting paid already before he put them on his team, but hey, whatever.
Does Fox have a countdown clock up yet on how long it is until Tony Podesta is getting arrested?
Tony Podesta? You’re not doing them justice. How about Hillary Clinton?
Tony Podesta resigned from his firm. So, it looks as if Phil suggested the right countdown clock.
Yep, I expect Mueller is soon going to release amended indictments in which the name “Paul Manafort” has been whited out and replaced with the real culprit, Tony Podesta.
Just to be clear, I only wrote that because I am a mindless, knee-jerk supporter of the Democratic Party who has been snookered by all the fake news claims about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.
Trending hashtags #2: podestagroup
Trending topics #2: Tony Podesta
Topic #1 is Tucker Carlson, who, surprise, is focused on Tony Podesta.
Gotta catapult that propaganda!
“No evidence here. Just more red-baiting McCarthyism. Wake me when some real evidence comes down.”
*inevitable response from the “real” left.
Au contrarire, a guilty plea is real evidence, and the young man himself had to admit that he did indeed contact Russians.
The real alt-right talks about the absence of evidence. The real left talks about not trusting the national security state.
What exactly is Mueller in this context? Especially as his material has come directly from ineterviewees.
If Tony Podesta shows up early in the lists of charges, it is hard to read how that plays relative to Russia. Podesta’s firm is close to Republicans as well. I suspect that the Podesta firm’s cultivates a bipartisan contact list for its clients.
Give George Poppapdopolous a break, He’s an ambitious 30-year-old who screwed up eight years after granduating from DePaul.
Anyone up with where he spent the remaining seven of those eight years? And how he got brought so quickly so close to Trump’s power?
First announcement and first guilty plea, and who does Mueller strike first? Popodopulous, Manafort, and Manafort’s buddy Rick Gates. Who else is dealing besides the 30-year-old kid?
What’s the second set of charges? Having a good understanding of what the Russians thought they were doing (an some of that is likely on interviews) will be very helpful to further charges. In addition there are reports of sighting of Sesssions where he could draw a perjury charge if he was not straight-up with Muellers interviewers.
Trump is acting like a man who thinks he never told anyone to do anything.
Going forward, one question is going to be what did SIGINT know and when did they know it? What could they do or not do as a result of what they knew and when?
What we have is an admitted perjury by a 30-year-old.
Mueller on the mound is not yet warmed up.
>>Anyone up with where he spent the remaining seven of those eight years? And how he got brought so quickly so close to Trump’s power?
short answer: no. The quickly-available background has little to answer the first question and none to answer the second.
this is from http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/30/politics/who-is-george-papadopoulos/index.html
Hudson Institute doesn’t want to share who his contract was with and who handled it? I wonder why?
A naster’s degree in security studies would the way one would go now for the fast start intead of the foreign service. Wonder who gives out those UK-based security study degrees (an affiliate of Trump U?)
So two years for his masters and for four years or so he is on this professor’s card. Then the primary season heats up with 17 candidates stretching the resources and he comes up with Ben Carson. Carson had a long fuse on his campaign; coulda kept Papadopoulos busy for a while.
He comes off of Carson’s campaign to see whether there’s any there there in the Russian offer of oppo on Hillary.
But had Papadopoulos been already picked up by recruiters trolling strategic studies schools? Whose recruiters?
That’s a little complication Mueller must dispatch simply and expeditiously to work the network either into Russia or deeper in the Trump campaign.
If he is pitching himself as an oil, gas, and policy consultant he must have enought surface expertise in it to have seemed that to Carson and Trump campaign managers.
I wonder what Carson knows about Russian promises of oppo.
I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Time has done some journalism today. This puts together a lot of his background.
http://time.com/5002832/george-papadopoulos-guilty-plea-indictment/
Sounds believable enough. None of the Carson people they talked to remembered Papadopoulos or anything he’d done there, but I believe that’s how that campaign was. P only spent about 6 weeks with Carson before jumping to Trump.
His school was University College London’s School of Public Policy, that’s real enough. No claim made that he received a degree from them.
The Cyprus connection is interesting too.
Cyprus is where he possibly could have networked into people who were working oil markets and offshoring capital from high-tax countries like Russia. Those could include oligopolists from any country but especially Russia.
He seems to be a very ambitious and bold young man with a Repupblican outlook on life of willing to be on the make.
Trump got him because experienced foreign relations (as opposed to military) people were sewed up with the Republican old establishment (JEB!) or (who is it that Marco Rubio stands in for on foreign policy besides anti-Castro Cuban-Americans?) The first, like the national security state, essentially boycotted Trump. Who are in the second group? Every one else were outsiders until the day after the election.
P was ambitious and knowing zilch about election law. And in the past three months discovered what “taking responsibility for your actions” really means.
I wonder at what point he figured out that he was to be the cut out and fall guy.
So this guy Papadopoulos is recruited by the FSB at this point and at an opportune moment they help shove him onto the escalator into a campaign?
That is one hypothesis. Others are possible that come to the same result.
Depends on how much you believe GOP campaign staffs want to be played by Russian interests — or energy interests that just happen to be Russian.
>> Mueller on the mound is not yet warmed up.
he didn’t need anything but fastballs to strike out this kid, who is totally minor league.
Which is of course why they went after him first. Young, not yet wealthy, not yet very well connected, in way over his head.
How’s Mueller’s breaking ball? IANAL, but this sounds pretty smart to me
I also liked hearing (somewhere) that there are still 4 other recent sealed indictments. Batter Up!
Batter up indeed with Manafort thinking he’s sitting pretty on first base–just take them like he’s doubtlessly done in the past one at a time with his coach of a lawyer.
It is what they don’t know that changes their situation. And who else has turned for the prosecution.
On the Watergate timeline we are at September 15, 1972, Hunt, Liddy, and the seven burglars were indicted.
March 17, 1973, burglar McCord signals willingness to sing.
That’s where we are. The contents of Papagopoulus’s guilty plea or his singing are not on public record yet. They might come in other indictments or those might be independendent evidence that Papadopoulus does not know is held independent of him.
I doubt that the obstruction of justice indictments need not be unseals until that is a real pre-emptive risk. Trump getting the chain of command to fire Mueller with Trump not being under explicit indictment for obstruction of justice is the dicey part of the Consitutional holding of accountability. That’s when you know the crazies are willing to blow up the ship of state rather than let their guy stand for accountability.
And this time you have a divided media, with one part of it holding maybe 30% of the audience away from accountability.
By the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, you will have a good picture how deep into the chain of command that Mueller will go. And I don’t think there are going to be 18 missing minutues of tape or tape to miss this time.
Can’t help assuming Manafort’s life isn’t worth a plugged nickel.
That could be more right than you may think.
I suspect that Russian intelligence, playing the long game as they do, cultivated Papadopoulos. The money laundering of Russian oligarch money by Manafort occurred in part with money in accounts he controlled in Cyprus, which is a locale favored by Russian intelligence for such things. Could this be the nexus with a young man with a Greek surname as Papadopoulos? Time will tell.
You don’t have to suspect, it’s what he plead to.
So, the first day of Tax Week went well. Mueller really opened the door for them to drive home their message to the public about how awesome cutting corporate taxes would be.
LOLOLOLOLOL…
Also, too, the President squealed like a stuck pig on the very subject you mention here:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/924649059520073730
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
All of this “Russia” talk right when the Republicans are making their big push for historic Tax Cuts & Reform. Is this coincidental? NOT!
7:48 AM – 29 Oct 2017
Day 2 of the Republican blowback on Papadopoulos is a new talking point: he was a young campaign volunteer who had little influence and was dismissed after no interaction with Trump’s party leaders, this right from Huckabee-Sanders podium. And today he’s been demoted even further to a “coffee boy”.
It would be comical to see these Trumpians backpedaling every day, but they seem to still keep going forward in their destruction of our democracy.
And we know that conservatives would ever so willingly swallow this same sort of pathetic attempt to paper over the facts if Democrats engaged in it, amirite?
/s