TBR News December 1, 2018

Dec 01 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8 

Washington, D.C. December 1, 2018: “Any competent trial lawyer will tell you that there two types of evidence: direct and circumstantial. And he will also explain that of the two, circumstantial is by far the strongest and most convincing.

There is a growing and very strong belief, not only in official Washington, in investigative agencies and in foreign capitals that American President Donald Trump is a bought and paid for asset of Vladimir Putin and the Russian SVR. That Trump has been transparently corrupt for many years is not a state secret and would hardly be a revelation to Russia.

Their intelligence system is probably the world’s most efficient and the Russians are well-known to develop character weaknesses in potential targets.

  • Trump is not an honest man by any stretch of imagination.
  • The concept of Trump taking bribes from the Russians (or the PRC) is completely understandable if one applies the concept of Occam’s Razor to the tumult and disruption he is deliberately causing both domestically and in foreign areas.
  • Certainly, the psychological personal profile of Donald Trump could hardly be better tailored to being easily turned by a hostile intelligence agency.
  • Russian intelligence agencies are known to have compromising sexual material on him going back more than 30 years and they have used him as a funnel for laundering dirty money from the Russian mafia and from post-Soviet oligarchs, and have more than enough compromising material on Trump to bend him to their will.
  • Trump has constantly engaged in bribing and manipulations and does this through second parties such as Cohen his former lawyer or Manafort, his recently convicted campaign manager during the election.
  • Following Mr.Trump’s bankruptcies in the 1990s he borrowed very large sums of operating capital from Russian sources.
  • 1,300 Trump condominiums have been sold to Russian-connected buyers. Even acheap Trump condo costs over a million dollars, so there over 1,300 condos that meet all the criteria for what is normally called money laundering. Russian intelligence is using Trump real estate to launder money
  • In 2008 his son Donald Trump Jr. said that Russia was an important source of money for the Trump businesses.
  • Trump and his entourage have  made a number of trips to Russia in the past (a list of these along with Russian personages he was in contact with can easily be found on Google), seeking financing and permission to build luxury hotels in that country
  • Russian intelligence owns Wikileaks entirely and released the damning, and authentic, ‘Podesta papers’ concurrent with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This did damage to her campaign and was a major contributory factor to her narrow defeat and Trump’s election.
  • President Trump was jobbed into his office with the full cooperation of Russian intelligence.
  • Trump’s actions, as President, are deliberate efforts to alienate both the putative allies of the US such as Germany, France, Canada and, to a lesser degree, Mexico.
  • Trump has deliberately launched pointless, and destructive, attacks against Mexican and Muslim immigrants, as well as Canadian, Chinese and German imports. All this has done is to create a highly negative image of his persona primarily and secondarily, the global image of the United States. This is only to the benefit of Putin’s Russia, not the United States.
  • Trump’s tariffs, and threats of tariffs, have engendered counter-tariffs that will, when implemented, create serious economic problems for American businessmen and, eventually, the American public.
  • Trump’s politically foolish but calculated support of the Israeli far right has done, and is doing, serious damage to the US image in the Middle East. It should be noted that Russian influence in the Shiite areas of the Middle East, is growing. Also note that Iran, and parts of Iraq, both Shiite, have extensive oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni state, once America’s primary source of badly-need oil, is running dry.
  •  Ergo, the Middle East areas where Russia is having growing influence have oil and if Russia sets itself up as major oil merchandizing source, this will give them tremendous economic leverage vis a vis the United States which is the world’s largest consumer of oil and its by-products.
  • By alienating America’s allies and disrupting that country’s social structure, Trump benefits only Russia and its interests.
  • When he is caught at this, and it is common knowledge that the FBI was deeply interested in his Russian connections long before he ran for President, either the American public will have to deal with another Dallas or Trump will suffer a fatal heart attack. Vice-President Pence, a Christian fanatic, would then have to be told to mind his manners or suffer similar terminal problems.
  • Trump is very well aware of the ongoing and growing official investigation into his completely genuine Russian connections and is certainly also well aware of what they can find, and probably have already uncovered, so he initially fired the head of the FBI and even now, according to a very reliable source, is determined to replace the FBI with the cooperative CIA (their former head, Pompeo, is now Secretary of State) as the sole foreign and domestic intelligence agency. He, and his Russian intelligence handlers, want to nip any FBI revelations in the bud so that Trump can continue on his course of castrating the United States as a global power to the benefit of Putin’s Russia.
  • There was a full page ad that he took out in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post in 1988, putting forth foreign policy points that could have been dictated by Vladimir Putin. It was an assault against NATO, and against Europe.
  • When, not if, it becomes public knowledge that the president of the US is an agent of a foreign power, it would be the worst scandal in American history

 

The Table of Contents 

  • Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 94
  • The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s credibility: America’s compromised leader
  • Odds Are, Russia Owns Trump
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Is Putin the Provocateur in the Kerch Crisis?

 

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 94

August 8, 2018

by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief

The Toronto Star, Canada

The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.

Last updated: Aug 8, 2018

  • Jul 27, 2018

“We’ve also liberated millions of Americans from the crushing burdens of Obamacare. The cruel individual mandate penalty is gone…That was the most unpopular provision, by far, probably on anything, but certainly in Obamacare. And Obamacare is now on its last legs, fortunately.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: Obamacare is not “on its last legs.” While Trump has weakened Obamacare in several ways, most notably by eliminating the “individual mandate” that required people to obtain health insurance, the law is far from dead. Trump did not eliminate Obamacare’s expansion of the Medicaid insurance program for low-income people, the federal and state Obamacare marketplaces that allow other uninsured people to buy insurance, or the subsidies that help many of them make the purchases. Nor did he touch various Obamacare rules for the insurance market, like its prohibition on insurers.

Trump has repeated this claim 33 times

“Half of them had tears coming down because we opened a tremendous United States Steel plant. They’re opening up seven other plants.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: Though Trump had been making versions of this claim for a month, there was still no evidence at the time that U.S. Steel was opening seven or eight plants. (Trump originally claimed it was six plants, then later claimed it was seven, then went up to eight.) At the time Trump spoke, U.S. Steel had only announced a major development at one facility since he introduced his steel tariffs: it said it was restarting two shuttered blast furnaces at its plant he gave this speech at, in Granite City, Illinois. Chuck Bradford, an industry analyst who follows U.S. Steel, said he was “not aware” of the company opening any other facilities. U.S. Steel told the Washington Post: “To answer your question, we post all of our major operational announcements to our website and report them on earnings calls. Our most recent one pertained to our Granite City ‘A’ blast furnace restart.”

Trump has repeated this claim 13 times

“Yesterday, I was at Granite City steel in Illinois. It was an incredible sight. We had an audience of steel workers, some of the roughest, toughest people you’ve ever seen. And half of them had tears coming down their face. I don’t know if these people ever cried before in their life, to be honest. Half of them had tears coming down because we opened a tremendous United States Steel plant.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: There was no evidence that any of the steelworkers in attendance at Trump’s speech were crying, let alone “half of them.”

“In the first three months after tax cuts, over $300 billion poured back into the United States from overseas. We think it’s going to be, in the end, when completed, over $4 trillion will be back into our country. Apple alone is bringing in $230 billion. And they’re building new plants. They’re building a magnificent campus.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: As the New York Times noted in March: “In fact, Apple has no plans to build a plant in the United States.” The company’s January announcement of a $30 billion capital investment over five years specifically mentioned a new campus and new data centres, not new manufacturing operations.

Trump has repeated this claim 20 times

“In the first three months after tax cuts, over $300 billion poured back into the United States from overseas. We think it’s going to be, in the end, when completed, over $4 trillion will be back into our country.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: The first figure is correct: according to the U.S. government, corporations repatriated more than $300 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2018. The second figure, however, is incorrect. Four experts contacted by the Star said they were not aware of any estimate as high as $4 trillion for the amount of corporate profits not repatriated from overseas. The U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation released an estimate of $2.6 trillion overseas in August 2016, and experts said they were not aware of a massive jump in the following two years. (An October 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) pegged the number at $2.6 trillion, while Goldman Sachs pegged it at $3.1 trillion the same month.) “Until there is some legitimate report showing otherwise, my guess continues to be that President Trump is arbitrarily inflating” the accurate number, ITEP senior policy analyst Richard Phillips said in July 2018. “I haven’t seen any reliable estimate that the number is that high,” said Edward Kleinbard, former chief of staff for the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation and now a chair at the University of Southern California’s law school.

Trump has repeated this claim 32 times

“So far this year, American exports are up nearly 20 per cent.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: Trump’s Bureau of Economic Analysis announced a week after this remark tat exports were up 9 per cent on the year in June: “Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $19.6 billion, or 7.2 per cent, from the same period in 2017. Exports increased $103.6 billion or 9.0 per cent.” The increase also rounded to 9 per cent in the most recent report before Trump spoke, issued in July for the month of May: “Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $17.9 billion, or 7.9 per cent, from the same period in 2017. Exports increased $84.5 billion or 8.8 per cent. Imports increased $102.4 billion or 8.6 per cent.”

“Business and consumer confidence has reached historic highs.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: There is evidence for Trump’s claim about business confidence; the National Association of Manufacturers optimism survey, for example, has registered historic highs in the Trump era. But the claim about consumer confidence is false. Consumer confidence was not at an all-time high at the time Trump spoke, nor even a high for this century. The final reading of the Conference Board consumer confidence index for June, announced in July, was 127.1 (revised up from the original 126.4). The index stood at 132.6 in November 2000.

Trump has repeated this claim 4 times

“Women unemployment rate recently reached the lowest level in 65 years. And soon that will be in history. Give it another two or three weeks.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: This claim was no longer true at the time Trump spoke. It was true as of the previous month: the women’s unemployment rate for May, reported in June, was 3.6 per cent, the same as in 1953, 65 years prior. But it rose to 4 per cent in June, reported in July, which was merely the lowest since 2017 — or, if you’re only counting pre-Trump years, the lowest since 2000, 18 years prior.

Trump has repeated this claim 14 times

“The Asian unemployment rate has recently reached the lowest level, again likewise, in history.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: The Asian-American unemployment rate briefly dropped to a low, 2.0 per cent, in May. But the most recent Asian-American unemployment rate at the time Trump spoke, for June, was 3.2 per cent. This was higher than the rate in Obama’s last two full months in office — 3 per cent in November 2016 and 2.8 per cent in December 2016 — and in multiple months of George W. Bush’s second term.

Trump has repeated this claim 9 times

“Everywhere we look, we are seeing the effects of the American economic miracle. We have added 3.7 million new jobs since the election — a number that is unthinkable, if you go back to the campaign. Nobody would have said it, nobody would have even, in an optimistic way, projected it.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: It is not true that it was “unthinkable” that 3.7 million jobs could be added over this 19-month period. In the previous 19-month period, under Obama, 4.0 million jobs were added.

Trump has repeated this claim 16 times

“Perhaps one of the biggest wins in the report, and it is indeed a big one, is that the trade deficit — very dear to my heart, because we’ve been ripped off by the world — has dropped by more than $50 billion. Fifty-two billion, to be exact. It’s dropped by more than fifty. Think of that. The trade deficit has dropped by more than $50 billion.”

Source: Speech celebrating 4 per cent quarterly GDP growth

in fact: The U.S. trade deficit is actually higher so far in 2018 than it was at this point in 2017. (Earlier in July, for example, Trump’s Bureau of Economic Analysis issued a report, for May, that said: “Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $17.9 billion, or 7.9 per cent, from the same period in 2017. Exports increased $84.5 billion or 8.8 per cent. Imports increased $102.4 billion or 8.6 per cent.”) Trump was making a more unusual kind of comparison: he was pointing to a decline from the trade deficit in the first quarter of 2018 to the trade deficit in the second quarter of 2018. However, as FactCheck.org, the Washington Post and others have explained, he was doing even this inaccurately. The president was simply taking the raw numbers in the report — $902.4 billion for the first quarter, $849.9 billion for the second quarter — and subtracting the second-quarter number from the first, which gave a result of $52 billion. There are two problems here: these are not actually quarterly numbers; they are expressed on an annual basis. And they are not in today’s dollars; they are expressed in inflation-adjusted terms. To do an accurate version of Trump’s quarter-by-quarter comparison, experts told both outlets, you have to make sure you’re using the current-day version of the figures; divide them by four, for the four quarters; and then, only then, do the subtraction Trump did right away. When you do that, you get a $21.7 billion decline, not a $52 billion decline.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“…the only Collusion with Russia was with the Democrats, so now they are looking at my Tweets (along with 53 million other people) – the rigged Witch Hunt continues!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The claim that Clinton or Democrats more broadly colluded with Russia is simple nonsense: the word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — just does not apply to Democrats’ Russia-related activities. The accusation is based on the fact that the British ex-spy who produced a research dossier on the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia, which was funded in part by Clinton’s campaign, used Russian sources in compiling his information. That does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

 

  • Jul 29, 2018

 

“…And why isn’t Mueller looking at all of the criminal activity & real Russian Collusion on the Democrats side-Podesta, Dossier?”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The claim that Clinton or Democrats more broadly colluded with Russia is simple nonsense: the word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — just does not apply to Democrats’ Russia-related activities. The accusation is based on the fact that the British ex-spy who produced a research dossier on the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia, which was funded in part by Clinton’s campaign, used Russian sources in compiling his information. That does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

“The Robert Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt, headed now by 17 (increased from 13, including an Obama White House lawyer) Angry Democrats…”

Source: Twitter

in fact: While at least 11 members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team have donated to Democrats in the past, the probe is headed not by them but by Mueller himself, a longtime Republican.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“The Robert Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt, headed now by 17 (increased from 13, including an Obama White House lawyer) Angry Democrats, was started by a fraudulent Dossier, paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC. Therefore, the Witch Hunt is an illegal Scam!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The research dossier produced by former British spy Christopher Steele, which described alleged connections between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, was not the impetus for the launch of the FBI investigation Trump describes as “the witch hunt.” In fact, the Trump-endorsed memo produced by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican, confirmed that the FBI began the probe after receiving information that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had obtained damaging information on Clinton, before this was publicly known. “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016,” the Nunes memo says.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“90% of media coverage of my Administration is negative, despite the tremendously positive results we are achieving, it’s no surprise that confidence in the media is at an all time low!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: A 2018 study by the conservative Media Research Center found that 91 per cent of “evaluative comments” about Trump on ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts were negative. (Other studies, using different methodologies, have found different results, but they have also found that media coverage of Trump has been overwhelmingly negative.) However, U.S. confidence in the media is not at an all-time low. It was in 2016, when, according to Gallup polling, just 32 per cent of Americans trusted the media to report the news fully and fairly. But it spiked to 41 per cent in 2017, fuelled by a dramatic increase in trust among Democrats, from 51 per cent to 72 per cent. While Republicans’ trust in the media is indeed at an all-time low, Democratic trust “is the highest it has been in the past 20 years,” Gallup reported. Trump did not specify that he was talking about Republicans only.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“The biggest and best results coming out of the good GDP report was that the quarterly Trade Deficit has been reduced by $52 Billion…”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The U.S. trade deficit is actually higher so far in 2018 than it was at this point in 2017. (Earlier in July, for example, Trump’s Bureau of Economic Analysis issued a report, for May, that said: “Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $17.9 billion, or 7.9 per cent, from the same period in 2017. Exports increased $84.5 billion or 8.8 per cent. Imports increased $102.4 billion or 8.6 per cent.”) Trump was making a more unusual kind of comparison: he was pointing to a decline from the trade deficit in the first quarter of 2018 to the trade deficit in the second quarter of 2018. However, as FactCheck.org, the Washington Post and others have explained, he was doing even this inaccurately. The president was simply taking the raw numbers in the report — $902.4 billion for the first quarter, $849.9 billion for the second quarter — and subtracting the second-quarter number from the first, which gave a result of $52 billion. There are two problems here: these are not actually quarterly numbers; they are expressed on an annual basis. And they are not in today’s dollars; they are expressed in inflation-adjusted terms. To do an accurate version of Trump’s quarter-by-quarter comparison, experts told both outlets, you have to make sure you’re using the current-day version of the figures; divide them by four, for the four quarters; and then, only then, do the subtraction Trump did right away. When you do that, you get a $21.7 billion decline, not a $52 billion decline.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“The biggest and best results coming out of the good GDP report was that the quarterly Trade Deficit has been reduced by $52 Billion and, of course, the historically low unemployment numbers, especially for African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Women.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The unemployment rates for African-Americans and for Hispanics are indeed at historic lows, at least since the government started releasing this data separately in the early 1970s. But the unemployment rate for women is not at historic lows. This claim was closer to true as of the previous month: the women’s unemployment rate for May, reported in June, was 3.6 per cent, the same as in 1953, 65 years prior. But it rose to 4 per cent in June, reported in July, which was merely the lowest since 2017 — or, if you’re only counting pre-Trump years, the lowest since 2000, 18 years prior.

Trump has repeated this claim 14 times

“The biggest and best results coming out of the good GDP report was that the quarterly Trade Deficit has been reduced by $52 Billion and, of course, the historically low unemployment numbers, especially for African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Women.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The unemployment rates for African-Americans and for Hispanics are indeed at historic lows, at least since the government started releasing this data separately in the early 1970s. But the unemployment rate for Asian-Americans is not at historic lows. While the Asian-American rate briefly dropped to a low in May, 2.0 per cent, the most recent Asian-American rate at the time Trump spoke, for June, was 3.2 per cent. This was higher than the rate in Obama’s last two full months in office — 3 per cent in November 2016 and 2.8 per cent in December 2016 — and in multiple months of George W. Bush’s second term.

Trump has repeated this claim 9 times

“Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party. That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. There must be something wrong, please recheck that poll!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is indeed something wrong: Trump is wrong, in two ways. First, this popularity ranking does not include Abraham Lincoln; there was no scientific opinion polling when Lincoln was in office in the 1860s. Second, while polls show that Trump is more popular with Republican voters at this point in his presidency than almost all previous Republican presidents who served in the era of polling, he is not more popular than all of them: Trump’s 90 per cent approval among Republicans in Gallup polling in June was behind George W. Bush’s 95 per cent approval among Republicans at that point in Bush’s first term.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

 

The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s credibility: America’s compromised leader

Editorial

As the Mueller investigation continues to produce troubling charges against his innermost circle, the US president’s word is increasingly suspect both at home and abroad

November 30, 2018

Earlier this week Donald Trump stood on the south lawn of the White House and ridiculed Theresa May’s Brexit agreement as a “great deal for the EU”. He is likely to make the same contemptuous case during the G20 summit in Argentina this weekend, although pointedly there is no planned bilateral. Given the political stakes facing her back home, Mrs May must feel as if 14,000 miles is a long way to travel for the weekend merely to be trashed by supposedly her greatest ally.

When this happens, though, who does Mrs May imagine is confronting her? Is it just Mr Trump himself, America First president, sworn enemy of the international order in general and the European Union in particular? That’s a bad enough reality. But might her accuser also be, at some level, Vladimir Putin, a leader whose interest in weakening the EU and breaking Britain from it as damagingly as possible outdoes even that of Mr Trump? That prospect is even worse.

Such speculation would normally seem, and still probably is, a step too far. The idea that a US president is in any way doing the Kremlin’s business as well as his own is the stuff of spy thrillers and of John le Carré TV adaptations. Yet the icy fact is that the conspiracy theory may now also contain an element of truth.

On Thursday, Mr Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty – in a court filing by the special counsel Robert Mueller – to lying to the US congress about Mr Trump’s Russian interests and connections during the months when the New York property magnate was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. It was not true, Mr Cohen has now admitted, that the Trump organisation ended its interest in Russian deals in January 2016; not true that there were no plans for Russian visits by Mr Trump later in 2016 to make property deals; not true that the Russian government did not respond to the deal overtures. Indeed, as late as May 2016, Mr Cohen was in indirect contact with Mr Putin’s office about the possibility of a meeting with Mr Trump in St Petersburg in June.

Days before he took office in 2017, Mr Trump said that “the closest I came to Russia” was in selling a Florida property to a Russian oligarch in 2008. If Mr Cohen’s statement is true, Mr Trump was telling his country a lie. What is more, the Russians knew it. Potentially, that raises issues of US national security. If Mr Putin knew that Mr Trump was concealing information about his Russian business interests, this could give Moscow leverage over the US leader. Mr Trump might feel constrained to praise Mr Putin or to avoid conflicts with Russia over policy.

All this may indeed be very far-fetched. Yet Russia’s activities in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton and in favour of Mr Trump are not fiction. They prompted the setting up of the Mueller inquiry into links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Another document this week suggests a longtime Trump adviser, Roger Stone, may have sought information about WikiLeaks plans to release hacked Democratic party emails in 2016.

There is nothing in the documents released this week that proves that Mr Trump conspired with Russian efforts to win him the presidency. Yet those efforts were real. For two years, Mr Trump has gone to unprecedented lengths to attack the special counsel. After November’s midterms, he seemed on the verge of firing Mr Mueller. He may yet do so. But this week’s charges suggest that there is plenty more still to be revealed. Mr Trump still has questions to answer from the investigating authorities, from the new Congress – and from America’s long-suffering allies.

 

Odds Are, Russia Owns Trump

November 27, 2017

by Michelle Goldberg

The New York Times

Three months ago, The Washington Post reported that even as Donald Trump ran for president, he pursued plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The next day, The New York Times published excerpts from emails between Felix Sater, a felon with ties to Russian organized crime, and Michael Cohen, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers and Sater’s childhood friend, about the project. Sater was apparently an intermediary between Trump and Russia, and in a Nov. 3, 2015, email to Cohen, he made the strange argument that a successful deal would lead to Trump’s becoming president. Boasting that he was close enough to Vladimir Putin to let Ivanka Trump sit in the Russian president’s desk chair, Sater wrote, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”

These stories were, at the time, bombshells. At a minimum, they showed that Trump was lying when he said, repeatedly, that he had “nothing to do with Russia.” Further, Sater’s logic — that Putin’s buy-in on a real estate deal would result in Trump’s election — was bizarre, suggesting that some part of the proposed collaboration was left unsaid.

But three months feels like three decades in Trump years, and I mostly forgot about these reports until I read Luke Harding’s new book, “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” One uncanny aspect of the investigations into Trump’s Russia connections is that instead of too little evidence there’s too much. It’s impossible to keep it straight without the kind of chaotic wall charts that Carrie Mathison of “Homeland” assembled during her manic episodes. Incidents that would be major scandals in a normal administration — like the mere fact of Trump’s connection to Sater — become minor subplots in this one.

That’s why “Collusion” is so essential, and why I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it. This country — at least the parts not wholly under the sway of right-wing propaganda — needs to come to terms with substantial evidence that the president is in thrall to a foreign power.

Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy. He was able to interview Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier attempting to detail Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin, and who describes the conspiracy between the American president and the Russians as “massive — absolutely massive.”

“Collusion” doesn’t purport to solve all the mysteries of this alleged conspiracy. There’s no longer any serious question that there was cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia, but the extent of the cooperation, and the precise nature of it, remains opaque. Harding makes a strong case for Steele’s credibility, but Steele reportedly said that the raw intelligence in his dossier is only 70 percent to 90 percent accurate, so it’s hard to know which parts of it to believe.

But Harding’s book is invaluable in collating the overwhelming evidence of a web of relationships between the Kremlin, Trump and members of Trump’s circle. He suggests, convincingly, that Russia may have been cultivating Trump since the 1980s. At that time, Harding writes, the K.G.B. was working to draw “prominent figures in the West” — as the K.G.B. described them — into collaboration. According to Harding, a form for evaluating targets asked, “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”

Last week, The Times reported that many Russian critics of Putin deplore America’s fixation on Moscow’s role in the election, since it reinforces Putin’s image of himself as an “ever-victorious master strategist” controlling world affairs. The article quoted Ivan Kurilla, a Russian historian and America expert: “American liberals are so upset about Trump that they cannot believe he is a real product of American life. They try to portray him as something created by Russia.”

As one of those American liberals, I don’t think this is quite right. Trump, the gaudy huckster who treats closing a sale as the height of human endeavor, is a quintessentially American figure. His campaign of racial and religious grievance drew on the darkest currents of American history. At most, Putin appears to have recognized an opportunity that American political dysfunction created.

It’s a sign of how deep that dysfunction goes that the substantial evidence that the president is not a patriot hasn’t caused more of a political earthquake. America, stunned and divided, appears incapable of metabolizing all we’re learning about the man in the White House. Yes, we have investigations, but the business of government plods on; right now the Senate is working on the Roy Moore of tax bills, a piece of legislation that magnifies right-wing pathologies into a cartoonish grotesque.

It wasn’t Putin who fashioned a Republican Party willing to tolerate something close to treason if it’s the price of corporate tax cuts. Even if all the Republicans in Congress read Harding’s book, they probably wouldn’t act. But at least they’d know what they’re abetting.

 

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

December 1, 2018

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

Conversation No. 113

Date: Wednesday November 26, 1997

Commenced: 1:02 PM CST

Concluded: 1:38 PM CST

GD: Hello, Robert. Bought your tree yet?

RTC: Good day to you, Gregory. A bit early.

GD: Perhaps. Those plastic trees are so much better than the real ones. Why murder a perfectly innocent tree just to encourage reckless spending in the shops? Do trees, which are part of the great system, come into our homes, cut our children off at the feet and stick them up in the woods, covered with squirrel shit?

RTC: Now, Gregory, don’t mar the joys of the season. Trees are traditional, after all.

GD: Well, so were burning witches at the stake but that finally died away. After that, our southern friends just burnt blacks up in the trees for entertainment.

GGRT: Gregory, where is your Christmas spirit?

GD: In my liquor cabinet, that’s where. You know, Robert, I like fine art and really decent music. I love classical music and I have hundreds of recordings. Most of them are Baroque and of those, the majority are religious in nature. I have masses, motets, requiems, te Deums and so on. I greatly enjoy the music but I am not a fan of the Gospels, most of which is pure propaganda, written decades after the fact by people who could never have been period witnesses to any ministry that Jesus might have promulgated. The music stands on its own feet, not on the strength, or weakness, of dogma. And when I am in Florence, I love to walk through the galleries of the Uffizi and admire the grand art. Most of it is religious in nature because in those days, artists were not allowed to portray the nude human figure except in a religious connotation. Aside, it’s downright funny, looking at the Shroud of Turin fake because that particular Jesus has a nice scarf wrapped around his genitals.

RTC: Yes, well, it kept people happy for a long time, Gregory.

GD: Yes and then we had the French Revolution, didn’t we? Yes, I suppose I ought to get a tree, which is pagan in origin by the way, and hang up wax figures on it of my enemies, with knitting needles thrust up their fundaments.

RTC: My, I feel sorry for the poor tree with all that weight on it.

GD: Now, Robert, not everyone hates me. I mean you don’t hate me, do you?

RTC: No, I don’t but I know quite a few people who wish you would take a long walk on a short pier.

GD: Dare I guess the names, Robert?

RTC: Do we have the time?

GD: ‘Had we but world enough, and time…’ Just a quote remembered dimly from my wonderfully rich days spent in my local high school. Yes, one of the bright spots in my life, Robert.

RTC: I take it you had problems there with them.

GD: No, Robert, they had problems there with me. Robert, you know, I am a peaceful person by nature. I am reflective. I love animals, but of course not sheep in the carnal sense, and good music, and better wine and my own cooking. I always minded my business as a child and was very courteous and civilized to my elders and even to most of my peers. Ah, but that was when I was a child. As I grew older and realized what vileness covered the earth, I grew increasingly disenchanted. But I never instigated anything against anyone, ever. But I never permitted anyone to attack or, worse, dishonor me, Robert. Never. And I had trouble in school because I did not socialize and I had a really vicious, but educated, tongue. If I was mocked, my retorts drove people to weeping and distraction. I played no favorites, Robert. I was democratic there. Teachers, parents, siblings, peers, whatever. They started it and I finished it. And if they were too big and too strong to attack directly, there was always the indirect attack. They might never know that it was I who ruined some pathetic aspect of their sheep-like lives but I always knew and I liked to treasure such moments. Our friend Heini Müller found no fault with this and in fact used to tell me I was one of the most entertaining scoundrels he ever met. And Heini was quite decent too, head of the Gestapo as he had been, but even he was not as creative as I was and in interrogations issues, I could beat him hands down and Heini was very, very good.

RTC: That he was. The few times I dealt personally with him I was very favorably impressed with not only his abilities, his forensic abilities, but also his character.

GD: I don’t think I am going to ask you about my character, Robert.

RTC: No, don’t worry about that, Gregory. You have plenty of character but our friend Heini was right. You are very medieval in your approach to the problems of life. You know, that’s why you could never have really worked for us. I mean if we told you to blow someone up, you would cheerfully do it if you agreed with our motives but if you didn’t, you would balk. No, we can’t have that. You have distinct abilities but no one but yourself can do anything with them, can they?

GD: Of course not. On the other hand, if I like you, I will certainly blow things up on your behalf. Or in your case, build a death ray for you to use on your Swiss neighbors. Take the meaning I am sure.

RTC: I have not complained, have I?

GD: I would hope not. I rarely have blown anything up, Robert but there was one exception. It was quite awful if you stopped to think about it but no one ever did.

RTC: Have I heard this one?

GD: No. I don’t talk about it.

RTC: Anyone killed or maimed for life?

GD: No, but there was some damage done. Mostly to property and, as King Ronald the First said, there was collateral damage.

RTC: Yes, Reagan’s pet phrase when one of our assaults on an unfriendly person was successful. What was your collateral damage?

GD: Yes, we all have our memories, Robert, thoughts to warm us on cold winter nights like a fat woman in the sack. Lots of warm blubber to comfort you. Nothing else to comfort me, believe me.

RTC: (Laughter) What do you have against fat people?

GD: Fortunately, nothing attached to my body, Robert.

RTC: Your explosive venture?

GD: Just trying to set me up, Robert? Tape recorder whirring? No, not you. That’s why I open my heart to you. Explosives? In my senior year of high school, I was considered quite a negative person by almost everyone. I had my little games, like the soap in the stock pot story, but no one ever suspected me because, believe it or not, I was a sweet-faced child who looked ten years younger than I was and who was very, very considerate and polite to people. At least generally. Anyway, some of the teachers, who had gotten very tired of my comments directed to them in class decided that while I had earned my diploma, I ought not to be given it in public. Why? Because of my satires and sallies. They would poke at me in class with what they pathetically thought was sarcasm and I would riposte with a thrust into their livers. No, they despised me so while I could get my diploma, they did not want me to get it at a graduation ceremony.

RTC: Very nasty, Gregory. Are you sure you hadn’t committed some atrocity unmentioned here?

GD: No. I am a private assassin, not a public one. I never got caught and was never suspected. On the other hand, I can cheerfully report that I was often accused of things I had never done and when I was discovered to be totally innocent of the charges, never apologized to. I used to get even for such things.

RTC: And the graduation? You spoke of explosives. Did you blow up the school?

GD: No, just a part of it. There was a patio off of the main corridor of the school. It was called the Honor Court and could only be entered by janitors and honor students. The rest of us were forbidden to go into it. It was a Spanish-style patio with four walls but open to the sky. There were bamboo plants around the place and a really ugly fountain in the center. A ceramic cherub holding a dolphin that shot a steam of water up out of his mouth. The anus would have been much more interesting an exit but they chose the mouth. Anyway, this ugly statue that would only excite a myopic pedophile had a basin below it, a basin filled with ugly, piebald carp which the honor students were permitted to feed. And on the surrounding walls of it were small bronze plates with the year of a graduating class on it. ‘37’ or ‘’42’ and so on. A solemn ceremony year graduating year as the class valedictorian and others of the sainthood of the perfect of God entered the patio and the plate for that year was solemnly tapped into place with the handle of an even more sacred trowel, one that had been used to tamp for twenty years. I think they kept it locked in a safe in the main office until it was needed. Anyway, one of the walls of this sacred grove was blank, another had the glass windows of the chemistry laboratory in it and yet another one had glass windows looking onto the corridor. The main corridors through which passed hundreds of students, all of whom were forbidden to enter the sacred grove. When I was told I could get my diploma but was not wanted at the graduation ceremonies because I was a very negative person and reflected badly on everybody except the janitors, I got rather angry. Now I had no use for most of the students and certainly none of the teachers but I felt that I had as much right to walk up the aisle and get my diploma as anyone else. I really did and in this case, my family was upset with the school, not with me. It didn’t do any good so I was told that my father would take me out to a very nice French restaurant in lieu of my attending graduation ceremonies. Dishonor, Robert, dishonor. That I never tolerated so I prepared a nice surprise. On the other side of that corridor was the outside auditorium where the graduation ceremonies would take place. I went to an establishment that, in those days things were much freer than they are today, that sold dynamite and I bought a case of 75% sticks, a box of caps, a crimper and the longest roll of 5 seconds per inch fuse I could get. I took the stuff home and made the dynamite into a sort of a long shawl by tying the sticks together at the tops and bottoms. Each stick is formatted to take an explosive cap so I rigged the whole thing up, wrapped it in a blanket and smuggled it into the school on the eve of graduation. It was safe enough because all the janitors and teachers were out in the rapidly-filling auditorium so I had no trouble wrapping the fat punk with a long blanket of destruction. I shoved the fused cap into one of the sticks and lit the other end. No one saw me come and no one saw me go. And I was home about two minutes or so, talking with my family who were getting ready to take me out to my consolation dinner, when we all heard a massive explosion. It rattled the windows but my father, who knew everything, assured it that it was a sonic boom. Of course he was wrong but who was I to correct him? Not I, certainly. Anyway, we left for the restaurant and we had to pass near the school. My, my, roads blocked off, police cars, fire trucks with lights blazing and so on. A detour and curiosity on my father’s part. I would loved to have enlightened him but there are times, Robert, times when silence is golden. We had a lovely consolation dinner and on the way back, we had to pass down the highway past the school, except we couldn’t. It seems the buildings were on fire so we went home and I took a nice shower and put some Bach on the record player.

RTC: Anyone killed?

GD: No, no one killed but a great deal of damage. Some of my classmates who were present called me the next morning and, being a curious person, I drove over to the school. Of course a janitor told me the main hall was a mess and I couldn’t go down it but I convinced him I had a family Bible in my locker and I needed to get it. I’m a pretty good con man and he let me through and off I went. Merciful Jesus, Robert, what a mess I saw that day. The high school orchestra had been playing, endlessly and always out of tune, Elgar’s  Pimp and Circumcision march while respectful students trekked up the aisles past adoring parents to get their diplomas. My, and just then, there was a great flash and a roar somewhere off to the left followed by the rapid descent of many Spanish roof tiles into the outdoor auditorium. Window glass burst out upon them and there was a rain of tile upon their heads. Panic. Screaming parents running around. Toppled metal chairs. Fleeing school officials, the local Methodist minister who was blessing people, the school choir and orchestra. By the way, high school orchestras ought to be banned on principle. They are a standing affront to music lovers. So Pompeii with Vesuvius erupting is what it was. I was establishing my alibi at the time and enjoying the idea of good French food when the disaster came upon them but from the havoc and wreckage I was able to observe, coupled with the hysterical and disjointed reports of my peers, I pieced the whole thing together. Tipped over metal chairs, abandoned mortar boards, sheet music fluttering in the wind, blood stains, shattered tiles, and on the stage, a tipped-over lectern, the school flag hanging by one corner, more scattered chairs and, I have always remembered this poignant touch, a base viola lying abandoned where its terrified wielder had abandoned it. Oh, the sacred patio? Oh my, what a shambles. The statue was blasted into dust and all that remained was a corroded copper pipe squirting water into an empty basin that had been breached almost totally. Sacred, dated sections were scattered all over the patio along with the ruptured remains of the carp, bamboo, roof tiles and a broken bench once occupied by the elite. The fires had been caused when the wall of the chemistry lab had blown in, knocking all the chemicals onto the floor. Some combination of their contents had started a raging fire that had burnt up into the attic and roared through it like crap through a goose. My, my, what a finale to my distress and grief- laden school years. No one was seriously injured but there were plenty of scalp cuts that tended to bleed a bit, trampled musical instruments and, of course, major damage to the school in general and the sacred precincts of the elite in specific. Dead carp, smashed altar and ruined bushes all laid out for me to view with awe and great joy.  Now there is my explosive adventure, Robert. Have you anything to say?

RTC: Lucky no one was killed.

GD: That’s a matter of opinion, Robert. I can quickly think of at least two or three dozen people I could have wished visiting the sacred carp for the last time and wondering what all those little road flares were doing strapped around the fat-assed cupid. Just before the cap went off. I wasn’t planning on such an occurrence but sometimes life gives you little bonuses.

RTC: (Laughter) And all of this so soon before Christmas, Gregory. And you got away with it, I assume?

GD: I did indeed. One could say that I went out with a bang. A very large one, Robert, very large. Another precious memory to treasure in moments of distress and grief. Haven’t you any such moments?

RTC: No, thank God.

GD: Just revolutions, assassinations and exploding airliners instead. Well, whatever pleases you, Robert.

(Concluded 1:38 PM CST)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas

 

Is Putin the Provocateur in the Kerch Crisis?

November 30, 2018

by Patrick J. Buchanan

On departure for the G-20 gathering in Buenos Aires, President Donald Trump canceled his planned weekend meeting with Vladimir Putin, citing as his reason the Russian military’s seizure and holding of three Ukrainian ships and 24 sailors.

But was Putin really the provocateur in Sunday’s naval clash outside Kerch Strait, the Black Sea gateway to the Sea of Azov?

Or was the provocateur Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko?

First, a bit of history.

In 2014, after the pro-Russian regime in Kiev was ousted in a coup, and a pro-NATO regime installed with U.S. backing, Putin detached and annexed Crimea, for centuries the homeport of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

With the return of Crimea, Russia now occupied both sides of Kerch Strait. And this year, Russia completed a 12-mile bridge over the strait and Putin drove the first truck across.

The Sea of Azov became a virtual Russian lake, access to which was controlled by Russia, just as access to the Black Sea is controlled by Turkey.

While the world refused to recognize the new reality, Russia began to impose rules for ships transiting the strait, including 48 hours notice to get permission.

Ukrainian vessels, including warships, would have to notify Russian authorities before passing beneath the Kerch Strait Bridge into the Sea of Azov to reach their major port of Mariupol.

Sunday, two Ukrainian artillery ships and a tug, which had sailed out of Odessa in western Ukraine, passed through what Russia now regards as its territorial waters off Crimea and the Kerch Peninsula. Destination: Mariupol.

The Ukrainian vessels refused to obey Russian directives to halt.

Russian warships fired at the Ukrainian vessels and rammed the tug. Three Ukrainian sailors were wounded, and 24 crew taken into custody.

Russia’s refusal to release the sailors was given by President Trump as the reason for canceling his Putin meeting.

Moscow contends that Ukraine deliberately violated the new rules of transit that Kiev had previously observed, to create an incident.

For his part, Putin has sought to play the matter down, calling it a “border incident, nothing more.”

“The incident in the Black Sea was a provocation organized by the authorities and maybe the president himself. … (Poroshenko’s) rating is falling … so he needed to do something.”

Maxim Eristavi, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, seems to concur:

“Poroshenko wants to get a head start in his election campaign. He is playing the card of commander in chief, flying around in military uniform, trying to project that he is in control.”

Our U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, however, accused Russia of “outlaw actions” against the Ukrainian vessels and “an arrogant act the international community will never accept.”

Predictably, our interventionists decried Russian “aggression” and demanded we back up our Ukrainian “ally” and send military aid.

Why was Poroshenko’s ordering of gunboats into the Sea of Azov, while ignoring rules Russia set down for passage, provocative?

Because Poroshenko, whose warships had previously transited the strait, had to know the risk that he was taking and that Russia might resist.

Why would he provoke the Russians?

Because, with his poll numbers sinking badly, Poroshenko realizes that unless he does something dramatic, his party stands little chance in next March’s elections.

Immediately after the clash, Poroshenko imposed martial law in all provinces bordering Russia and the Black Sea, declared an invasion might be imminent, demanded new Western sanctions on Moscow, called on the U.S. to stand with him, and began visiting army units in battle fatigues.

Some Westerners want even more in the way of confronting Putin.

Adrian Karatnycky of the Atlantic Council urges us to build up U.S. naval forces in the Black Sea, send anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to Ukraine, ratchet up sanctions on Russia, threaten to expel her from the SWIFT system of international bank transactions, and pressure Europe to cancel the Russians’ Nord Stream 2 and South Stream oil pipelines into Europe.

But there is a larger issue here.

Why is control of the Kerch Strait any of our business?

Why is this our quarrel, to the point that U.S. strategists want us to confront Russia over a Crimean Peninsula that houses the Livadia Palace that was the last summer residence of Czar Nicholas II?

If Ukraine had a right to break free of Russia in 1991, why do not Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk have the right to break free of Kiev?

Why are we letting ourselves be dragged into everyone’s quarrels – from who owns the islets in the South China Sea, to who owns the Senkaku and Southern Kurils; and from whether Transnistria had a right to secede from Moldova, to whether South Ossetia and Abkhazia had the right to break free of Georgia, when Georgia broke free of Russia?

Do the American people care a fig for these places? Are we really willing to risk war with Russia or China over who holds title to them?

 

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