TBR News November 9, 2018

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

Washington, D.C. November 9, 2018:”Furious at the Democratic capture  of the House, even more furious over the possibility a black woman might become the Governor of Georgia and incandescent at the thought of Central Americans daring to present themselves at immigration centers, Trump is very close to initiating serious domestic problems that will, without question, result in his being removed from office and either jailed or committed.”

The Table of Contents 

• Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 75
• Post-midterm outlook in US: ‘It’s going to be crazy for the next 2 years’
• Trump and Russia
• ‘Phenomenally saddening’: inside the sordid world of America’s for-profit colleges
• S. judge halts Keystone XL oil pipeline in blow to Trump, Trudeau
• Tax evasion helps US corporations steal $180bn from the rest of the world every year
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 75

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

• May 26, 2018

“When will the 13 Angry Democrats (& those who worked for President O), reveal their disqualifying Conflicts of Interest? It’s been a long time now! Will they be indelibly written into the Report along with the fact that the only Collusion is with the Dems, Justice, FBI & Russia?”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — simply does not apply to the Russia-related activities of the Democrats. This 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. This does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

“This whole Russia Probe is Rigged. Just an excuse as to why the Dems and Crooked Hillary lost the Election and States that haven’t been lost in decades. 13 Angry Democrats, and all Dems if you include the people who worked for Obama for 8 years.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The Russia probe, which is led by special counsel Robert Mueller, is not composed of “all Dems”: Mueller himself is a longtime Republican. This appears to be what Trump was referring to when he said he was including people who “worked for Obama for 8 years.” But Mueller served under Obama for less than five years after serving more than seven years under the Republican president who appointed him, George W. Bush.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“With Spies, or ‘Informants’ as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or ‘Justice’ contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is no evidence that there were “spies” “all over” Trump’s campaign; it is now known that there was one informant, a Republican professor, who made contact with campaign officials to try to get information about its relationship with Russia. In addition, Trump was indeed briefed by the FBI about the Russia threat: NBC News reported in December that “in the weeks after he became the Republican nominee on July 19, 2016, Donald Trump was warned that foreign adversaries, including Russia, would probably try to spy on and infiltrate his campaign.” Trump spokesperson Raj Shah confirmed the story: “That the Republican and Democrat nominee for president received a standardized briefing on counterintelligence is hardly a news story,” he told NBC News.

“The Failing @nytimes quotes ‘a senior White House official,’ who doesn’t exist, as saying ‘even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.’ WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: This senior White House official is very real: he is Matthew Pottinger, National Security Council senior director for Asia, and he made these comments in an official White House briefing for a large group of journalists. (The administration had insisted that he only be identified as a senior White House official.) Trump could have made a reasonable argument that the Times’s paraphrasing of Pottinger’s comments was not accurate: Pottinger cast strong doubt on the possibility that the summit could be held on June 12, but he did not explicitly say it was impossible. Trump, however, argued that the Times invented the official, not that it slightly misquoted the official.

“Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: No law requires the separation of border-crossing parents from their children. This is a policy of the Trump administration.

• May 27, 2018

“Why didn’t the 13 Angry Democrats investigate the campaign of Crooked Hillary Clinton, many crimes, much Collusion with Russia?”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — simply does not apply to the Russia-related activities of the Clinton campaign. This 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. This does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

May 29, 2018

“We’re the nation that built the Empire State Building in less than one year.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: We’d let Trump with getting away with saying the Empire State Building was built in “one year,” even though that ignores the pre-construction planning process: the construction took 13 months, so he’d be close. But “less than one year,” Trump’s ad-libbed exaggeration, is objectively false.

Trump has repeated this claim 4 times

“…Repeal and replace Obamacare. But what — we had it done, folks. It was done, and then, early in the morning, somebody turned the hand in the wrong direction. That cost our country a lot. That was a very, very terrible thing that happened that night. That was a very terrible thing. That cost our country $1 trillion in entitlement saving that nobody would have known.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: Sen. John McCain’s vote against Trump’s plan to repeal and replace Obamacare did not cost the country $1 trillion. As the Washington Post noted: “Trump’s estimate is way off. The Senate bill to repeal and replace Obamacare that Trump is talking about would have reduced the deficit by a net $321 billion over 10 years, according to a joint analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.”

Trump has repeated this claim 4 times

“We got $6 billion for opioid and getting rid of that scourge that’s taking over our country. And the numbers are way down. We’re getting the word out — bad. Bad stuff. You go to the hospital, you have a broken arm, you come out, you’re a drug addict with this crap. It’s way down. We’re doing a good job with it.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: As the Associated Press, PolitiFact and others noted, there is no indication that the number of opioid overdoses or deaths is “way down.” The AP reported: “One leading indicator of the opioid epidemic is down — painkiller prescriptions. Other indicators are up, such as the number of overdoses and deaths…Prescriptions for opioid painkillers filled in the U.S. fell almost 9 percent last year, the largest drop in 25 years…But overdose deaths involving opioids rose to about 46,000 for the 12-month period ended October 2017, up about 15 percent from October 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The numbers are preliminary because of continuing cause-of-death investigations later in the reporting period. They could go higher.”

“Bush. Bush — $7 trillion in the Middle East — great, great, great investment.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: There is no basis for the “$7 trillion” figure. During the 2016 campaign, Trump cited a $6 trillion estimate that appeared to be taken from a 2013 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. (That report estimated $2 trillion in costs up to that point but said the total could rise an additional $4 trillion by 2053.) Trump, however, used the $6 trillion as if it was a current 2016 figure. He later explained that since additional time has elapsed since the campaign, he believes the total is now $7 trillion. That is incorrect. The latest Brown report, issued in late 2017, put the current total at $4.3 trillion, and the total including estimated future costs at $5.6 trillion.

Trump has repeated this claim 17 times

“When I got involved, I said, ‘You got to help me with this, because why have you never been able to pass tax cuts?’ You might have heard the story. And they said to me, ‘Sir, I don’t know. We just can’t pass them.’ I said, ‘Can I see a few of these bills over the years?’ I looked at one from 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago. But it doesn’t say ‘tax cut.’ It says the ‘Tax Reform Act of 1994,’ tax reform. It says things — what does reform mean? It might mean you pay more taxes. It didn’t say cuts. So I meet with the politicians, and they’ve been doing it much longer than me. Remember that I’ve only been doing it for a couple of years, right? But we have common sense.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: Trump’s history was inaccurate even if he was only talking only about his own party’s tax cuts. In claiming that presidents after Ronald Reagan were “never able to pass tax cuts,” he again ignored the passage of George W. Bush’s major tax cuts. (Those cuts were widely known as “the Bush tax cuts”; the formal names of Bush legislation used the phbrase “tax relief”: the “Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the “Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.”)

Trump has repeated this claim 11 times

“Think of it, a lottery. You pick people. Now, let me ask you. So these countries that are sending people in — do you think they are sending us their finest? Do you think they are sending us — so we got the lottery. So they put names, and we pick the names, and they come in, and then we wonder why we have problems. We’re not going to be a stupid country anymore. We’ve stopped it.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: This is, as always, an inaccurate description of the Diversity Visa Lottery program. Contrary to Trump’s regular claim, foreign governments do not put the names of their problem citizens into the lottery to try to “send” them to the United States. Would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

“So they go. And they take this man (Sayfullo Saipov), right? And he got here and he’s got 22 people that came in — his mother, his father, his grandmother, his uncle, his brother, his sister. He got — 22 people come in for this one guy. That’s called chain migration — 22 people.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: There is no evidence that Saipov, the alleged perpetrator of the terror attack in 2017 on Manhattan’s West Side Highway, brought 22 relatives into the U.S. Even Trump’s own aides have declined to endorse this claim, and even anti-immigration advocates say it is wildly improbable that one man with a green card could have sponsored 22 people

Trump has repeated this claim 6 times

“These are people that are running alongside of the Hudson River, which I know so well. And they are running. And this maniac takes his car, he’s driving fast, he goes, he knocks off as many people as he can. Eight people killed, many people badly injured — missing a leg, missing an arm. Can you imagine?”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: Nobody lost an arm in the terror attack on Manhattan’s West Side Highway in 2017. The Associated Press reported that one woman, a Belgian tourist, lost two legs. The commissioner of New York’s fire department offered corroboration, saying the attack led to one double amputation.

Trump has repeated this claim 4 times

“Our laws are the worst laws of any country anywhere in the world — catch and release. Did you ever hear? You catch, you take their name and you release. Great. Wonderful. Then they are supposed to show up to a court. There’s only one problem: They never show up.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: It is not true that people “never” show up for their immigration court hearing once they are released. A 2017 report released by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates a hard line on illegal immigration, concluded that 37 per cent of people who were free pending trial did not show up for hearings over the past two decades. The author of the report, a former immigration judge, said the number was 39 per cent in 2016. In other words, even according to vehement opponents of illegal immigration, most unauthorized immigrants are indeed showing up for court.

Trump has repeated this claim 10 times

“And immigration is down much, but we need border wall. We need — we got to have a change in our laws.” And: “We have borders down 40 percent, and it’s tough because our economy is doing so well.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: Trump assesses the state of illegal immigration by looking at the number of people apprehended trying to cross the southwest border. For several months of 2017, the number of would-be immigrants apprehended trying to cross the southwest border did drop by more than 50 per cent. Now, though, there is an increase, not a decline — let alone a 40 per cent decline. For the first four months of 2018, apprehensions were actually up 4 per cent from the first four months of 2016 — and up 77 per cent from the first four months of 2017.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“We have such a bad deal with Mexico. We have such a bad deal with Canada. We lose with Mexico over $100 billion a year with this crazy NAFTA deal.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: The U.S. does not have a $100 billion trade deficit with Mexico. Trump was off by at least $31 billion, or at least $29 billion if you give him the benefit of the doubt. The U.S. trade deficit with Mexico was $71 billion in 2017 when counting goods alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Including trade in services, the net deficit was $69 billion, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis says. (The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses a different method of calculating deficits and surpluses than the Census Bureau.)

Trump has repeated this claim 34 times

“And, in San Diego, they came to us — they wanted the wall in California. And you heard the story. I said, ‘Don’t give it them, because we lose a lot of energy.’ They wanted it so badly. They got tired of illegal immigrants walking across their front lawn. Can you understand that? Isn’t that terrible that they got tired? Why shouldn’t they have people walking in their living room? Why? So they wanted the wall. So I said, ‘No, let’s wait.’ And they said, ‘Go ahead and build it, we got a good price.’ So we started to build it. Then I had second thoughts because of the governor of California, who loves sanctuary cities and other things. So he didn’t want the wall. But they were putting so much pressure, so I decided to do it. Then, in the middle of doing it — it’s beautiful. It’s big. Nobody is crossing it very easily. Not one of those that you can just scoot to the top. This is a real wall. So what happened is, in the middle, like, I sort of had second thoughts. You ever have second thoughts about something? I said, ‘You know, let’s stop building the wall, because we get more pressure put on this crazy governor where the taxes are high and the crime is high.’ Other than that, he’s doing a fantastic job, OK?… So I said, ‘Let’s stop building the wall.’ I said, ‘How much would it cost?’…So I said, ‘Find out how much it would cost to stop.’ And one of the generals said, ‘Sir, it wouldn’t cost anything to stop.’ I said, ‘Really? Find out.’ When he came to me, he said, ‘It’s $7 million to stop.’. I’d said, ‘All right, keep building it, OK?’ I’m not going to stop it for that, right? We got to get it done. So we’re doing the wall.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: This entire story appears fictional. First and foremost, it is based on the premise that San Diego badly wants a border wall, which is not true: San Diego city council voted 5-3 in September to express opposition, and even the Republican mayor, Kevin Faulconer, has stated that he is opposed: “Mayor Faulconer has been clear in his opposition to a border wall across the entirety of the U.S. southern border,” a spokesperson said in September. (The board of supervisors of San Diego County has voted to endorse a lawsuit against California “sanctuary” laws protecting unauthorized immigrants, but “this county has taken no action with regard to the wall,” county spokesperson Michael Workman told local news outlet KPBS.) Second, wall construction has not begun in San Diego, so it would not cost $7 million to “stop” building there.

Trump has repeated this claim 11 times

“We have $1.6 billion for the wall. We’ve started the wall.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: Construction on Trump’s border wall has not started. When he has made this claim in the past, Trump has appeared to be referring to a project in which a 2.25-mile stretch of existing wall in California is being replaced by a taller wall. That project was proposed in 2009, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Border Patrol spokesperson Jonathan Pacheco told reporters in March: “First and foremost, this isn’t Trump’s wall. This isn’t the infrastructure that Trump is trying to bring in. … This new wall replacement has absolutely nothing to do with the prototypes that were shown over in the San Diego area.” The $1.6 billion Congress allocated to border projects in 2018 is not for the type of giant concrete wall Trump has proposed: spending on that kind of wall is expressly prohibited in the legislation, and much of the congressional allocation is for replacement and reinforcement projects rather than new construction.

Trump has repeated this claim 20 times

“The only way she (Hillary Clinton) filled up the arena was to get Jay-Z…And then he’d finish and everybody would leave and she’d be standing up making a speech to 400 people.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: This is an exaggeration on both ends. Though Trump’s crowds were usually larger than Clinton’s, Clinton filled numerous venues without the help of Jay-Z. At the November 2016 Cleveland rally where Jay-Z and Beyoncé performed, some attendees did leave after the performances, but thousands were still present for Clinton’s brief post-performance address.

“Have you seen what they (MS-13) are doing to us? And we’re taking them out of our country by the thousands — out, out by the thousands.” And: “We’re bringing them out by the thousands, but they come in. We’re bringing them out by the thousands.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: “By the thousands” is an exaggeration; it is more like “by the hundreds,” or “by the dozens.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement told PolitiFact that its investigations division arrested 405 MS-13 members in the first quarter of fiscal 2018.The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Thomas Homan, said in December that “a renewed focus on ID’ing & dismantling the ultra-violent MS-13 gang led to nearly 800 arrests in (fiscal year) 2017, for an 83 per cent increase over last year.” Homan then said at this event with Trump that 896 “MS-13 leaders, members, and associates” were arrested in fiscal year 2017. That figure is disputed, as some of the people arrested may not be actual members of the gang. Even if they are, though, that too is far from “thousands.”

Trump has repeated this claim 15 times

“He’s (Tennessee Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen) a tool of Chuck Schumer and, of course, the MS-13 lover, Nancy Pelosi. She loves MS-13.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: There is no basis for the claim that Pelosi loves the brutal street gang. Pelosi simply objected to Trump’s use of the word “animals” in describing members of the gang. She, like some others, believed he was referring more broadly to unauthorized immigrants, and she argued that “we’re all God’s children, there’s a spark of divinity in every person on Earth.” We give Trump some leeway to use normal political exaggeration in attacking this opponent, but this one goes too far.

Trump has repeated this claim 4 times

“And wages, for the first time in many, many years, are finally going up. Wages are going up.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: Wages have been rising since 2014. As PolitiFact reported: “For much of the time between 2012 and 2014, median weekly earnings were lower than they were in 1979 — a frustrating disappearance of any wage growth for 35 years. But that began changing in 2014. After hitting a low of $330 a week in early 2014, wages have risen to $354 a week by early 2017. That’s an increase of 7.3 percent over a roughly three-year period.” FactCheck.org reported: “For all private workers, average weekly earnings (adjusted for inflation) rose 4% during Obama’s last four years in office.

Trump has repeated this claim 25 times

“We’ve created 3.3 million new jobs since Election Day. Now, if we would have said that before the election, that I’m going to create 3.3 million new jobs, we would never have survived the onslaught from the fake news. They would have not accepted it. They wouldn’t have accepted it. They would have said, ‘There’s no way you can do that.'”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: It is not true that nobody would have believed 3.3 million jobs could be created over this period (November 2016 through April 2018). That is an 18-month period. The number of jobs created over the previous 18 months, under Obama, was 3.9 million.

Trump has repeated this claim 16 times

“There has never been an administration — and even some of our enemies are begrudgingly admitting this — that has done what we’ve done in the first year and a half. Think of it.”

Source: Campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee

in fact: Trump’s enemies are not saying this.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“The European Union … was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States.”

Source: Remarks at Tennessee fundraiser

in fact: Experts on the E.U. say that competing with the U.S. economically was not even on the list of the top reasons for the original formation of the European coalition or its evolution into the official European Union in 1993. “That effort was never to compete with the United States,” said Maxime Larivé, associate director of the European Union Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Its original incarnation, an economic “community” created in the 1950s, was intended “to simply foster peace through trade and economic exchange” of coal and steel, Larivé said.

Trump has repeated this claim 4 times

“The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: No part of this claim is fully accurate. Trump usually uses “worked 8 years for Obama” in reference to special counsel Robert Mueller, who actually served under Obama for less than five years after serving more than seven years under the Republican president who appointed him, George W. Bush. There is no indication that people involved with the probe will be nefariously “meddling” with the midterms. (We wouldn’t declare this claim false in itself, since Trump likely means “meddling” to mean “influencing the election by continuing to investigate me,” but it’s worth noting.) And while “taking” can be predictive, Republicans do not lead in a single one of the credible “generic ballot” polls of midterm voting intentions. They briefly led in one, but it promptly bounced back to a Democratic lead.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — simply does not apply to the Russia-related activities of the Democrats. This 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. This does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

 

Post-midterm outlook in US: ‘It’s going to be crazy for the next 2 years’

The US midterms resulted in a split Congress with Democrats winning the House of Representatives and Republicans increasing their majority in the Senate. A look at key impacts — and how President Trump fits into it all.

November 9, 2018

by Michael Knigge (Washington)

DW

Legislative agenda

Even with a majority in both chambers of Congress and Donald Trump in the White House, Republicans have found it difficult over the past two years to get major legislation passed.

That was not just due to obstruction by the Democrats, but also to internal dissent that repeatedly crippled the GOP on key issues like killing former President Barack Obama’s landmark health care act and passing their own health care bill. That’s why last year’s massive tax cut bill pushed through despite ardent Democratic opposition remains one of the few signature achievements passed by the GOP during its hold on Congress.

If the legislative progress was slow with Republicans in control, it likely will come to a grinding halt with the incoming split Congress, said Philip Klinkner, chair of the government department at Hamilton College. “You’ll see gridlock. Nobody has total control.”

While each party can present its own legislative ideas, the other party can and likely will nix those plans to prevent the other side from scoring possible points for the upcoming presidential race in 2020.

And while Republicans and Trump remain in the political driver seat, they should theoretically have a greater interest in trying to pass bills to show their constituents that they have done a good job governing. But that traditional logic doesn’t necessarily apply in the Trump era. In a contentious press conference after the midterm elections on Wednesday, Trump himself said as much when he told reporters that he would simply blame Democrats for a government shutdown.

Democrats, meanwhile, have little strategic interest in being seen cooperating or compromising with Trump’s style of negotiating. “If the past is any prologue, I think he is going to negotiate simply in a sense of ‘Give me what I want’,” said Victoria Nourse, former chief counsel to Vice President Joe Biden and now the director of the Center on Congressional Studies at Georgetown Law School.

Fresh investigations

Brace yourself: if one thing is certain about the new Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, then it’s that lawmakers there are all but certain to launch a whole slew of investigations into Trump and his administration’s conduct in office — to go along with the ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible ties to the Trump campaign. The only question is how far-reaching those probes will be, said Nourse.

“The one unknown is how Democrats are going to deal with investigations. There is a lot of pent-up energy in the Democratic Party to find out about things like the president’s tax returns, to find out what happened with our electoral system, whether it remains subject to interference by foreign powers, and other investigations about corruption within our Cabinet,” she said.

Trump, meanwhile, did not waste any time Wednesday telling Democrats how he would react to probes he would consider too personal or too broad, warning he would take a “warlike posture” against those kinds of investigations.

While Trump’s missing tax returns, his business deals and the controversial conduct of Cabinet members like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke are surely all on the investigative agenda, that’s nothing compared to the biggie: probing possible Russian connections to the Trump campaign.

And with their new subpoena power, Democrats in the House now have a potent weapon in their arsenal to force potential witnesses to testify and tell the truth in committee hearings.

How Trump — who has repeatedly, and without prompting, maintained there was no collusion by his campaign with Moscow — would react to a Russia-Trump related probe was shown by his actions less than 24 hours after the midterms. After months of a deteriorating relationship he fired Jeff Sessions, his attorney general who refused to curtail or shut down special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election meddling.

Democrats, similarly did not waste time responding to the ouster of the attorney general. “The firing of Jeff Sessions will be investigated and people will be held accountable,” vowed Representative Jerrold Nadler, the likely new chair of the House Judiciary Committee. “This must begin immediately, and if not, then a Democratic Congress will make this a priority in January.”

And so the main battle line for the next two years is already drawn, said government scholar Klinkner, who predicts that the resulting clashes between the new House and Trump won’t be pretty.

“[Trump] clearly sees the Mueller investigation as a mortal threat to his presidency, maybe even a real criminal threat to himself and he wants to shut it down,” said Klinkner. “And he will use every possible means he has at his disposal to do that. So it’s going to be crazy for the next two years.”

Political climate

It’s no secret that the US political climate was deeply divisive even before Trump’s arrival on the political stage. And it’s clear that in less than two years in office Trump has been responsible for a deterioration of political discourse and public civility, bringing it to a level simply not imaginable prior to his inauguration.

And we probably haven’t reached rock bottom yet. That’s because the political divide between Republicans and Democrats has been even further exacerbated by the midterm results, said Klinkner.

The new Democratic caucus in the House will be defined by the many freshly elected women, many of them nonwhites and almost all from metropolitan areas with diverse populations. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans will be mostly white, mostly male and mostly from rural areas.

“Trumpism is really largely an appeal to some sort of white nationalist sentiments in the American electorate,” said Klinkner.

When asked to give a preview of what to expect until the 2020 election, he offered this: “Take everything you have seen over the last two years and multiply it times a hundred.”

Trump and Russia

November 9, 2018

by Christian Jürs

• President Trump was jobbed into his office with the full cooperation of Russian intelligence.
• They own 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.
• Trump is not an honest man by any stretch of imagination.
• Trump has constantly engaged in bribing and manipulations and does this through second parties such as Cohen his former lawyer or Manafort, his campaign manager during the election.
• Trump and his entourage have made a number of trips to Russia (I have a listing of all of these along with Russian personages he was in contact with), seeking financing and permission to build luxury hotels in that country
• 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 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.
• 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 public.
• Trump’s foolish 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.
• 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.
• If he is caught at this, and I understand the FBI was deeply interested in his Russian connections long before he ran for President, either we 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 aware of the FBI investigation, aware of what they can find, and probably have already uncovered, so he 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 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.
• It is quite evident that Trump is unbalanced to a dangerous degree and that even his senior staff view him as both dangerous and totally unpredictable. The problem that arises from the strong and growing opposition to Trump is the polarization of the voter base in the United States.

Donald Trump has pursued business deals in Russia since 1987, and has sometimes traveled there to explore potential business opportunities. In 1996, Trump trademark applications were submitted for potential Russian real estate development deals. Mr.Trump’s partners and children have repeatedly visited Moscow, connecting with developers and government officials to explore joint venture opportunities. Mr.Trump was never able to successfully conclude any real estate deals in Russia. However, individual Russians have invested heavily in Trump properties, and following Mr.Trump’s bankruptcies in the 1990s he borrowed money from Russian sources.

• In 2008 his son Donald Trump Jr. said that Russia was an important source of money for the Trump businesses.
• In 1996 Mr.Trump partnered with Liggett-Ducat, a small company, and planned to build an upscale residential development on a Liggett-Ducat property in Moscow. Trump commissioned New York architect Ted Liebman, who did the sketches.
• In 1987 Mr.Trump visited Russia to investigate developing a hotel

In Russia, Mr.Trump promoted the proposal and acclaimed the Russian economic market. At a news conference reported by The Moscow Times, Mr.Trump said he hadn’t been “as impressed with the potential of a city as I have been with Moscow” in contrast to other cities had visited “all over the world.

By this time, Mr.Trump made known his desire to build in Moscow to government officials for almost ten years ranging from the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev (they first met in Washington in 1987) to the military figure Alexander Lebed.

Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, showed Trump plans for a very large shopping mall to be located underground in the vicinity of the Kremlin. The mayor complimented Mr.Trump’s suggestion that this mall should have access to the Moscow Metro, and it was eventually connected to the Okhotny Ryad station. Although the 1996 residential development did not happen, Mr.Trump was by this time well known in Russia.

Between 2000–2010, Mr.Trump entered into a partnership with a development company headquartered in New York represented by a Russian immigrant, Felix Sater. During this period, they partnered for an assortment of deals that included building Trump towers internationally and Russia was included. For example, in 2005 Slater acted as an agent for building a Trump tower alongside Moscow River with letters of intent in hand and “square footage was being analyzed.”

In 2006, Mr.Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka stayed in the Hotel National, Moscow for several days, across from the Kremlin, to interview prospective partners, with the intention of formulating real estate development projects.

Sater had also traveled to Moscow with Mr. Trump, his wife Ivanka and son Donald Jr.

Mr. Trump was associated with Tevfik Arif, formerly a Soviet commerce official and founder of a development company called the Bayrock Group, of which Sater was also a partner.

Bayrock searched for deals in Russia while Trump Towers company were attempting to further expand in the United States. Mr. Sater said, “We looked at some very, very large properties in Russia,” on the scale of “…a large Vegas high-rise.”

In 2007, Bayrock organized a potential deal in Moscow between Trump International Hotel and Russian investors

During 2006–2008 Mr.Trump’s company applied for a number of trademarks in Russia with the goal of real estate developments. These trademark applications include: Trump, Trump Tower, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Home.

In 2008, Mr. Trump spoke at a Manhattan real estate conference, stating that he he really prefered Moscow over all cities in the world and that within 18 months he had been in Russia a half-dozen times.

Mr.Trump had received large and undisclosed payments over 10 years from Russians for hotel rooms, rounds of golf, or Trump-licensed products such as wine, ties, or mattresses, which would not have been identified as coming from Russian sources in the tax returns

 

‘Phenomenally saddening’: inside the sordid world of America’s for-profit colleges

The new documentary Fail State, executive produced by Dan Rather, tells the 50-year tale of profit-driven colleges scamming society’s most vulnerable

November 9, 2018

by Jake Nevins

The Guardian

In 2014, film-maker Alex Shebanow read about Corinthian Colleges, one of America’s largest for-profit college companies, while working on a documentary about student loan debt.

Relying heavily on federal student loans, from which it took $1.4bn in yearly revenue, Corinthian was on the brink of collapse after the department of education halted the company’s flow of federal funding due to evidence of rampant fraud in its reporting of grades and job placements.

Corinthian, a behemoth of the for-profit college industry that marketed its vocational and post-secondary programs to single mothers at or below the poverty line, was already under investigation by various federal agencies, the education department, and 20 different state attorneys general when it said it could not operate for more than a few days without an influx of cash. Internal documents revealed the for-profit specifically targeted “isolated” and “impatient” individuals with “low self-esteem”.

It was this run-in with the sordid underbelly of the predatory for-profit college industry – and a multi-state investigation into a company, QuinStreet, that set up an ostensibly government-run website funneling veterans to for-profits – that inspired Shebanow to expand the scope of his project. The result is his new documentary Fail State, an expansive and infuriating account of the rise of profit-driven colleges, their devastating effects on low-income students, and the ways Republicans and Democrats have aided and abetted their treachery.

“I don’t know how these people can sleep at night,” says Shebanow, whose work so impressed Dan Rather that the famed journalist signed on as an executive producer. “A lot of people don’t realize what’s percolating beneath the surface. It was crazy that no one had done a documentary on this until now and that it took a bunch of twentysomething film-makers to do it. I was always so worried someone was going to come out with a documentary of their own because the story is so big and important. I thought there was no way we were the only ones doing it. But somehow, that was the case.”

As Fail State explains in broad, digestible fashion, all of this began in 1972, when for-profits, often called proprietary, vocational, or career-driven colleges, became eligible for federal student aid under an amendment to Lyndon B Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965. The rerouting of financial aid money from institutions to students themselves was meant to allow private universities to compete with public ones, whose low costs made enrollment swell. But this opened the door for profit-driven colleges, who took advantage of the desire to make higher education more inclusive by encouraging students to take out huge sums of financial aid money.

These companies promised students eventual employment and, since the money was coming from taxpayers, had no vested interest in whether or not the students could pay back their loans. As an expert says in Fail State, for-profits had what amounted to risk-free access to the US treasury. Predictably, default rates soared in the 1980s, with almost half of all students at these colleges defaulting on their loans. By 1992, however, lawmakers began to wise up to the predatory recruitment practices and the virtually useless degrees these colleges were offering students.

At the time, a series of congressional hearings, and the attention of Congresswoman Maxine Waters (who appears in the documentary), helped set in motion a series of provisions that would allow for oversight of the for-profit industry: the 85-15 rule, requiring that at least 15% of the companies’ revenue came from sources other than government student aid; the 50/50 rule, ensuring no more than half of college courses were offered online or by mail; and the incentive compensation rule, banning college recruiters from receiving bonuses based on how many students they lured to the program. In the following decade, though, congressional interest in policing the for-profit sector waned and many of these regulations were dismantled or otherwise softened.

Shebanow’s documentary guides viewers through all this potentially wonky information with a careful hand, emphasizing the fact that Democrats and Republicans alike have been guilty of lenience toward and even support for profit-driven colleges. Sally Stroup, George W Bush’s assistant secretary for postsecondary education, was previously a lobbyist for the Apollo Education Group, which runs several for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and Western International University. Nancy Pelosi and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, too, have also been historically cozy with representatives of the for-profit sector.

“It wasn’t like we set out to make the most non-partisan film that we could,” says the director. “It was more like, ‘Here are the facts’. And it was in some ways a happy accident that this issue transcends red and blue politics.”

Where Fail State makes its greatest impact is in the testimony it provides from students who were scammed. They attest to being harassed with phone calls, emotionally manipulated, deceived about costs, and persuaded that their post-secondary educations would land them implausibly high-paying jobs. A two-year investigation by the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee, producing what Shebanow calls one of the most “damning” reports on a single industry in congressional history, found evidence of aggressive and insidious practices like the “pain funnel”, a script from which recruiters would read that was designed to prod at emotionally or financially susceptible prospective students.

A year into production, Shebanow and his team scoured the internet for these students and found hundreds of them commiserating in comments sections and company reviews.

“Part of what is so phenomenally saddening to me is that the people who are being affected and preyed upon by these schools are some of the most voiceless in our society, and their arcs are very similar,” says Shebanow, noting that students often encountered television, subway or internet advertisements for for-profits and received countless phone calls thereafter until they enrolled.

“They were promised the world. It was affordable. You don’t need to worry about your student loan debt. And they enrolled and realized their education was leading nowhere, or some realized the scam halfway through and dropped out, but had all this debt they’d taken on.”

That the president himself once ran a criminal for-profit education company – and that he’d appoint in education secretary Betsy DeVos a willing foot soldier for their cause – was not something Shebanow and his team anticipated when they began work on Fail State back in 2013. The saga of Trump University has been well-documented, but DeVos’s overtures toward the for-profit industry, including the elimination or rollback of Obama-era gainful employment and student borrower defense regulations, have gone mostly under the radar. DeVos, the director explains, is also tinkering with rules mandating “substantive teacher-student interaction”, which ensures students at for-profits are not navigating their coursework alone.

“As a journalist, you always dream of that hard-hitting story,” he says. “But the better the story, the worse the human tragedy. When I started this film I’d have never believed anyone who told me the film would be more relevant almost six years down the line.”

Fail State is now out in the US with a Starz premiere date on 17 December and a UK release date yet to be announced

 

U.S. judge halts Keystone XL oil pipeline in blow to Trump, Trudeau

November 9, 2018

by Rod Nickel and David Gaffen

Reuters –

A U.S. judge in Montana has halted construction of the Keystone XL pipeline designed to carry heavy crude oil from Canada to the United States, drawing a sharp rebuke on Friday from President Donald Trump.

The ruling out of a U.S. Court in Montana late on Thursday dealt a major setback to TransCanada Corp (TRP.TO), whose stock dropped 2 percent in Toronto. Shares of companies that would ship oil on the pipeline also fell. TransCanada said in a statement it remains committed to building the $8 billion, 1,180 mile (1,900 km) pipeline.

The ruling drew an angry response from Trump, who approved the pipeline shortly after taking office. It also piles pressure on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to assist the country’s ailing oil sector.

It was a win for environmental groups who sued the U.S. government in 2017, soon after Trump announced a presidential permit for the project. The ruling also rewarded tribal groups and ranchers who have spent more than a decade fighting the planned pipeline.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris wrote that a U.S. State Department environmental analysis of Keystone XL “fell short of a ‘hard look’” at the cumulative effects of greenhouse gas emissions and the impact on Native American land resources.

“It was a political decision made by a judge. I think it’s a disgrace,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

“The Trump administration tried to force this dirty pipeline project on the American people, but they can’t ignore the threats it would pose to our clean water, our climate, and our communities,” said the Sierra Club, one of the environmental groups involved in the lawsuit.

Representatives of Trudeau and Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi did not immediately comment. The U.S. State Department was not immediately available for comment.

The pipeline would carry heavy crude from Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would connect to refineries in the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast, as well as Gulf export terminals.

Shares of Canadian oil producers Canadian Natural Resources Ltd (CNQ.TO) and Cenovus Energy (CVE.TO) shed 3 percent. Canada has long sought more arteries to move oil out of Alberta, where the tar-like bitumen is extracted.

Several pipeline projects have been scrapped due to opposition, and the Trans Mountain line project still faces delays even after the Canadian government purchased it this year to move it forward.

“You have to wonder how long investors will tolerate the delays and whether the Canadian government will intervene again to protect the industry,” said Morningstar analyst Sandy Fielden.

Ensuring at least one pipeline is built is critical to Trudeau’s economic and environmental plans, with a Canadian election expected next autumn.

Canada is the primary source of imported U.S. oil, but congested pipelines have forced oil shippers to use costlier rail and trucks.

Alberta has felt the financial pressure, and an industry source said the provincial government last month solicited proposals from companies on ways to move crude faster by rail. The source said proposals included ideas such as buying rail cars and investing in loading terminals.

“I’ve never seen (the Alberta government) so active on this front,” said the source, who asked not to be identified because the matter is politically sensitive. “That is a shift.”

The Alberta government did not immediately comment. In a statement to Reuters on Thursday, a spokesman for its energy ministry declined to specify options under consideration.

Morris, in his ruling, ordered the government to issue a more thorough environmental analysis before the project can move forward. He also said the analysis failed to fully review the effects of the current oil price on the pipeline’s viability and did not fully model potential oil spills and offer mitigations measures.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama rejected Keystone XL in 2015 on environmental concerns.

Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, David Gaffen in New York and Brendan O’Brien; Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton in Washington, Julie Gordon in Vancouver and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and David Gregorio

 

Tax evasion helps US corporations steal $180bn from the rest of the world every year

November 9, 2018

RT

A new study by top economists and experts found that tax avoidance and evasion translate into hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes every year, with the money ending up in the pockets of the world’s wealthiest people.

The paper, ‘The Exorbitant Tax Privilege’, was co-written by Thomas Wright and University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s top authorities on tax havens

The research shows that almost 50 percent of US multinationals’ profits are currently generated in tax havens, while back in 1970, the number was less than 10 percent. The corporations effectively pay tax rates of 27 percent on profits generated in non-tax havens, and seven percent in tax havens.

According to James Henry, investigative economist and senior advisor at Tax Justice Network, America’s wealthy kleptocrats, tax-dodgers, and particularly multinational companies have been massively parking money offshore. He told RT that by 2017 US multinationals have “accumulated about $2.6 trillion offshore while they didn’t have to pay the 35 percent US corporate tax.”

Since the early 1990s, the rate paid by US non-oil multinationals on foreign profits has fallen from 35 to 20 percent. Similarly, the tax rate paid by US oil companies to foreign governments fell from an average of 70 percent before the 1991 Gulf War to 45 percent. That, according to Zucman and Wright, may reflect “a return on military protection granted by the United States to oil-producing States.”

The US’ accumulated foreign debt exceeds that of any other country, standing at about $8 trillion, or more than 40 percent of the US gross domestic product (GDP). That $8 trillion is the difference between $35 trillion in foreign investments in US assets and $27 trillion in US investments in foreign assets.

The study’s authors estimated that almost half of the difference between US returns and foreign returns can be attributed to abnormally low tax rates for American multinationals, thanks to US power and tax havens. Tax privilege translates into about $180 billion per year, or almost one percent of US GDP, the research concluded.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

November 9, 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. 55

Date: Monday, December 30, 1996

Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

Concluded: 9:21 AM CST

RTC: Hello, Gregory. Have a nice Christmas?

GD: Wonderful. I got a sled, some bunny slippers, a silencer for my shotgun, a pornographic Bible, three pair of socks that were too small and a dead turtle. Yourself?

RTC: Somehow, I don’t believe you. Christmas was fine here. I take it you did not have an extensive Christmas.

GD: The rabbit died and we were in deep mourning. But then we ate it and felt much better.

RTC: I could send a sympathy card.

GD: Just flush it down the loo. It might meet up with what’s left of the rabbit. Robert, to be serious, you said that Corson did not like Mark Lane. He represented Carto in a lawsuit and I was wondering what was the reason for the bad feeling?

RTC: My God, Gregory, this is like an old auntie’s sewing circle. Everyone here hates everyone else, tells lies, sticks out their tongues at each other and acts like small children. There was a lawsuit of the Keystone Cops type. Victor Marchetti, who used to be one of ours but got booted out, wrote an article for the Spotlight paper saying that Hunt had been in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot. He was. Hunt sued the paper and got a judgment. The paper fought back and got Mark Lane to defend them.

GD: The Oswald lawyer?

RTC: The same. So they went back and forth. Marchetti is a fat slob who thinks he is very important when we who really know him consider him to be a chattering nut. Hunt is grossly incompetent but the reason why Corson hates Lane and everyone else, is that Marchetti claimed he got this information about Hunt in Dallas on November 22nd from Corson. Corson got dragged over the coals by Lane and clearly was proved to be a liar. However, there was a third person there when Corson told his little story to Marchetti and that’s what nailed him. Poor Bill. He always has to put his oar in, needed or not.

GD: Well, he told Kimmel that he knew some secret British soldier who told Corson about the Roosevelt/Churchill conversation. Corson claimed he backed it up. Kimmel went for this like a duck after a June bug, but I can’t believe it. Who was this mysterious witness? Corson said his lips were sealed.

RTC: Too bad that isn’t true.

GD: Back and forth. I know Corson has lectured me on a subject that I knew far better that he did but I just kept quiet and acted impressed. Didn’t he get court-martialed?

RTC: My God, Gregory, don’t ever go into that one. Look, these people like Bill and Trento, Marchetti and the rest of them, are like squirrels in the park running around begging nuts from the public. This is the Beltway, Gregory. It’s a hot house. Someone sees the President from about two hundred feet away, driving past in his armored limousine and then tells his friends that he had a chance to talk to the President that afternoon and the President told him….and that’s how it goes. Trento thinks he is a brilliant writer, Bill thinks he’s a mover and shaker, Marchetti sees himself as a secret agent and Hunt has just enough sense to put on his pants before going outside to get the paper. These are the hangers-on, Gregory, the wannabes as the current generation calls them.

GD: Ah, Robert, but you were actually there, you knew from doing it. The sun versus the moon. The moon reflects the glory of another. Does that role make you happy?

RTC: It makes me sad sometimes. And they run around acting like old women. Chatter, chatter, boast, back-stab, strut and eventually die. We all die, Gregory, but some take a long time to do it. I’m pleasant with them because perhaps they can help me but I am giving up with most of them. I thought Costello would be a good outlet but I gave up on him long before he died last year. Trento thinks he’s a great intelligence writer but he reminds me of a wino rooting around in old dumpsters for chicken bones. Bill hints at great secrets that only he knows and Hunt is a bumbling idiot and we should have done him instead of his wife. Marchetti is a little bit of all of them. If you listen to them, Gregory, they will convince you that big black cars drive up in front of their homes, every evening, and give them briefcases full of very secret papers. You know the types.

GD: I do, Robert, I really do. I love it when one of your pinheads starts telling me about German intelligence. Oh yes, and what about Nosenko?

RTC: A Russian double agent that Angleton mismanaged.

GD: Was Angleton Italian?

RTC: No, half Mexican. He spoke wop from his father, having lived there and sold cash registers but he was a Mexican. He was well-connected with the mob, though.

GD: Mueller told me about Boris Pash…

RTC: That asshole. A gym teacher with more dreams of glory.

GD: Heini said that Pash tried to kill the Italian Communist leader.

RTC: Togliatti. Yes, but he missed. They always miss, Gregory.

GD: I have an Irish friend who never does. He prefers a knife but bombs will do very well.

RTC: I think you mentioned him. Mountbatten?

GD: The same. Now that’s a professional. And he doesn’t talk like the rest of them.

RTC: Real professionals never do.

GD: So if we both agree on what constitutes a professional agent, how do you analyze Corson, Kimmel, Marchetti, Trento and the others? Are they agents? Kimmel works for the FBI, Marchetti used to work for your people and the others?

RTC: What we have there is the wannabe club, Gregory. All of them think they are important people and, because they have, or have had, connections with the intelligence community, they begin to feel, somehow, that they are possessors of the secrets that others do not have. This elevates them from boredom and real obscurity and makes them believe that they are privy to those who really do walk in the corridors of power. I am the one, pardon the vanity, with the secrets and I am the one who walked once in the corridors of power so they gather around me, snapping up any little bit of information I choose to drop. There are many things I would like people I know, such as my family, to know about. I would like not to leave a legacy of mystery and negativity behind me. I know Corson and the others would like to have a private club type of inner knowledge, to sit around the fire solemnly talking about great secrets they have known. Never happen. When I go, they go. It’s that basic. I had thought once to cultivate Costello and let him speak for me but I gave up on him after his visit with you. The man was brittle, opinionated and as blind as a bat. Kimmel is an establishment man with no creative juices, Corson runs around barking like one of those obnoxious little Mexican dogs that were once raised for food, Marchetti reminds me of a drunken little rat running around in a barn, trying to get out. And when he does get out, he runs around outside trying to get back in. Trento and his wife are delusional and self important and love to mix it up with losers and never-could-have-beens.

GD: Basking, like the moon, in reflected glory.

RTC: Absolutely. And these are at the top of the rank amateur clubs. Down below them, we find the “experts” and the “researchers” who represent the bottom of the pyramid. They are the ones who scribble, jabber and strut. They look upwards to the top for the voices of the masters. They all feed on each other, Gregory. Their little worlds are all they have and if someone like you, especially someone like you, comes along, they loathe, fear and despise you. You see, you are the real thing and they are just wearing Halloween costumes and they know it. After Costello returned from his visit with you and spent hours telling me how terrible and unpleasant you were, I put this down to simple jealousy and thought that perhaps I might look into you myself. And that’s why we’re talking right this very moment.

GD: Thank you for your approval, Robert. I agree with you, but they are wearing the gold-braided clown suits and go to clubs and meetings and, like old peacocks, preen endlessly. What you tell me I already know, Robert, but short of grabbing them by their throats and banging their heads against the wall, there isn’t much I can do…

RTC: Except to out-produce them, Gregory. And they know you can do it and they hate you for it. A week does not go by without my getting some kind of a phone call about what a terrible, evil person you are and warning me never to talk with you. Notice how impressed I have been with these dire warnings. But please make my life a little easier in my old age by not quoting me to any of these cheap hustlers. If they really get it into their heads that I am being informative to you, they will call me every other day, warn Greg and Emily to protect me from you and then do everything in their shabby little power to trash you. Do not, and I repeat, do not trust any of them, ever. I think we understand this all, don’t we?

GD: Oh, yes. I never trusted these sort anyway. They remind me of old aunties or, even worse, academics. Both of them gossip, chatter, denigrate everyone not present and can’t sleep well at night unless they feel they have damaged someone else that day. They see themselves as giants and, in fact, they are small, chattering mice. But, and I am sure you know all about this, we have to put up with them in order to get along with the really important matters. Don’t worry about making myself vulnerable to these types. It ends up that they make themselves vulnerable to me in the end. What is the saying? Out of nothing, nothing is made.

(Concluded at 9:21 AM CST)