An even bigger scandal: when the ringleader went to Jared

You need to read this post by my friend, tech-investor Russ Daggatt about possibly the biggest political scandal in U.S. history: 

"Last August, Jared Kushner, son-in-law and (not coincidentally) the senior White House official in charge of the Middle East, received over a billion dollars from a firm seeking to sell nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Then, the House Judiciary Committee got confirmation Jared uses WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders (in violation of US law), including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS known for ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi). 

"The Trump administration has kept secret seven authorizations for sharing of sensitive nuclear technology with Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the kingdom hasn't agreed to the anti-proliferation requirements of US law. (Oh, and Trump intervened to get his daughter Jared and Ivanka  and 23 others high-level security clearances when they were denied them through normal national security channels.)

Daggatt continues: 
“Let's go through this step-by-step (links below). In 2007, just before the collapse of the real estate bubble, Jared had the family company buy 666 Fifth Avenue in New York for $1.8 billion, financed by a $1.4 billion loan - the highest price ever paid for a building in New York, and is not among even the top 100 tallest buildings in the city. It was a disastrously overpriced acquisition, about 30% vacant, with its largest tenant saying it planned to leave. The loan was due in February. Jared had been scouring the planet - while serving in the White House - for possible investors to save his family from financial collapse. No rational investor would touch the thing.

‘But then, last August, a savior was found - Brookfield Asset Management - which took a 99-year lease on the building, paying the entire $1.1 billion in lease payments upfront (!) and allowing Kushner to retain ownership of the underlying land (the one thing of real value). Turns out, Brookfield also owns the nuclear services company Westinghouse (purchased out of bankruptcy last year), which is seeking to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia. (Trump's first National Security Advisor (and convicted felon) Michael Flynn, and Trump's buddy, campaign advisor, and the chairman of his Inaugural Committee, Tom Barrack, were also part of these efforts to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia. It gets complicated - among other things, Barrack was the guy who brought Paul Manafort in as Trump's campaign manager. This appears to be among the matters spun off from the Mueller investigation. But I digress.)

‘It was reported last October that Jared has been communicating with MBS, using his personal mobile phone, through the free encrypted messaging service WhatsApp, which conveniently does not store messages on its servers after they are delivered, leaving no record of the communications. (If only Hillary had used WhatsApp.) That appears to have been confirmed recently by the House Oversight Committee. Jared has also been bypassing the State Department and the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia in his direct dealings with MBS, excluding them from communications and meetings (much like Trump's direct dealings with Putin).'

(DB note: Then there's the stunning Qatari angle: they used US foreign policy to shake down the Qataris to help bail out 666 Fifth Avenue. Crum! They didn't even try to hide it behind a series of shell companies! It's almost in the open!)

‘We know Trump ordered John Kelly, to grant Jared and Ivanka security clearances, despite objections from the CIA and the White House counsel, among others. Trump and Ivanka had both previously stated publicly that Trump did not intervene in the granting of those security clearances after they had been held up for over a year. (What exactly is it that Ivanka does that requires a top security clearance? Getting personal trademarks from China?) Who knows what the hold up was. Maybe it was the 40 times Jared had to amend the paperwork for his security clearance, to disclose foreign government contacts he had previously omitted (in possible violation of law). Maybe it was his efforts during the transition to set up a secret back channel to the Kremlin through the Russian Embassy to evade US intelligence services (just one of those details omitted from his paperwork). Or maybe it was his global hunt for money. 

‘In any event, we have what looks like a possible billion dollar payoff to a senior White House official (and president's son-in-law) by a group seeking to sell nuclear technology to the world's major exporter of Islamist radicalism. And, at the same time, secret approvals of transfers of nuclear technology to that country. And I've really only touched on all permutations of this story. You'd think it would be getting more attention than it has.

‘Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: The National Enquirer, which Trump has used for decades to kill scandals, and (apparently) Saudi intelligence services may have teamed up for a hit on Washington Post owner (and Trump target) Jeff Bezos. No way the Saudis and the Enquirer would be doing that except at the direction (or at least, with the knowledge) of Trump. Saudis aren’t going to be going rogue on something like that. My take is that Trump seems to be using the Saudi intelligence services to do dirty work for him that the professional US intelligence services never would (just as he sought a back channel to the Kremlin through the Russian Embassy to evade US intelligence services).’

Thanks Russ. If even just one of you can wrestle a RASR to the ground and pin him long enough to hear you recite-aloud the above, and get him to WAGER whether ALL of the “Clinton Scandals” he clings to – if all of them together were proved (and none ever were) -- would amount to 1% of just this one aspect of the Confederate-GOP-Putinist treason.... 

Cornered by your demand that he put actual money on it, some RASRs have been known to declare that they now realize we’re ruled by a mafia gang. If you – yes you – can haul just one sinner back to the American Enlightenment, then this will be a good day for us all.

Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/nyregion/kushners-building-fifth-avenue-brookfield-lease.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/us/politics/kushner-talked-to-russian-envoy-about-creating-secret-channel-with-kremlin.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/saudi-arabia-jared-kushner-nuclear.html 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-westinghouse-m-a-brookfieldbusinesspa/brookfield-business-partners-to-buy-westinghouse-for-4-6-billion-idUSKBN1ET1MQ 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-authorized-nuclear-energy-companies-to-share-technological-information-with-saudi-arabia/2019/03/28/1b5f0816-5180-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/us/politics/jared-kushner-security-clearance.html 

There is more blatant proof here - just lying in the open - than all of the "Clinton-Obama Scandals" that the mad right spent 25 years and half a billion of our dollars "investigating," finding zilch.


A picture is worth…

Lest we forget the most-telling image of them all (and what Hollywood director would have dared with such a wretched-obvious villain cliché?)

Show it again to your aunt and uncle, and ask them if they ever saw James Bond characters who didn't scream more villainy.


== It’s mobs. Everywhere mobs ==

This article offers (duh!) comparisons between the Trump Organization and organized crime. But I take it much further. There are no other models that better map what we're up against. Putin, Kim, MBS (the Saudi leader), Erdogan, Duterte, Assad and the PRC all order assassin hits on opponents around the world with impunity while Trump defends all of them and blocks our institutions from taking counter measures. Some are 'communist' or ex-KGB or Sunni or Shiite or Catholic or casino moguls or U.S. Nazis -- but all those surface rationalizations and incantations are distraction BS.

Fundamental: some human males will be insatiably rapacious, absent of accountability. After 6000 years of feudalism, mafia tactics come naturally, wherever the Western Enlightenment cannot shine its new inventions of light and accountability. And the top shared goal of all these mobs - loosely led by Putin - is utter demolition of those tools and this enlightenment.

There are no other applicable models. (Well, the Chinese are a bit more complex, but the Kremlin has been the same, from the Czarist Okrhana to the Stalinist KGB to the post-communist-but-still-Stalinist oligarchy-mafia. And that one point should be shoved up your mad uncle's MAGA nose.) 

My father infiltrated the 1930s Nazi-Bund. As a gangland reporter he covered Capone. The Greatest Generation came to recognize this perennial threat to our flickering freedom, that strives above all to divide us and staunch our faith in facts and negotiation and a hope for reasonableness. 

And if you haven't yet, at my urging, watched the Costa-Gravas film "Z" then please do so ASAP.

The Stark Difference - make it count!

The news cycle moves so fast it may be intentional, giving us no time for thought about particular outrages. For example, do you recall how retired Adm. William McRaven, the man who oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, issued a stunning rebuke of President Donald Trump's decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan? “McRaven, a former Navy SEAL who led US Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014, not only called Brennan "a man of unparalleled integrity," but volunteered to have his own security clearance revoked in an act of solidarity.”

The context for this all-out struggle — not between left-and-right but between America’s adult side and our raving toddler-men — could not be more clear. Between those who spew machismo through posturing and screeches…and those like McRaven who quietly and effectively performed the most decisively important and surgical and efficient elimination of a deadly national foe. And yes, those who appointed good people. 

And yes, Obama killed Osama. Live with it. 

== The Stark Difference: make your mad uncles listen ==

John Brennan and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon both issued dire, contradictory warnings. Brennan says Kremlin-led forces have interfered with the U.S. actively helping - and helped by - Trump. Bannon released a movie trailer screaming that “the media” is bent on bringing Trump down.  

This is not something we can soothe your mad uncle (MU) out of, by comparing facts - not when all fact-using professions are condemned as enemies, on Fox and Jones etc. converting good American reflexes like suspicion of authority into cancers. 

So, use bullets of logic. Read one page to your MU aloud. Because asking him to read is futile.

1. “There are roughly HALF A MILLION men and women working in the so-called “deep state”… members of the law (e.g. FBI), intelligence or military officer communities… folks who always leaned crewcut conservative, and who nearly all are gun-owners. Quietly skilled and effective, they led in winning the Cold War against the Soviet/Kremlin empire. They hunted down bin Laden.

“Now, a vast majority of these dedicated men and women are deeply worried about a new, growing Kremlin empire, led by many of the same KGB thugs, using skulking methods that our skilled protectors clearly see… Yet, suddenly you are hostile to these half a million loyal, dedicated folks? All in the same conspiracy? Why? 

"Because Rupert Murdoch’s pretty yammerheads tell you to.”

(This cogent essay compares Moscow's current cozy support of the U.S. radical right to their 1930s subversion via the American far-left. Read also about the 12 new Russian naval bases along the ice-free arctic, and dare your MU to find one senior naval officer who's still a Republican.) 

2.  “There are roughly HALF A MILLION American scientists or high tech entrepreneurs who did the R&D and invention that made America rich and gave YOU all the comforts and machines and toys you depend on daily, ensuring safe food and clean air, sending miracle space probes to distant planets, rapidly improving medicine, and creating spectacular atmospheric models that predict weather often ten days in advance.* They may not wear crewcuts and not all are gun-owners, but they are key to winning future prosperity.

“Now, a vast majority of these dedicated men and women are deeply worried about terrible dangers to our children’s future, that they can see clearly in the data and in every model and analysis. But suddenly you are hostile to these half a million brilliant, dedicated folks, who know a whole lot more than you do. Why? 

"Because Rupert Murdoch’s pretty yammerheads tell you to.”

3. "There are roughly a QUARTER OF A MILLION U.S. journalists at various levels, men and women who took up the profession because they are curious people who ask a lot of questions.  Yeah, yeah, almost none of them have crewcuts and many lean liberal, in part because they travel all over and see a lot of pain.  But suddenly you are hostile to these curious and thoughtful folks, en masse, dismissing a quarter of a million professionals as “the media.” Why? 

"Because Fox-yammerheads and Steve Bannon tell you they are engaged in a vast conspiracy aimed at destroying the country they love, every bit as much as you do? What all of them? A conspiracy that involves hundreds of thousands, yet doesn’t leak? 

Now add in the other “elites” that Sean Hannity gets you raging-at. A MILLION teachers! And then a MILLION doctors and health workers. Unions have been declining for 40 years, yet somehow they are demons! Yet we should trust Wall Street. No, no. Never look at oil lords or Wall Street.

Hey, uncle, name one fact-using profession that your cult isn't waging war against? One? Science, journalism, teaching, medicine, law, public service... name an exception! And now the "deep state" FBI, Intel Agencies and US military officer corps. The one thing they all have in common? Grownups who use facts.

Steve Bannon wants you to hate every skilled “elite” profession. But never doubt the good intentions of three dozen casino moguls and oil barons and slumlords all with mafia ties and debt entanglements with Saudi princes and Moscow oligarchs! 

In contrast, what is the dedicated pro, John Brennan, asking you to consider?  That the same Kremlin agents you hated, back when they wore hammer and sickle pins and conspired against America, might… still… be… doing it? In collusion with Rupert Murdoch and a few pals.

That seems a simpler hypothesis.

== A public servant strikes back? Or a self-serving coward? ==

Alas, the news cycle requires that I add yet more.

The secret “high official” who wrote the recent op-ed denouncing his own boss as immoral and un-moored, in the NY Times, also alluded that a large fraction of Trump’s cabinet had informally mulled whether to invoke the 25th amendment to the US Constitution, in order to protect the republic and its people from a jabbering, terror-stricken, bully-toddler. According to reports, those worried officials decided instead “to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.”

Woof, so many aspects to this:

1) I have long said there are grownups, in the civil service, along with the justice, intel and military professionals, etc., and even maybe a quarter of today’s billionaires, who are alerted to the danger, doing what they can to maintain a semblance of a strong and sane national government and economy, amid all this. It is this civil society of dedicated servants to the rule of law that Vladimir Putin will never understand.

2) In order for the 25th to be invoked, the Vice President must call an official cabinet meeting. And Mike Pence will only do this on his terms, at his own time, when it serves the interests of Mike Pence. That won’t happen while the MAGA Trumpists still seem a potent force, and while Murdoch’s shills are stoking that inferno..

…though it could be an unforeseen side effect if there truly is a huge “Blue Wave” in November. At which point the Casino and slumlords and mafia kingpins who help Murdoch run the GOP may decide to ditch the MAGAs as hard as they threw the Bushite neocons under the bus, in 2005. (Oh, this time there will be violence. But if DT is martyred in just the right way, they might figure they can turn it to advantage, like the death of Hindenburg, in 1933. God bless the Secret Service.)

3) Remember that this op-ed writer – whoever it is – was appointed by Two Scoops, whose bizarro “excellent judge of people” power has picked a higher proportion of “disloyal betrayers” than any national leader in the history of our species. Dig that well and use it in your arguments with confeds.

“No squirming rationalization gets you off the pure fact that Donald Trump is a wretchedly awful judge of character.” ("Donald Trump Jr. complains his father has few he can trust.") Whoever the anonymous “high official” is, we should

(a) be glad he/she is trying to reduce the damage and  (b) still know that it’s probably not a person qualified to strike a match with five tries. 
Oh, there are a few exceptions. 
But on the first order: anyone chosen by Donald Trump for high office should bear a presumption of utter disqualification for service or office. And yes, op-ed writer, this includes you. Look in a mirror. He… picked… you.

4) If the scenario reported by the anonymous official is true, then he just did us all a profound disservice by bragging! By alerting His Highness to the extent of the “resistance.” How is that helpful? This self-serving betrayal - plus the Woodward book - may have rendered untenable James Mattis’s strategy of defending us by flattering the toddler.

As for the 25th Amendment, consider my posting about it. Exit strategies Part II: Surprising aspects of the 25th Amendment.

5) Then there is the op-ed writer's hypocrisy assailing Trump while defending overall GOP policy – e.g. “Supply Side” voodoo “economics” that never across 40 years correctly predicted a single outcome, always achieving opposite results. This is your silver lining?

6) And finally: "There is no redemption... You think an op-ed ... is going to cut it? You cannot write an article admitting to the president’s “anti-democratic” impulses while also saying you want his administration “to succeed.” ...while omitting any and all references to his racism, bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism." writes Mehdi Hasan in The Intercept.

Again, pass word about my posting about wagers!

== Speaking of all-out war ==

Apparently our diplomats were attacked in communist Cuba and communist China by a Russia-developed microwave weapon. And your MU thinks we’re not already at war? Read about the Kremlin-ordered malware attacks bringing down systems around the globe, turning millions of private laptops into ‘bots,’ (yours, maybe?), and preparing for worse.

Why do this now, so brazenly? (1) to cow the Ukrainians into coming back under Moscow control, (2) to help breakup the Western Alliance, (protected from consequence by their agent in the White House), and (3) because, facing demographic and economic collapse, they must act now to both raise oil prices and conquer enough surrounding territory to feel safe.

If the West stays strong another decade, all hope of rule by mafia-oligarchy will pass away like a bad fog. It must be now.

== A stunning prediction, out of a light SF flick ==

If you ever saw the film BLAST FROM THE PAST, recall Chistopher Walken's final words, when he asks:

"So I'm supposed to believe the Politburo just one day threw up their hands and surrendered?"

"Yeah, dad. That's pretty much it."

Pause.

"Oh, you've got to hand it to them."

We've been handing it to them. Hand over fist.