U.S. Politics: One NothingBurger with 100% Mos-Cow, Side of Orange Slices and a Banana Daiquiri, Please

[LongRider]

Trump has a long history with Aras and Emin  Agalarov.  

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So who are Aras and Emin, the two people said to have helped broker the meeting? Aras Agalarov, 61, is a Russian developer worth an estimated $1.9 billion. Shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse, in 1989, he founded a real estate firm named Crocus Group, which has close ties to the Russian government. The business has received multiple contracts from state-affiliated agencies and was named general contractor of stadiums that will be used at the 2018 FIFA World Cup. It also holds dozens of high-value assets across Russia, including Moscow’s Crocus City Mall. In 2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded Aras Agalarov an Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.

The Agalarov's seem to be known as 'cutouts'

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That line has relevance for three reasons.

First, because Aras and Emin Agalarov (father and son) are well-known intermediaries (or "cutouts, the formal intelligence community term) for the Kremlin. But this email indicates they were intermediaries for the most sensitive element of Russia's 2016 election intelligence operation: communications with the Trump campaign regarding the anti-Clinton effort.

As I explained last week, Russian intelligence, and Putin in particular, thrive on using cutouts to conduct sensitive intelligence activities. In effective terms, one could replace "helped along by Aras and Emin" with "helped along by Igor and Sergey" (the heads of Russia's GRU intelligence service).

Second, Goldstone's clarification ("part of Russia and it's government's support for Mr. Trump") is offered at face value. That strongly implies Goldstone already knew that Trump Jr. knew what the Russians were doing.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

14 hours ago, Mudguard said:

The charge of collusion with a foreign agent is going to be much more difficult to make stick, and I'm not even sure what the legal basis for the charge is.  The Russian lawyer and the Russian government both deny that she is an agent of the government.  If you can't prove that she's an agent, then how is the information that she provided any different than the information Christopher Steele provided to various campaigns?  It doesn't seem like the meeting with the Russian lawyer is going to do it.  You would need to prove collusion with someone like Kislyak, who has conveniently for the Trump campaign left the USA.

I agree with basically everything I snipped, but as to the bolded, does it even matter if she was associated with the Russian government? Trump Jr, Jared and Manafort agreed to meet with what they thought was a senior agent of the Russian government to obtain valuable information on Clinton. The intent, it seems to me, is all that matters. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Nasty LongRider said:

The Russian attorney is small potatoes.  The hot potatoe is the Agalarovs who are the pipeline to Putin and the agents the Trumps need to be worried about.  They are mentioned in Jr's emails 

(this email found everywhere on the web, no link needed)

Look there for your agents, they sent the attorney.  

The key to that quote:

"Part of"

So what's the rest? 

[OldGimletEye]

It’s not often that conservative sorts of people have reasonably decent ideas. But, you know, every dog has his day, I reckon.
 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449065/federal-reserve-monetary-policy-nominal-spending-target-preferable-inflation-target

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These arguments for a higher inflation target are reasonably strong if you accept the premise that keeping inflation stable should be the Fed’s principal task in the first place. There is, however, a superior alternative. That alternative would stabilize the growth of nominal spending: the total amount of dollars spent throughout the economy. The growth rate of nominal spending equals the sum of the rates of inflation and of real economic growth. (In 2015, for example, inflation ran at 1.2 percent and the economy grew by 1.6 percent in real terms, so nominal spending grew by 2.8 percent.) Under a level target for nominal spending, the Fed would commit to keeping total spending growing at a steady rate, say 4 percent. It would commit, further, to correcting for any failure to hit the target. If nominal spending grew by 4.5 percent one year, that is, the Fed would shoot for 3.5 percent the following year.

I’d say, probably the biggest advantage of NGDP targeting is the FED commits to hitting it’s inflation target on average rather than seeing it as an upper bound, which seems to me what the FED is currently doing.

Of course just as soon as liberals say “yes”, conservative sorts of people will say, “oh were not interested now!!” (well a lot wouldn’t be interested anyway. You know gold standard and all that).

[LongRider]

19 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The key to that quote:

"Part of"

So what's the rest? 

That is what Mueller is tasked with sorting out I would think.  

Also see my next post about Agalarov being a cutout. He's an agent and he set the meeting up according to email. 

[Relic]

6 hours ago, dmc515 said:

I don't know why I waste my time

Because you think you can talk sense to someone who, in his own mind, is light years smarter than you. Just let it go, you won't convince him or anything. 

[Mexal]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I agree with basically everything I snipped, but as to the bolded, does it even matter if she was associated with the Russian government? Trump Jr, Jared and Manafort agreed to meet with what they thought was a senior agent of the Russian government to obtain valuable information on Clinton. The intent, it seems to me, is all that matters. 

Exactly. That's what matters. It doesn't matter if they got anything of value physically handed to them, it's the intent to obtain information from a foreign national with the clear knowledge that it's coming from a foreign government that's at issue.

Ignoring all that, I thought this was a good article from Just Security This could have just been a test by the Russians to see what the Trump's would do. An email is received with the promise of high level, sensitive information from the Russian government and instead of calling the FBI, they set up the meeting, bring in two high level members of the campaign and show significant eagerness towards wanting the intelligence. Then if you look at the timeline as I have previously posted, it looks very much like everyone took off shortly after that meeting. The Russians, regardless of whether they gave them any physical information that day, found out what they wanted to know; the Trumps were interested in working with them for help against Clinton.

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The media is, in large part, missing the point when it comes to the news about Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Vesilnitskaya and should be steering instead to raising the right questions. It is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which a private citizen in Russia has access to derogatory information on a U.S. presidential candidate. The act of offering such information was likely, at minimum, a trial balloon, and at best (from Moscow’s perspective), a chance to pass certain information from an agent of the Russian government to the Trump campaign through the candidate’s campaign manager and son, thereby also implicating Donald J. Trump himself. This begs the most important questions: what did she offer in that meeting? How did Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort respond?

Vesilnitskaya may have had her own agenda in requesting a meeting with Trump. That part could be legitimate. But Russian intelligence practice is to co-opt such a person by arming them with secret intelligence information and tasking them to pass it to Trump’s people and get their reaction. Did Trump’s associates like it? Do they want more? Did they report it to U.S. authorities?  The key point is that essentially no Russian citizen or lawyer has compromising material on Hillary Clinton which has not been supplied to them from Russian intelligence. The simple assertion that she had such information is tantamount to declaring that Vesilnitskaya was acting as agent of Russian government in this particular role. Couple that with the specific text of the email messages (PDF full text) sent to Donald Trump Jr. to set up the meeting which described the material as coming from the Russian government. All the alarm bells should have been going off in Trump Tower when they received an email offering to provide “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and it’s government’s support for Mr. Trump.” A later email refers to the “Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.” Donald Trump Jr.’s response: he would include Manafort and Kushner in the meeting.

In sum, Vesilnitskaya’s advocacy of other causes is irrelevant to her mission on behalf of the Russian government. Based on what we now know, this interaction had all the hallmarks of an overture by Russian intelligence to the campaign, and it is utterly damning that Trump Jr. took the meeting, brought in Manafort and Kushner to the meeting, and none of them reported the events immediately to the FBI nor to U.S. authorities until very recently.

.

[OldGimletEye]

Ted Cruz talks about appeasement and demonstrates why when we deal with conservatives there should be no appeasement with them and that every situation with conservatives should be treated as if it were 1938 and we are in Munich.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/closer-look-ted-cruzs-interest-russian-appeasement

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There were some fascinating exchanges yesterday between reporters and congressional Republicans on the Trump-Russia scandal, but for my money, it’s tough to top the interview NBC News’ Kasie Hunt had with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in a Capitol Hill hallway.

HUNT: Is Russia an enemy of the United States?

CRUZ: Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug.

HUNT: Do you think that Trump is treating them that way?

CRUZ: I think that we have had eight years of Barack Obama showing nothing but appeasement towards Russia

HUNT: President Trump is not appeasing Russia?

The Texas Republican, reluctant to answer the question directly, kept trying to complain about Obama – because some habits evidently die hard. Hunt ultimately reminded Cruz that Trump is trying to water down a bill on Russian sanctions that Cruz (and 96 other senators) voted for.

 

[DMC]

Rand Paul on New Version of Bill - Senate GOP Decides to Keep Obamacare:

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This citizenry won in four elections. Each time, the GOP establishment told conservatives, “We can’t repeal Obamacare until we have all three branches of government.” Finally, in 2016, that came to pass. Republicans now control all three branches of government.

And . . . the best that is offered is Obamacare-lite: keeping the Obamacare subsidies, keeping some of the Obamacare taxes, creating a giant insurance bailout superfund, and keeping most of the Obamacare regulations.

Shame. Shame on many in the GOP for promising repeal and instead affirming, keeping, and, in some cases, expanding Obamacare. What a shame.

Yeah, so I think I'm sticking with Paul being a hard no.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

Lulz. Kind of says it all.

[Altherion]

17 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Actually it is rather broad, and several constitutional scholars have suggested it could apply to things other money:

I think we can all agree that gaining incriminating evidence on your opponent is something of incredible value. 

Also, what Trump did is kind of apples and oranges compared to what Jr. did. Trump called for Russia to hack and release Clinton's emails  for everyone to see(that may also be illegal, I'm not 100% sure though) while Jr. specially wanted a Russian agent to give him something. 

6 hours ago, dmc515 said:

I don't know why I waste my time while you frantically jump from one groundless justification to another, but again, this is just flagrantly wrong.  As @Tywin et al. mentioned, "or other thing of value" is in the statute, specifically section (b):

Opposition research, or "oppo" as the cool kids call it, is inarguably something of monetary value - it is, in fact, a regular commodity of modern campaigns.  The type of oppo the lawyer purported to be offering, and Junior explicitly stated he would have "loved," was clearly something of lucrative value.  Further, it's a fact that Junior himself admitted two days ago he was seeking oppo.  Listen, I'm not a lawyer and am not going to pretend to be.  But politically speaking, by any reading of the statute, Junior admitted to a crime when releasing the email chain beyond a reasonable doubt.  And based on the Feds' track record, it's almost certain that Mueller could at least get him indicted for this, if he wants to.

But nobody interprets that law this way. As Mudguard pointed out, if you really want to take this very broad interpretation, hiring ex-MI6 operatives to investigate Trump would also be a crime. Furthermore, what about all of the non-citizens who donate money and volunteer their time for campaigns? No matter what politically correct euphemisms are used to describe them, by law, the ones here illegally are certainly foreign nationals and in fact even those here legally who have not completed the naturalization process are usually also foreign nationals. If you interpret the law broadly enough to indict Trump Jr., you can probably indict on the order of half the politicians in the country.

[Mexal]

35 minutes ago, Altherion said:

But nobody interprets that law this way. As Mudguard pointed out, if you really want to take this very broad interpretation, hiring ex-MI6 operatives to investigate Trump would also be a crime. Furthermore, what about all of the non-citizens who donate money and volunteer their time for campaigns? No matter what politically correct euphemisms are used to describe them, by law, the ones here illegally are certainly foreign nationals and in fact even those here legally who have not completed the naturalization process are usually also foreign nationals. If you interpret the law broadly enough to indict Trump Jr., you can probably indict on the order of half the politicians in the country.

This isn't right. Christopher Steele's company was contracted by Fusion GPS, a Washington based firm. No campaign contacted him or paid him directly and he didn't have any contact with either the Republican or Democrat campaigns. Hell, no campaign paid Fusion GPS, they were first retained by donors of Republicans then Democrats.

As for non-citizens, by law, they are allowed to volunteer their time or be a paid consultant as long as the payment does not amount to an "in kind contribution". They are not, however, allowed to donate money to political campaigns. If they are donating money, by funneling it through citizens, or directly sending money, it is a violation of federal law.

Neither situation you mentioned is anything like the situation with Don Jr, Paul Manafort (campaign CEO) and Jared Kushner (key campaign advisor) trying to receive unsolicited intelligence on Clinton from the Russian government.

[maarsen]

22 minutes ago, Altherion said:

But nobody interprets that law this way. As Mudguard pointed out, if you really want to take this very broad interpretation, hiring ex-MI6 operatives to investigate Trump would also be a crime. Furthermore, what about all of the non-citizens who donate money and volunteer their time for campaigns? No matter what politically correct euphemisms are used to describe them, by law, the ones here illegally are certainly foreign nationals and in fact even those here legally who have not completed the naturalization process are usually also foreign nationals. If you interpret the law broadly enough to indict Trump Jr., you can probably indict on the order of half the politicians in the country.

I think you forgot a 'but,but...her emails' .

[OldGimletEye]

39 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Lulz. Kind of says it all.

LOL, like Hannity has any credibility.
Or like his sorry ass "conservative principles" has any credibility.

[maarsen]

Running into a meeting to buy stolen property is a crime also. It doesn't matter if a foreign agent is selling or a citizen is selling the stuff. 

Does it not get depressing to be an apologist for such a collection of complete fuckwits? 

[DMC]

46 minutes ago, Altherion said:

But nobody interprets that law this way. As Mudguard pointed out, if you really want to take this very broad interpretation, hiring ex-MI6 operatives to investigate Trump would also be a crime.

First, what @Mexal said.  The analogous party to Junior would be the Republican and Democratic donors that commissioned Fusion GPS to acquire the information.  As far as I know (and I may be wrong, haven't followed the story too closely), that's not even public knowledge.  Second, again referring to the statute, the person or party has to have actual or reasonable knowledge the source of what's solicited is a foreign principal/national - (See (a)(4) "Knowingly.")  Did those donors know Fusion contracted Steele to produce the dossier?  Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but that's hard to prove.

This is fundamentally different - and obviously so - because Junior fucking publicly admitted he both had knowledge it was a foreign national and was seeking "oppo" of significant value, and provided documented proof to that effect.

As for undocumented workers providing funds or volunteering aid to campaigns, again, the issue is of reasonable knowledge.

[Gertrude]

I trust the legal minds will figure this out and we will just have to wait to see how the law is interpreted. I have to say, I was fairly convinced that there would be a lot of smoke and there almost certainly was some sort of shady connection, but nothing would be able to be proven. I really didn't expect anything as clear as this email chain - not even close. I would have bet anything it would have been a money trail that would have been their biggest problem. Not taking that off the table yet, of course, I'm just actually kind of shocked the collusion angle seems to have real teeth. Still doubtful that it leads up to Trump himself, but those around him seem to be fucked. I'm patient, though, and I know this kind of thing takes time to really take shape.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

But nobody interprets that law this way. As Mudguard pointed out, if you really want to take this very broad interpretation, hiring ex-MI6 operatives to investigate Trump would also be a crime. Furthermore, what about all of the non-citizens who donate money and volunteer their time for campaigns? No matter what politically correct euphemisms are used to describe them, by law, the ones here illegally are certainly foreign nationals and in fact even those here legally who have not completed the naturalization process are usually also foreign nationals. If you interpret the law broadly enough to indict Trump Jr., you can probably indict on the order of half the politicians in the country.

I have to ask, is this meant to be performance art? 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I have to ask, is this meant to be performance art? 

More like a carnival act. 

[Kalbear]

Note also that there is a significant legal difference between 'foreign national' and 'agent of foreign government'. DJTJ accepted this meeting with the pretense that this person was a high-ranking attorney representing Russia, and that the goal was for the Russian state to support Trump. Regardless of whether this ended up being true or not doesn't matter; the problem is that DJTJ, Manafort and Kushner were willing to take this meeting.

And then Kushner didn't disclose it.

The reason this is a problem on a security form is that it is precisely this sort of thing they're looking for. The goal of the security form isn't to make you disclose everything, it's to see what kind of person you are. And if you are the kind of person who is willing to take meetings with agents of foreign governments to get information against US citizens, that is kind of a big deal. If you're further willing to omit that on your briefing and then lie, saying you didn't have any contacts, that's an even bigger deal - because it implies that you will certainly do this in the future.