Russia Attempts to Collect Its Winnings

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Russia has been engaged in a good deal of dick-wagging with Trump since the election.

After Trump won, Russia did not call to congratulate — at least as far as we know (though Viktor Orbán seems to be Trump’s handler and he did).

Putin did, on Thursday, butter up Trump, calling his response to being shot courageous and claiming interest in a deal.  Putin did what he always does with Trump: he played to his narcissism.

On Friday, though, one of the most popular TV shows in Russia used a different approach (as made available by Julia Davis’ Russian Media Monitor) — airing Melania’s nude photos in the guise of noting that she was years ago photographed with a US seal, as if someone knew she would be First Lady.

 

Monday morning, WaPo published an exclusive claiming that in his first call with Putin, Trump warned Putin not to escalate in Ukraine.

During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, said a person familiar with the call, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The two men discussed the goal of peace on the European continent and Trump expressed an interest in follow-up conversations to discuss “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon,” one of the people said.

In the aftermath of the claimed call, Russia escalated strikes.

Russia has also deployed 50,000 troops, including some from North Korea, to attempt to expel Ukraine from Kursk.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday Russia has deployed nearly 50,000 troops to Kursk, the southern Russian region where Kyiv launched its surprise counteroffensive in the summer.

Ukrainian troops “continue to hold back” the “nearly 50,000-strong enemy group” in Kursk, Zelensky said in a post on Telegram after receiving a briefing from General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

Kyiv launched its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August, taking by surprise not just Moscow, but also its allies. It said at the time, that the operation was necessary, because Russia had been planning to launch a new attack on Ukraine from the region. It said it was aiming to create a “buffer zone” to prevent future cross-border attacks.

The Kursk offensive, the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign power since World War II, caught Moscow completely unprepared.

Meanwhile, Russia denied WaPo’s report. There was no call, Putin’s spox said. Putin has no plan to call.

“It is completely untrue. It is pure fiction; it is simply false information,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said when asked about the call. “There was no conversation.

“This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is being published now, sometimes even in fairly reputable publications.”

Peskov added that Putin had no specific plans to speak to Trump.

Peskov is probably lying. But the US can’t debunk him because (according to WaPo) Trump is, once again, going it alone.

Trump’s initial calls with world leaders are not being conducted with the support of the State Department and U.S. government interpreters. The Trump transition team has yet to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration, a standard procedure for presidential transitions. Trump and his aides are distrustful of career government officials following the leaked transcripts of presidential calls during his first term. “They are just calling [Trump] directly,” one of the people familiar with the calls said.

Later in the day, Nicholay Patrushev implied that Trump had made commitments to get elected — commitments he was obliged to keep.

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.

Trump is going to be a tool of Russia. In one of his first personnel moves, he humiliatingly killed Mike Pompeo’s bid to be Defense Secretary; Pompeo, like Nikki Haley, supports Ukraine. Reportedly Trump made that decision with the counsel of Don Jr — Trump’s soft-underbelly — and Tucker Carlson.

My guess is their primary concern is when he will do that.

He promised to deliver peace on Day One. Seven days later, he hasn’t delivered, nor said he would. The shape of the capitulation Trump is discussing — basically a freeze of the status quo and a withdrawal of funding for Ukraine — is far less ambitious than what Russia intends, which is to conquer all of Ukraine.

While Trump has appointed white nationalists — Tom Homan and Stephen Miller — to run his mass deportation program, his national security appointments, thus far, were once normal people before they capitulated to Trump: Elise Stefanik at UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz at National Security Adviser, Marco Rubio at Secretary of State, and Kristi Noem at Homeland Security (it’s unclear who thinks will manage the House as it awaits special elections to replace two newly elected members; the GOP will win the majority but with a thinner margin than they had).

But Patrushev is correct: Russia did, overtly, help Trump win, and there may have been far more useful covert assistance we don’t know. Early in the year, they set up yet another attack on Hunter Biden as a way to attack his father. They released a series of videos targeting Harris and manufacturing claims about migrants voting. Those videos likely involved John Mark Dougan, a former Palm Beach sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016. While it’s not yet clear whether bomb threats to Springfield, OH and on voting locations were from Russia, they were routed via a Russian email domain.

A far bigger question is whether the decision by a bunch of tech oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, to support Trump came with the involvement of someone either formally working for or just actin as an epic useful idiot of Russia. Did Trump install JD Vance as part of a deal for support from Elon? And what should we take from all the Russophile nutjobs that Trump plans to install in his administration?

To a great degree, Trump will be opening up his Administration to Russia, and doing so via wildly ignorant or crazy people. Russia will get what it wants under a Trump Administration. It just might take awhile.

So why the dick-wagging?

Probably, Russia is engaging in this game for two reasons. First, while the infusion of North Korean soldiers has helped its cause and it is making advances in Ukraine, it is doing so at great cost. And Ukraine still manages some attacks deeper in Russia.

An average of around 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed or injured per day in October — Russia’s worst month for casualties since the beginning of the invasion, according to Britain’s Chief of the Defense Staff Tony Radakin.

“Russia is about to suffer 700,000 people killed or wounded — the enormous pain and suffering that the Russian nation is having to bear because of [President Vladimir] Putin’s ambition,” Radakin told the BBC on November 10.

Moscow does not reveal the number of its war casualties.

Radakin claimed Moscow was spending more than 40 percent of public expenditure on defense and security, putting “an enormous strain” on the country.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed on November 10 that its forces had captured the town of Voltchenka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where Russian forces have been making advances in recent weeks.

Ukraine launched dozens of drones targeting Moscow, forcing the temporary closure of three of the capital’s airports, Russian officials said on November 10.

With Trump’s victory, Russia is in a strong position, but it faces immediate challenges. So it would prefer, I’m sure, immediate action.

More importantly, Russia has a history with Trump, where he deferred action until he was inaugurated, and then failed to deliver.

Robert Mueller never charged Trump with entering into a quid pro quo in 2016. It may have happened, but would have required the cooperation of people Trump later pardoned to prove it. But Russia had every reason to expect that Trump might end sanctions and recognize Crimea after he was elected with their help the first time. During that transition, Russia did reach out to Trump, first with a congratulatory Putin call, and then with discussions via Mike Flynn.

On December 29, 2016, Flynn reached out to Sergey Kislyak and asked Russia to do no more than match Barack Obama’s sanction, so as not to set off an escalation. At that point, Russia undoubtedly had every expectation they’d see sanctions removed. Instead, over the course of the Administration, more were imposed, with Biden adding an entire new sanctions regime in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.

That is, Trump has a history of making commitments to Russia he didn’t deliver, couldn’t deliver after installing grown-ups in his Administration.

So Russia appears to be doing what every other entity that helped Trump get elected is doing, as they try to collect on their support: exerting what levers of pressure they have to get their objectives.

It turns out they likely have more levers of pressure — some of which are more powerful now, before Trump’s win is certified — and larger demands than most of the people who helped Trump get elected.

Trump proved unreliable in 2016. Russia has good reason to want to demand better this time around.

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Trump Sold Grievance and America Liked What He Was Selling

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Once Trump got everyone hooked on his grievance drug, Merrick Garland was never going to make a difference.

I have tried, over and over, to explain how the investigation into Trump and his co-conspirators proceeded. More recently, I’ve explained how you couldn’t have charged Trump with insurrection — the only thing that would have disqualified him from running — until after May 2023, and had Jack Smith done so, it would have ended up exactly where we are here, with John Roberts delaying everything until after the election.

No effort to explain the process — the two years of exploiting phones, the months of January 6 Committee delay, the ten months of privilege fights, the month Elon Musk stole, or the eight months John Roberts bought Trump — none of that has mattered, of course. People needed an explanation for their own helplessness and Merrick Garland was the sparkle pony they hoped would save them.

But nothing Merrick Garland would have done would have mattered anyway.

That’s because since January 2017, since Trump learned that Mike Flynn had been caught undermining sanctions on the phone with Sergey Kislyak, Trump has used every effort to hold him accountable as a vehicle to sell grievance.

This is the core premise of the Ball of Thread podcast I’ve been doing with LOLGOP.

Rather than being grateful when learning that FBI was investigating four of his close campaign advisors had monetized their access to him — rather than imagining himself as the victim of the men who snuck off and met with Russian spies — Trump made himself the victim of the FBI. He invented a claim he was wiretapped, and then kept inventing more and more such false claims. And then he (possibly on the advice of Paul Manafort, whose associate Oleg Deripaska funded HUMINT before the Democrats did) used the dossier as stand-in for the real Russian investigation. It wasn’t the Coffee Boy yapping him mouth that led to the investigation into those trying to monetize access, this false story tells, it was the dossier Russia filled with disinformation, a guaranteed way to discredit the investigation. Once you convince people of the lie that the FBI really did investigate a candidate based off such a flimsy dossier, it becomes easy to target all those involved, along the way gutting the Russian expertise at FBI.

Then Bill Barr came in and used the authority of the Attorney General to lie about what the investigation found; almost no media outlets have revisited the findings once it became clear that Barr didn’t even bother learning what the report said. While trying to kill Zombie Mueller — the parts of the investigation that remained after Mueller finished — Barr’s DOJ literally altered documents in an attempt to put Joe Biden at the genesis of the investigation into Donald Trump, yet another attempt to replace the actual investigation, the Coffee Boy and campaign manager and National Security Advisor and personal lawyer and rat-fucker who were found to have lied to cover up the 2016 Russian operation, with a storytale in which Democrats are the villains.

John Durham never bothered to learn what the report actually said either. Had he done so, it would have been far harder to criminalize Hillary Clinton for being a victim of a hack-and-leak operation, along the way taking out still more expertise on Russia.

And while Barr was criminalizing people, he followed Rudy’s chase for dick pics in an effort to criminalize Hunter Biden and his father.

Do you see the genius of this con, Donald Trump’s most successful reality TV show ever?

Vast swaths of America, including at least half the Supreme Court, and millions of working class voters, really believe that he — the guy who asked Russia to hack his opponent some more — was the victim.

And that’s how a billionaire grifter earns the trust of the working guy.

For the most part, the press just played along, repeating Trump’s claims of victimhood as if they were true.

It’s also the problem in thinking that if only Trump faces legal consequences, he’ll go away, he’ll be neutralized.

We saw this every time he faced justice. The first impeachment. The second one. The New York trials. Each time, his grievance became a loyalty oath. Each time, he sucked more and more Republicans into the con. Each time he made them complicit.

The hatred of and for Trump by Rule of Law is what made him strong, because he used it to — ridiculously!! — place himself into the role of the little guy, the target of those mean elites.

We’ll have decades, maybe, to understand why Trump resoundingly won yesterday. Some of it is inflation (and the unrebutted claims it is bigger than it is), which makes working people angry at the elites, people they might imagine are the same people persecuting Trump.

For many, though, it’s the appeal of vengeance.

Trump has spent nine years spinning a tale that he has reason to wreak vengeance on Rule of Law. The greatest con he ever pulled.

So even if DOJ had charged Trump, two months before Merrick Garland was confirmed (though all three of the charges people imagine would be easy — incitement, the call to Brad Raffensperger, and the fake electors plot — have been unsuccessful in other legal venues), even if DOJ had convicted Trump along with the earliest crime scene defendant in March 2022, even if Trump hadn’t used the very same means of delay he used successfully, which would have still stalled the case past yesterday’s election, it still wouldn’t have disqualified him from running.

It still would be the centerpiece of his manufactured tale of grievance.

It still would be one of the elements he uses to make working people think he’s just like them.

You will only defeat Trumpism by destroying that facade of victimhood. And you will not achieve meaningful legal victories until you do that first.

I know we all need an easy way to explain this — an easy culprit for why this happened.

But it’s not Merrick Garland, because years before he came on the scene, Trump had already convinced everyone that any attempt to hold him accountable was just another attempt by corrupt powers to take him down.

Trump sold the country on grievance and victimhood. And in the process he made half the country hate Rule of Law.

Update: This is a good summary of how Trump lures in people attracted to grievance.

The Republican Party has been the party of the Low-Trust voter for a very long time. It’s the party that wants to get rid of institutions, of any of the bonds that connect us all together. The Democratic Party is the party of institutions, the party of Good Governance. It’s the party of trusting other Americans to make good choices for you. There is very little that the Democrats can do to appeal to the Low-Trust voter, and you saw what that means for the future of our politics last night. I would go so far as to say that we’re seeing the effects of a realignment of what partisanship is. The GOP is the party of the perpetual outsider and the Low-Trust voter, the people calling for things to be torn down. The Democrats are the insiders, the institutionalists. That’s why you saw realignment of people like Liz Cheney and Vermont Governor Phil Scott, people who still think the government matters even if they disagree on how it should be doing things.

I don’t know what you can do to win back the Low-Trust voters.

[snip]

I don’t know how you build back trust in the government. Things like FEMA in disasters are supposed to be able to do that, but the post-hurricane situation in North Carolina, where outside agitators went in to try to destroy that trust, and people on the Internet went out of their way to spread lies about how the Federal government had abandoned Asheville, are just examples of how everything can be used to pop out more Low-Trust voters.

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Ball of Threads: Durham Descends

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LOLGOP finished this just in time for you to spend your day watching it while you wait. We describe how Bill Barr and John Durham attempted to criminalize being the victim of a hack-and-leak attack.

Here’s the Patreon for the series.

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The Media Started Capitulating to Trump with Russia Russia Russia

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I took a few days to go wander around Paris.

In the meantime (as Nicole and I discussed on Friday), the WaPo has subjugated itself to Donald Trump by spiking an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Whatever else WaPo and LAT’s capitulation to Trump has done, it has focused attention on media failures this year.

I concluded back in February that the media was not going to help hold Trump accountable this year. I concluded that when zero traditional outlets pursued the story of how Donald Trump’s DOJ used a side channel to ingest dirt Rudy Giuliani collected from — among others — known Russian spies to criminally frame Joe Biden, with the Alexander Smirnov bribery allegation.

One candidate’s DOJ criminally framed the other candidate and it has been simply ignored.

That’s not the only way the media has failed. Hell, there have been maybe two stories about Trump’s abuse of pardons. There has been no scrutiny about whether Trump works for the Saudis, rather than the American people. We don’t talk about the fact that Trump stole 100 classified documents, and probably more we haven’t located.

This failure is not surprising. After all, the first act via which Trump cowed the media came with his success at spinning the results of the Russian investigation.

The Mueller investigation and its aftermath obtained legal judgments that Trump’s Coffee Boy, his National Security Adviser, his campaign manager, his personal lawyer, and his rat-fucker all lied to cover-up what happened with Russia in 2016. That’s an astoundingly productive investigation, one that should keep the issue of what really did happen at the forefront (particularly after Treasury confirmed that Russian spooks did get the internal campaign information Paul Manafort shared). And yet the media has never taken the time to fact check Trump’s Russia Russia Russia chant, via which he dismisses the result of the Russian investigation as a witch hunt. The media never calls him on that lie.

For whatever reason — perhaps ignorance, perhaps exhaustion — the media has allowed Trump to dodge accountability for the help Russia gave him in 2016. They have allowed him to apply a double standard on the Iran and Chinese hacks this year, when Trump invited foreign hacks in 2016. They simply ignored how in advance of 2020, Rudy Giuliani flew around the world soliciting help from — again, this is uncontroversial — at least one known Russian spy, right out in the open.

This is one thing I’ve tried to accomplish with the Ball of Thread series. Here’s how it worked.

  • Trump and the media let the Steele dossier serve as a substitute for the actual things Trump did, both before and after the election.
  • Trump turned an investigation into people grifting off their access to him into an attack on him by the Deep State.
  • Republicans in Congress picked up and expanded the Steele dossier substitution.
  • Along the way, these efforts did real, undoubtedly intentional damage to the FBI, especially those with expertise on Russia.
  • Bill Barr thwarted what was intended as an impeachment referral.
  • In his effort to kill Zombie Mueller, Barr created propaganda about the investigation and Joe Biden and laid the groundwork for January 6.
  • The Durham investigation criminalized Hillary’s victimization by Russia.
  • Bill Barr helped Rudy criminally frame Joe Biden.
  • The Hunter Biden investigation(s) sucked up all the oxygen that should have been focused on Trump.

This is the process by which Trump has stoked grievance out of a Russian investigation that concluded that five top aides lied to hide what really happened.

And the media, to this day, lets him dismiss all that by chanting only Russia Russia Russia.

The media’s surrender, led by Jeff Bezos, to Trump’s authoritarianism is not new. The media has been doing this for six years.

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Ball of Thread: Zombie Mueller

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In this episode of Ball of Thread, we showed how Bill Barr’s efforts to kill the parts of the Mueller investigation that continued after he misrepresented the report itself led directly to January 6. In his effort to lower the sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, for example, Barr treated threats from Stone and the Proud Boys against a Federal judge a “technicality.” And after Barr’s efforts to reverse the prosecution of Mike Flynn failed, Trump pardoned his former National Security Adviser just as Flynn and Sidney Powell were creating the Big Lie.

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Ball of Thread: Barr’s Butchery

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In this week’s installment of Ball of Thread, LOLGOP and I talk about how Barr deliberately set out to kill the Mueller investigation. Here’s the Patreon for the series.

You can also subscribe on:
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Putin Has Convinced Trump He’s Keeping Trump’s Weakness Secret

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“He gets played by them, because he thinks that they’re his friends and they are manipulating him full time … with flattery.” Kamala Harris

Here’s how WSJ described the Bob Woodward scoop that Donald Trump sent COVID testing equipment to Vladimir Putin rather than to Americans in need.

Woodward reports that one former intelligence analyst specializing in Russian affairs believed that Trump idolized Putin, making him open to manipulation. During the outbreak of Covid-19 in Russia, Trump secretly sent Putin some Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for Putin’s personal use.

Putin then asked Trump never to mention it to anyone else, Woodward reports. “I don’t care,” Trump replied. “Fine.”

“No, no,” Putin said. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”

In this telling, there’s an intelligence analyst involved, someone who could be Woodward’s source.

It’s not just that Trump secretly sent Putin medical equipment that Americans needed. It’s that, presumably knowing full well the Intelligence Community would learn of that gift, Putin told Trump to keep it secret. “I don’t care,” Trump claimed. But he kept his KGB handler’s secret anyway.

He’s still trying to keep it secret.

You don’t need an intelligence analyst to tell the story of how easy it is for Vladimir Putin to manipulate Donald Trump. After all, HR McMaster documented Trump’s subjugation to Putin at length.

I was the principal voice telling him that Putin was using him and other politicians in both parties in an effort to shake Americans’ confidence in our democratic principles, institutions and processes. Putin was not and would never be Trump’s friend. I felt it was my duty to point this out.

[snip]

Trump wanted to call Putin to congratulate him on being elected to a fourth term as president of Russia. I explained that Putin’s victory had been rigged, thanks to the Kremlin’s control over the media, its quelling of the opposition, the disqualification of popular opposition candidates such as Alexei Navalny, and restrictions on election monitors.

A call was arranged anyway. The day before it, I told Trump I knew he was going to congratulate Putin, but that he should know that “the Kremlin will use the call in three ways: to say that America endorsed his rigged election victory, to deflect growing pressure over the Salisbury nerve agent attack and to perpetuate the narrative that you are somehow compromised.” I then asked Trump the following: “As Russia tries to delegitimize our legitimate elections, why would you help him legitimize his illegitimate election?”

But at this stage in our relationship, my advice on Putin and Russia had become pro forma. I knew that Trump would congratulate Putin and go soft on Salisbury. Trump took the early morning call from the residence. Because I had briefed him the day before, I listened in from my office. As expected, he congratulated Putin up front. After the call, Trump asked me, as he had before, to invite Putin to the White House.

On Face the Nation, McMaster described that he included all this in his book to try to demonstrate to Trump (or at least his hypothetical handlers in a second term) how successfully Putin was manipulating him.

MARGARET BRENNAN: When you got home, you said to your wife, “After [over] a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.” How do you explain that now?

LT. GENERAL H.R. MCMASTER: Well, I explained it in the book. I try to place the president’s belief that he could have a good deal with Vladimir Putin in context of the two previous presidents who thought that they could have a good deal with- with Putin. But also, you know, President Trump, and people know this, he- he likes big splashy deals. He liked- he was pursuing that with Putin. He was pursuing that with Xi Jinping. And of course, Putin is the best liar in the world. And so I struggled, Margaret, should I write about how Putin tried to manipulate President Trump, or not? And I thought, well, Putin knows how he was trying to do it. So maybe in writing about how Putin was trying to press Donald Trump’s buttons, that will make a future President Trump, if he’s elected, less susceptible to those kind of tactics.

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the intelligence community knows what a simp for Putin Trump is, knows about his ongoing calls with Putin.

The mention of the analyst at least suggests that the IC learned about the COVID testing equipment in real time, which is not surprising given that the equipment would have to be shipped somehow. Importantly, Trump’s KGB handler Vladimir Putin surely knew that it would be discovered. I’m sure the COVID testing kits were nice for Putin to have. The fact that Putin got Trump to prioritize Putin’s health over Americans, the fact that by keeping this secret, Putin ratcheted up the hold he had on Trump were probably far bigger gifts.

And that’s why I think Putin’s instructions to keep this secret are as important as the fact that Trump made efforts to care for Putin’s health as he neglected hundreds of thousands of Americans. It’s the control over all this information that Trump keeps ceding to Putin. As Asha Rangappa noted, Trump just keeps handing Putin ways to control him, willingly.

And now Putin is picking and choosing which of the secrets he has with Donald Trump he’ll make public. Oh sure, he sent me medical equipment at a time when Americans were struggling, Putin is effectively saying. But phone calls?!?! The seven phone calls that are bloody obvious from his claims about speaking to me about my dreams? Nyet! No phone calls, they didn’t happen!!

These tailored denials, hilariously, come from Dmitry Peskov, the guy whose call Trump and Michael Cohen criminally conspired to hide, the likely source for the false claim that appeared in the Steele dossier that the call to the Kremlin Cohen and Trump were hiding was not about real estate in January 2016, but was instead about cheating in an election in October 2016.

That is, I’ve long argued, one of the ways Putin has been wildly successful: not just getting Trump to simper to him like a teenager with a crush, but also to use Trump’s paranoia to heighten conflict in the United States over Trump’s ties to Russia.

Indeed, while Trump would have been preferable for Russia based on policy stances alone, Russia would prefer a weak Trump they could manipulate over a strong Trump any day. By the time of the 2016 operation, Vladimir Putin had already exhibited a willingness to take huge risks to pursue Russian resurgence. Given that audacity, Trump was more useful to Putin not as an equal partner with whom he could negotiate, but as a venal incompetent who could be pushed to dismantle the American security apparatus by playing on his sense of victimhood. Putin likely believed Russia benefitted whether a President Trump voluntarily agreed to Russia’s policy goals or whether Putin took them by immobilizing the US with chaos, and the dossier protected parts of the ongoing Russian operation while making Trump easier to manipulate.

Just as one example, Vladimir Putin knew the FBI was getting recordings of Sergey Kislyak’s calls with Mike Flynn — there’s even a moment when Kislyak’s assistant performs for the wiretap back on December 29, 2016. Putin knew that when he didn’t respond to Obama’s sanctions, the spooks would find those calls, leading to all manner of disruption for the US.

And that created a cascade of ongoing benefits for Putin, as Trump keeps denying Russia Russia Russia that he needed Russia’s help to win, and so keeps doubling and tripling down on his denials, even as he makes his capitulation to Putin readily apparent.

Russia’s 2016 intelligence operation and its aftermath may be the most successful intelligence operation in recent history, because Vladimir Putin has gotten Trump to believe that his KGB handler is hiding the proof he’s got of how weak Trump is, and Trump is desperate, to the core of his being, to pretend that his weakness is not obvious to all.

Update: Going to reup what I wrote just weeks after Helsinki.

Trump and the Russians were engaged in a call-and-response, a call-and-response that appears in the Papadopoulos plea and (as Lawfare notes) the GRU indictment, one that ultimately did deal dirt and got at least efforts to undermine US sanctions (to say nothing of the Syria effort that Trump was implementing less than 14 hours after polls closed, an effort that has been a key part of both Jared Kushner and Mike Flynn’s claims about the Russian interactions).

At each stage of this romance with Russia, Russia got a Trump flunkie (first, Papadopoulos) or Trump himself to publicly engage in the call-and-response. All of that led up to the point where, on July 16, 2018, after Rod Rosenstein loaded Trump up with a carefully crafted indictment showing Putin that Mueller knew certain things that Trump wouldn’t fully understand, Trump came out of a meeting with Putin looking like he had been thoroughly owned and stood before the entire world and spoke from Putin’s script in defiance of what the US intelligence community has said.

People are looking in the entirely wrong place for the kompromat that Putin has on Trump, and missing all the evidence of it right in front of their faces.

Vladimir Putin obtained receipts at each stage of this romance of Trump’s willing engagement in a conspiracy with Russians for help getting elected. Putin knows what each of those receipts mean.

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As Russia Overtly Helps Trump Get Elected, Trump Continues to Check in with Vladimir Putin

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According to CNN, Bob Woodward’s latest book reveals that Trump has spoken to Vladimir Putin as many as seven times since leaving the Presidency.

In one scene, Woodward recounts a moment at Mar-a-Lago where Trump tells a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

“According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward writes.

Woodward asked Trump aide Jason Miller whether Trump and Putin had spoken since he left the White House. “Um, ah, not that, ah, not that I’m aware of,” Miller told Woodward.

“I have not heard that they’re talking, so I’d push back on that,” Miller added.

Woodward writes that Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines “carefully hedged” when asked about whether there were any post-presidency Trump-Putin calls.

“I would not purport to be aware of all contacts with Putin. I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done,” Haines said, according to Woodward.

According to WaPo’s version of the Woodward story the incident where Trump asked an aide to leave the room happened in early 2024.

This is unsurprising. After all, Trump has repeatedly described speaking to Putin in advance of the Ukraine invasion, including fairly explicitly during the debate with Joe Biden.

When Putin saw that, he said, you know what? I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine. Never.

But the confirmation that Trump keeps speaking to Putin is important for several other reasons.

We still don’t know where all the stolen documents are

If Trump was speaking to Putin before the Ukraine investigation and at least as recently as earlier this year, he was speaking to him during the investigation into his stolen documents, during the period when Trump was hiding boxes from his attorney to make sure he could steal documents.

Trump was going back and referring to some of these documents during the period he worked with Putin.

And perhaps most importantly, there were presumably classified documents loaded onto his plane on June 3, 2022 that got flown back to Bedminster, and probably some remained hidden at Mar-a-Lago (the FBI failed to search a room off Trump’s suite).

The FBI has never found the missing classified documents.

Trump was charged with hoarding some of America’s most secret documents in his basement. And during that entire period, he was checking in regularly with the leader of a hostile foreign country, the one who keeps helping him get elected.

Russian staged another operation to help defeat Joe Biden

Last month, Guardian revealed details of an information operation involving George Papadopoulos and Simona Mangiante, one for which she published an interview she did with sanctioned Russian agent Andrii Derkach. Relatedly, they rolled out yet more propaganda about Hunter Biden.

Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.

The growth of the website, which has not been reported on before, comes at a time when the US is seeking to crack down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election. Recently, the justice department charged two members of RT (formerly known as Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments they allegedly made to “recruit unwitting American influencers”. It also placed sanctions on RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.

[snip]

Mangiante, his wife, has written several posts for the site about debunked conspiracy theories involving the Bidens and Ukraine. In January, she posted an interview with a former Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, who repeated false claims of bribery about the Biden family in Ukraine. In 2020, the US placed sanctions on Derkach, calling him an active Russian agent; Derkach, who now is running for political office in Russia, previously met with Rudy Giuliani and purported to offer evidence of corruption against the Bidens.

“Intelligencer appears to be one of several [Russia-friendly] operations targeting the upcoming US elections, leveraging a network of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said.

Mangiante, along with fellow board member Igor Lopatonok, appears to have parlayed this work into a new documentary about the Hunter Biden laptop saga called Hunter’s Laptop: Requiem for Ukraine. According to social media posts, the documentary premiered on 5 September at the Trump International hotel in Chicago. Eliason wrote the script, which was filmed by Lopatonok, who has frequently collaborated with Oliver Stone on prior anti-Ukrainian documentaries and fawning films of dictators.

Since Biden dropped out, I haven’t really dug into this as much as I might. It can wait. But suffice it to say these links are interesting beyond the most obvious ones. I believe that this ongoing effort targeting Hunter Biden is among the reasons Trump was so sad that Joe Biden dropped out: because Russia had already reloaded the ongoing information operation to work against Joe Biden.

But that’s not the only ongoing Russian operation. As part of the RT operation, for example, Russia was allegedly paying money to Lauren Chen, who also had a role at Turning Point America, the group that was supposed to lead Trump’s turnout operation.

In a warning about Russia’s plan to interfere issued in July, ODNI described that Russia was using “influential US voices” to push Russian support for Trump (and according to a new warning today, also for members of Congress who’ll abandon Ukraine).

“We are beginning to see Russia target specific voter demographics, promote divisive narratives and denigrate specific politicians. Moscow seeks to shape electoral outcomes, undermine electoral integrity and amplify domestic divisions,” the ODNI official said.

“To accomplish this, Moscow is using a variety of approaches to bolster its messaging and lend an air of authenticity to its efforts. This includes outsourcing its efforts to commercial firms to hide its hand and laundering narratives through influential U.S. voices,” the official said.

An influential US voice also mentioned in the RT indictment is Tucker Carlson, fresh off his visit to Vladimir Putin.

American media critics have made themselves tools of Russian disinformation

As it happens, just yesterday, the publisher of the Steele dossier that gave Republicans a way to claim the Russian story was something other than it was, Ben Smith, claimed that the Trump-Russia story is nothing more than “an embarrassment.”

The Trump-Russia story is at this point an embarrassment to everyone. Democrats couldn’t prove the most extensive allegations of plotting or that Russian Facebook ads swung the election. Republicans couldn’t deny that Russia was trying to help Trump, or prove their own more conspiratorial claims that the whole thing was a Hillary Clinton-made “Russia hoax.” At some point, American politics mostly moved on.

What the Russian investigation found is that Trump’s coffee boy, his campaign manager, his National Security Adviser, his personal lawyer, and his rat-fucker all lied to cover up the truth of what happened with Russia in 2016.

And yet because Trump successfully pardoned himself out of legal trouble, people like Ben yawn and say it’s over. And Trump’s successful pushback on the Russian story — assisted by the self-imagined savvy of people like Ben — means that no one has investigated the follow-on in 2020 and this year.

Vladimir Putin’s puppet makes house calls

And that has led the mainstream press to give just passing coverage of critical stories about Trump’s negotiations with Russia and its proxies.

Days before Biden dropped out of the race, I included Viktor Orbán’s trip to Mar-a-Lago among the stories getting ignored as everyone chased Joe Biden old stories.

Now, however, Trump no longer hides that he’s willing to let Putin dismember Ukraine. He welcomed Viktor Orbán’s pitch of a plan to do just that — but there has been no readout from Trump’s side of what happened. Orbán, however, has told other EU nations that Trump will moved for “peace” immediately after being elected — a replay of what Flynn lied to cover up in 2017 — largely by withdrawing US support for Ukraine.

In the past, Trump has gone even further than this, suggesting he’ll do nothing as Putin invades NATO states.

Meanwhile, JD Vance is, if anything, even more pro-Russian than Trump, as are some of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who now back Trump’s campaign since the Vance pick.

Trump’s plan of capitulation to Russia will go a long way to ending the Western rules-based order, the greatest wish of Putin and Xi Jinpeng.

And thus far we know just one of the things that Russia seems to be doing to help Trump’s campaign: detaining WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich until Trump gets elected, just as Iran held onto hostages to help Reagan get elected. Avril Haines recently made clear Russia is planning on helping in other ways as well.

That’s how “Russia Russia Russia” has worked. It’s a shameless lie that Mueller found nothing, a lie built off years of propaganda. Indeed, Trump’s willing acceptance — or, in Rudy’s case, outright solicitation — of Russia’s help to get elected has only gotten more brazen. Yet rather than call Don Jr on his “Russia Russia Russia” lie, reporters simply let the pressing question of whether Trump will end the alliance of democracies in a second term go unasked.

Viktor Orbán is an absolutely central player in Republican plans, especially those — like Project 2025 — boosted by the Heritage Foundation. But there has been almost no curiosity about what’s behind that.

Another thing that got largely buried was Paul Manafort’s return to Trump’s campaign, even though since he last worked for Trump, it has been confirmed that his efforts resulted in Russian spies obtaining polling and the campaign’s strategy.

Because Trump has so successfully led journalists to be cowed by his “Russia Russia Russia” bullying, none of this has been a central story.

It needs to become one.

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Disaster Disinformation Is This Year’s John Podesta Emails

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I’ve already focused on these three paragraphs, but want to return to them. They’re from NYT’s article anticipating how the apparently tied race will roll out in the next 30 (now 28) days.

With polling averages showing all seven battleground states nearly tied, many Democrats believe their biggest advantage may be an extensive ground game operation that their party has spent more than a year building across the country. Mr. Trump’s campaign thinks that recent events — the escalating conflict in the Middle East and deadly hurricanes that have killed more than 200 people across the Southeast — will give them an edge in the final weeks.

[snip]

Their field operation stretches from turning out staunch Democrats to persuading moderate Republicans who supported Mr. Trump in previous races but disapprove of his indictments, impeachments and general conduct since leaving office.

In contrast, Trump aides see recent events as reinforcing their central campaign message that Ms. Harris is unprepared, weak and incapable of restoring the sense of calm that the Biden administration promised when elected four years ago.

The entire article contrasts the extensive Democratic ground game with sketchier GOP infrastructure. Importantly, Republicans do not contest that Democrats are better prepared to turn out their seemingly equal share of voters.

In response, Republicans first claim they’re better positioned on the issues, pointing to immigration and the economy but not abortion.

They believe they are competing in a country that has become more conservative over the past four years — pointing to surveys showing that more voters now identify as Republican — and more likely to side with them on the issues.

As I’ve been tracking, Trump’s one-time lead on the economy has been shrinking. This Cook Political Report podcast provides more nuance, one that explains a great deal of the polling we’re seeing in polls based on different turnout models. Among college-educated people, Harris now does better than Trump by 4% points. Among non-college voters, Trump retains a 10% lead. The trick, though, is that the former are far more likely to turn out than the latter. The differences you’re seeing on this issue may stem from likely voter models.

But that means that GOP certainty that they’re fine because Trump leads on the issue that is most important for the largest number of people — the economy — depends on their ability to turn out low-propensity voters.

Yet they admit they don’t have the GOTV infrastructure in place that Harris has.

Instead, Trumpsters told the NYT (again, Maggie Haberman is on the byline) that their plan to make up for that deficit is Bibi’s war (which works — and it may well work — primarily in MI) and disasters.

On one level, it was an utterly ridiculous claim, though the NYT didn’t blink. It’s a non-sequitur.

On another level, they were telling the truth. They admit they don’t have the ground game necessary to turn out voters who are disproportionately low-turnout voters. But their answer to that is to exploit two devastating hurricanes as a basis to argue, “that Ms. Harris is unprepared, weak and incapable of restoring the sense of calm.”

If NYT were engaged in journalism, they would have noted that even by the time Trump’s people made this claim, the affected GOP governors had already publicly commented on how satisfied they were by the Federal support they were getting.

That is, it is insane for Republicans to assume, as a matter of faith, that disasters will serve a narrative that VP Harris in unprepared. It’s just as likely that some swing voters in North Carolina and Georgia will see in the Biden-Harris Administration a level of responsiveness they wouldn’t otherwise, if they were simply following reporting of an event twelve states away.

But we’ve seen why they said it. Trump and hackish Republicans are treating this in the same way that they treated John Podesta emails and wanted to treat Hunter Biden’s laptop, as an opportunity to distract attention with make believe stories in the weeks before the election. He knew the things he was Tweeting about John Podesta’s emails weren’t true, Microchip testified at Douglass Mackey’s trial, but he didn’t care. He wanted, “To cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.” This is precisely what they’re doing by making shit up about the Helene (and soon, the Milton) response.

To be fair, because the stakes are life and death, Republicans are getting a lot more pushback on their lies this time around. There have been a slew of Republican local officials calling on other Republicans to stop. A fact check Glenn Kessler did — noting that while Joe Biden hasn’t diverted FEMA money to immigrant detention, Trump did — has gotten a lot of attention (though Trump’s abysmal record on disaster response generally and hurricane response more specifically, such as when Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Rican hurricane survivors, deserves far more systematic attention).

Indeed, Trump’s choice to make disaster response this year’s distraction effort in the month of October presents an opportunity to hold not just Trump, but especially members of Congress, accountable for their refusal to govern.

But make no mistake what he’s doing. A fair assessment of the disaster response, so far, would in no way help Trump; indeed, it creates a topic on which Trump fails any meaningful comparison of outcomes. But that’s not what Trump’s team meant when they said impending disaster creates an opportunity to attack Harris.

They have learned to succeed in recent years by taking packaged up events — John Podesta’s risotto recipe, Hunter Biden’s dick pics, and now deadly hurricanes — as a hook on which to hang disinformation. Holy hell, Senator John Kennedy was wailing about tampons on Hannity!

They are not making a rational argument. They are using disinformation to create distrust and a sense of unease. That’s what the NYT would have said if they were reporting reality rather than spin.

The Republican party is treating deadly hurricanes like they treated John Podesta’s risotto recipe and Hunter Biden’s dick pics in past elections.

Reporters (including the NYT here) too often treat Trump as if his utterances involve truth claims, rather than efforts to use noise to create chaos. But even now, even as a second deadly hurricane bears down on Trump’s own state, Trump is making it clear he intends to use the disasters as another opportunity to create noise.

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Bill Barr Didn’t Hear When Trump Asked, “Russia Are You Listening?”

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One of the most surprising details in the book by former Mueller prosecutors, including Aaron Zebley, is that they added a contentious half paragraph the morning they finished the report.

For volume I, we discussed one last time whether the report was sufficiently clear about “coordination” with Russia. One of the sticking points: on July 27, 2016, Trump had made his “Russia, if you’re listening” speech urging Russia to find Clinton’s “missing” emails. Five hours later, the Russian GRU launched attacks into the Clinton team’s personal email accounts. This appeared to be Russia’s response to Trump’s speech.

Bob had tied our work to established criminal standards. We did not view this “call and response”—Trump’s publicly asking for an action and then Russia taking one—as sufficient for a criminal agreement or conspiracy. But without more explanation, we were concerned a reader might not understand why these July 27 events did not constitute “coordination.” That morning, we added a paragraph to the introduction to volume I to make our reasoning clearer (emphasis added):

“Coordination” does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interest. We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating that the investigation did not establish that Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.

There’s more to this paragraph: it starts by explaining why prosecutors didn’t assess Trump’s actions in terms of “collusion,” another term that’s not a crime. Unlike “collusion,” though, “coordination” was included in Rod Rosenstein’s appointment order. As a prosecution and declination report, Mueller had to (and did) assess conduct in terms of law, not buzzwords or Rosenstein’s ill-considered measures.

Rather than providing clarity, this paragraph made things worse, because those who had spent years talking about “collusion,” incorrectly claimed the report had addressed it. No collusion!!! All the headlines blared. No collusion!!! Bill Barr keeps claiming.

In fact, as the book describes it, prosecutors added the coordination language, at least, not to expand the scope of the report (to include terms people used to describe it), but to address how they approached what the book calls “call-and-response:” when Russia and Trump’s campaign worked in concert without formally agreeing to do so.

Of late, I’ve come to understand this “call-and-response” structure as Russia’s effort to lock Trump in, ensuring a benefit to itself, in his compromise and America’s polarization, whether or not he took the actions Russia would prefer.

There’s a sad irony here. Prosecutors thought that the “are you listening” comment was so outrageous, they needed to explain why it was nevertheless not a crime, because of course must appear outrageous to everyone else.

But in reality, it didn’t appear to their bosses at all. Both Rod Rosenstein and Bill Barr, for example, repeatedly excised a key part of Mueller’s findings: that Russia was seeking to help Trump and Trump was happy to accept the help from a hostile foreign country.

Rod Rosenstein did so when announcing the Internet Research Agency troll indictment; Rosenstein even ad-libbed a claim that the indictment did not allege the information operation changed the outcome of the election.

One thing we noticed about Rosenstein’s remarks was that he never stated that the defendants’ actions were designed to help Trump and disparage Clinton, even though that was one of the core allegations of the indictment. And at the end of his remarks, he added something that wasn’t in the indictment: “There is no allegation,” he said, “that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.”

Bill Barr didn’t say Russia was trying to help Trump when he informed Congress of his spin of the results.

It omitted or misstated our analysis. In its discussion of volume I, the letter accurately stated our core charging decisions, but left out any reference to the intent of the Russian social media campaign to aid Trump in his bid for the White House, nor did it describe that same objective driving the hack-and-dump operation run by Russian military intelligence. There was no mention of the contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian officials and proxies. The letter also left out a core conclusion of volume I: that the “Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure the outcome, and that the [Trump] Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through [Russian military] efforts.

And Barr did it again — refused to say Russia was trying to help Trump — when he gave a press conference with the release of the Report.

[A]s he had in his March 24 letter, he omitted any mention of Russian support for Trump’s election bid. He then described the Russian military intelligence operation to steal and dump Clinton campaign emails, but again omitted the Russian government’s purpose of harming Clinton’s election bid in order to aid Trump. Barr also did not mention our finding that the Trump campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian military intelligence efforts.

He then described the Russian military intelligence operation to steal and dump Clinton campaign emails, but again omitted the Russian government’s purpose of harming Clinton’s election bid in order to aid Trump. Barr also did not mention our finding that the Trump campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian military intelligence efforts.

To be sure, the prosecutors’ larger gripe was always how Barr dealt with volume II. Mueller’s team had decided they would not to make a prosecutorial decision, but Barr spun it as a choice that they could not make such a decision. (My instincts that they deliberately left this for Congress are confirmed by the book.)

But the book tracks how the people overseeing the investigation refused to admit something central to it: Russia wanted to help Trump, and Trump invited that help.

“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

It’s an important observation given what came next. The entire Durham investigation was premised on ignoring Trump’s request for help. Two years later, for example, Barr insisted that the Russian investigation started from the Steele dossier (and astonishingly, Barr dismissed the possibility that Russia would want something in exchange for electing Trump).

Bill Barr and John Durham deliberately kept themselves ignorant of all that. Three years later, Barr continued to insist the investigation arose from the Steele dossier (and, insanely, said that since Russia didn’t need help doing a hack-and-leak, there was no reason to investigate Trump). Durham repeatedly tried to prevent those he charged from describing how Trump’s public comments (and their likely knowledge that another hacking attempted followed the comments) drove their concerns about Trump’s ties to Russia, even though as Marc Elias described, that was the reason they all started to focus on Russia.

Even at the end of his four year investigation, Durham claimed to have no idea that in response to Trump’s comments, Russia attempted to hack a new target.

Of course, Barr and Durham had to ignore Trump’s solicitation of a hack. If they hadn’t, they would never have had an excuse to launch the Durham probe, to pretend that investigating why Trump’s campaign got advance warning of the operation and then goaded it on made total sense. Barr and Durham had to pretend that none of this posed a risk to the country.

For a report for Bill Barr, Mueller added language trying to explain why they didn’t treat Trump’s successful solicitation of an attempted hack against his opponent as a crime.

But Barr, both before, in real time, and for years after, never even considered that a problem. Or couldn’t, because if he did, he couldn’t criminalize Hillary Clinton’s victimization at the hand of Russia.

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