K. T. McFarland’s Big Fat Email [UPDATED]
[NB: Update at the bottom of this post.]
I am posting this on the fly, haven’t yet fully digested what I just read. All I can really do right now is roll my eyes as I wave my hands in the air and scream about the stupid that burns.
You need to read this article, Emails Dispute White House Claims That Flynn Acted Independently on Russia; this bit in particular just boggles my mind although it’s not the only thing in this article which made me ululate.
And of course it’s Obama’s or the Democratic Party’s fault she was taken out of context here. Uh-huh. And Clinton should be impeached.
This bit is nearly as mind-blowingly whack:
“Political malpractice” is not the first thing that comes to mind here, Mr. Cobb.
UPDATE — 9:00 PM EST —
NYT’s Michael Schmidt has now provided K. T. McFarland’s full quote to clarify what was meant in the email.
We’re supposed to believe the context is about spin McFarland anticipated Obama (or the unspecified Democrats in the NYT’s article) would employ against Trump.
However lawyer Ty Cobb’s explainer-cum-apologia doesn’t sound like McFarland and others on the transition team were merely indulging in speculation.
Any time now I expect someone in the administration will not only say openly that Trump authorized the transition team to discuss dropping the sanctions, but that it isn’t illegal when the president does it.
Except in the U.S. we only have one president at a time.
For a bunch of people who claim to be expert manipulators they sure are stupid about email.
I wish I knew if they were just so bloody arrogant, perhaps because of some factor we don’t yet know about, or if they were really this incredibly stupid.
I’m probably suffering from some form of cognitive dissonance because we have just been screwed to the tune of $1 trillion because people as sloppy/stupid/arrogant as McFarland had the executive office handed to them. How did this happen?
The new cost, after adding the handwritten changes is 2.2 T !!!
But we’re supposed to drink the Kool Aid of it will not only pay for itself but will also pay down the debt!’ Right!!!
Did Bannon lawyer up? He’s been pretty quiet lately.
Yeah, but I think he’s also been scurrying around looking for some new gigs while trying to maximize damage to the former status quo.
If I wasn’t afraid of picking up digital bugs, I’d go skulk about the dark web looking for clues.
After seven months, KT still has not been confirmed as Ambassador to Singapore. What do you think the chances are she will pull a Clovis and withdraw?
I wouldn’t put any money on her confirmation if I was interested in betting some cash. But then I didn’t think the Senate GOP were as stupid as they proved Friday night/Saturday morning, either.
K.T. is Flynn’s Brain?!!
Grand Old Class War
http://nymag.com/guides/summer/17407/index2.html
Reagan Aides Try To Remember KT McFarland By MEGHAN CLYNE, Staff Reporter of the Sun | March 7, 2006
But Frank Gaffney!
http://www.nysun.com/national/reagan-aides-try-to-remember-kt-mcfarland/28643/
Thanks for the excerpts from these profiles. Please use caution when excerpting copyrighted material; the NYmag piece pushes the limits of Fair Use.
I do like the John Spencer quote in that same profile: “She’s the dirtiest politician I’ve met in sixteen years.” Hmm.
Will try to do better next time!
Some other events and actions alleged and referenced in some other profiles seem to support the possibility that the quote “She’s the dirtiest politician I’ve met in sixteen years.” may not be an overreach.
That and learning how it is done from Henry K.
Secret overtures to the Chinese…
All of this doesn’t matter it is just kabuki theatre to distract people while the thugs dismantle the US and world. How many headlines of demanted donnie and his cotorie of hangers on and associated scum still collect tax payers money in salaries and perc’s.
She will still be ambassador. All the headlines yet they are still packing courts with incompetent ideologues, still ignoring laws enforcement for poluters and bankers, still getting more corporate welfare with tax bill, still dismantling the ACA and the list goes on.
Laws are only for people who beleive in them. demented donnie has made a career of ignoring them while buying off prosecutors and judges for pennies on the dollar.
Game over. The d’s can claim they have succeed in their efforts to protect the burnt out ruins of our government while sacrifying the citizenry on their alter of protecting institutions and ensuring that correct forms of governence ( i.e. protecting custom of calling racist and greed heads as honorable members when they wouldn’t know what honor is) nothing of any matter or signifigance except for those cowards who dare not engage for fear of being seen as rude.
This bit here is the kabuki; it’s a lot of noise and gestures intended to make these criminals more fully characterized in the scripted reality TV show they are enacting.
But unwinding the conspiracy does matter. We need to know who did it, how they did it, why we didn’t see it so that we can stop it, prevent it from happening again, and inform the rest of the world about the risks their governance may face if they do not learn from our example. If you truly believe this is “game over” as you say, perhaps you need to find something pleasurable to fill your life and leave this space to others who are using it to address the frailties of this democracy.
See Honduras https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/amid-disturbances-honduras-to-hand-count-final-votes/2017/12/01/d809816c-d701-11e7-9ad9-ca0619edfa05_story.html Americans are in dissonance. Some refuse to accept they live in a country where the vote is hacked. The Trumpian gamer gaters are from a culture that used to subcontract out denial of service to knock out competitors and went on to harass other gamers and developers by hacking their computers and lives. Same tactics used in the 2016 election. Where the pushback comes is not that 2016 was hacked, but who hacked it and with whose help. Getting help from foreign actors is offensive to some.
I like the observation about ‘gamer gaters’. I wonder if/when we’ll see more detailed research into effect of this subculture on 2016.
Ever since the D’s decided that the sanctity of “private” property/software was more important then a legitamate voting process when they allowed Saxby Chambliss be seated and refer to him as the “honorable” gentleman even after a software patch named “ROB Georgia” was applied to voting machines illegaly, with out legally mandated review, the week end before he scored an upset victory over a true american hero, Max Cleland, coming back from 4 points behind to winning by 3 or 4 points.
Recount was impossible because Diebold, a privately held partisan rethuglican corporation, claimed any review would violate corporate privileges. The d’s acquiesed because protecting the wealthy and commected is more imporatant then ensuring an honest election.
I remember having dinner, back in home state, with a congress critter who had lost to a whack job in the ’98 election and the opinion offered was that there was no hope except with a recolution.
Pointed comments how they, who were progressive, got 3rd rate help and mimimual support from the DNC and DCCC because Rahm would rather deal with hard right nut cases then progressive D’s.
Because he knew that the rethuglican whack jobs would praise him and allow him to collect donations from Pritzer family, as an example, since he was willing to allow them to gut the constitition as long as they referred to him as the “honorable” gentleman.
It isn’t just that they accept getting paid off to betray the grass roots but also how cheap and easy they are that truly offends me.
After all if you are aiding and abbetting the destruction of a country you would think they would hold out for more then symbols and petty cash.
But that goes to show just how inept they are. Can’t even get a decent pay off for their virtue.
“The frailties of this democracy”?
I’d start – and finish – with our DC Dems as the Washington Generals. Dems in DC major in losing and whining about it. And cashing lobbyist checks.
Seriously; folks – what positive big things have Dems accomplished in last 8 years? PPACA. Iran nuke deal. Auto industry bailout (dwarfed by Wall St/bankster bailout). Hate Crimes Prevention Act . Fair Sentencing Act.
Beyond that? Um…
Rayne, the Logan Act was about private citizens causing trouble…200 years ago. Flynn was on Pres-elect Trump’s team. It was post-election, pre-Inauguration. Do you really believe – and expect – no previous incoming Admin ever talked to world leaders in the transition period? #Bah
Next you’ll tell me you think 1917 Espionage Act was for prosecuting journalists and whistle-blowers…
Howdy, Mr. First-Comment-Ever-Approved-At-This-Site-Berniecrat. Looks like you’re new here and haven’t really read much of the last 10 years we’ve been beating on multiple political parties, though the GOP has received more entirely-earned blows.
Come back after you’ve done some actual work organizing voters and campaign work for candidates; if you dig you’ll find I wrote a road map on how to do that. Oh, and take some math classes; it’s a little difficult for a minority party in Congress to push policy past an entrenched, racist, obstructive majority. Or perhaps you can’t see the math through your lens of privilege. Buh-bye!
Hi there Mr. Mann! I agree with Rayne. I’d also urge that you bleating about no prior prosecutions under the Logan Act, whether with an “incoming administration” or otherwise, are bullshit. When has an incoming administration blatantly undercut the substantive position, covertly, of the current administration? I’ll be waiting.
if it comes down to the sanctions and the Logan Act, this Congress will not impeach Trump. If there’s a smoking gun, one that ties the “adoption” stuff, the Papadoofilous trips, and the Smith suicide together, then they probably won’t have a choice.
As of right now, I don’t think KT’s blurb about the “handing” him the election is enough to sway any minds
Throw in the NRA as a backchannel to Moscow too.
You’re right. But remember the bedrock principle of Watergate: follow the money. It’s not just about decades of Drumpf laundering money for the Russians — it’s about Putin financing his campaign. Remember last summer when Drumpf made a huge show of “forgiving” a $50 million dollar “loan” to his campaign? Do we seriously believe a man who hates to use his own money for anything other than gold-plated tributes to himself would have financed his own campaign? That “loan” came from Russia and I’d be willing to bet that Mueller can prove it. Now, via Flynn et al, he’s building the case for what that money bought.
Political malpractice? Nice coinage, wrong facts. A competent administration with less to hide might have held preliminary discussions with foreign leaders through established channels, with prior notice to the sitting administration.
The malpractice, the incompetence, the potentially criminal conduct lies in the Trump team’s choice to hold talks in secret, about secret topics, through ad hoc, unheard of channels, such as the attempt to use encrypted Russian government channels to communicate secretly with the Russian government. The outrageous conduct was immediately, actively and secretly to interfere with the policies of the sitting government. That’s just for starters.
Not doing such things would NOT have been “political malpractice”. It would have been sensible, it would have been smart, it would have been legal. But that’s not what Trump does or who he is.
I suspect that on these topics, what Mr. Mueller is finding is that Donald Trump was the micromanager of micromanagers, that his fingerprints are on the candlestick in the library, the wrench in the kitchen, and the lead pipe in the dining room. Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard will have no trouble finding the clues to this mystery and piecing them together, nor will Mr. Mueller.
I’d like to know why Kushner needed a highly covert back channel if reaching out to foreign dignitaries during the transition was expected and not prohibited to him since he was not ex-military like Flynn.
And why was Flynn reaching out to Russia five times over encrypted communications if this was simply expected, traditional transition communications.
“It would have been political malpractice not to discuss sanctions…” I can’t wait for the rest of the fallout on this.
Any of us could discuss sanctions in a general, non-committal way. Donald wanted to make deals, to make promises, to show he had made it and that he was boss, and to do it NOW. What I’d like to know is why he acted as if he was obligated to do that.
As I think you’ve suggested, Trump acted, acts as if he owed Putin for something big. Trump was racing to show he could and would pay it back. It’s like the debtor who gives everything he has to the Godfather, knowing it’s only half as much as he owes, and hoping the don will tell him what might satisfy him besides watching the debtor shove his feet through the front windshield with the air ticket to Vegas in his breast pocket.
Three dead Russians inside the U.S. (Lesin, Krivov, Churkin) within 14 months might be an incentive to expedite deliveries.
while reading up on your named cadavers, i ran across this in miss wiki’s dossier on churkin:
“…. Vitaly Churkin was the 5th Russian diplomat posted abroad to die unexpectedly, in a remarkably similar fashion, since November 2016, the first such death having occurred on the morning of the U.S. presidential election, 8 November 2016, inside the Russian consulate in NYC, – a fact that caused conspiracy theorists to try to detect a pattern.[26][27][28] The apparent pattern was followed by a sudden death of Russian ambassador to Sudan Migayas Shirinskiy in the capital Khartoum in August 2017.[29] Hours after Shirinskiy′s death, Russia′s government-owned news agency TASS published a list of names and brief biographies of senior Russian diplomats (naming five), who had died ″of natural causes″ ″in the past two years″ (in fact, since 30 May 2016, the day when Russian Chargés d’affaires ad interim to Ukraine Andrei Vorobyov, aged 57, died suddenly in Moscow), that included Churkin.[30] His death was likewise cited in a list published in early May 2017 byUSA Today — as one in a series of ″dozens of high-profile″ Russians′ deaths, such as GRU chief Igor Sergun′s (January 2016), in ″the past three years in Russia and abroad in suspicious circumstances″.[31]… “
Earl,
A fine piece of creative writing.
Your wry observations on Parker Brother’s Clue game are great stuff.
It leads us to the dark side of an unfolding mystery.
As Rayne says, we even have three dead Russians inside our borders.
Maybe my initial e-mail address was wrong. I fixed it.
A little more background for those pursuing trivia:
Now, if we could just figure out why all those Russians dropped dead of natural causes in such a timely fashion.
Yeah, Nostalgia
The Parker Brothers plant where Clue and Monopoly were manufactured and shipped, sat less than a mile from my birthplace of Salem, MA. Some of our neighbors worked on the assembly line.
Hasbro later bought out Parker Brothers, and with most manufacturing and mill plants in Massachusetts, they were shattered and converted into Condos, malls, and now only a tattered piece of Professor Plum exists.
Don’t worry though, Don the Con vowed to bring back manufacturing jobs and coal will surge.
Just FYI, another tea leaf on the way to Full Cray-Cray:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/us/politics/trump-fbi-tatters.html
The Donald claiming that the FBI is in tatters.
I think that I’ll go long FBI, and short coal.
Also, short coal might be bad for McConnell, which makes shorting coal a twofer.
So, let’s examine this. The Trump team KNEW that the Russians had helped them. They didn’t care. And they SECRETLY UNDERMINED the response of the Obama team to the Russian meddling. How is that NOT illegal?
http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-kt-mcfarland-russia-thrown-election-to-trump-flynn-2017-12
Don the Con is back in New York determined to rip apart our legal system.
We are watching a meltdown in real time.
I’m not shitting, he is delusional and needs to be taken directly to McLean Hospital in Belmont for observation. (formerly named Asylum for the Insane)
This is not funny.
He was tweeting at 3AM and probably hasn’t had much sleep. I hate Don the Con but he is spiraling……. and deserves some comfort I guess
Yup. Tweeting at 3 am is a really bad sign.
Completely agree that we are watching a meltdown in real time, and I find it more than a bit intriguing that The Donald was kept mostly out of sight on Friday.
I’m not convinced that a guy who seems to have cut deals with people who launder money, to say nothing of being Roy Cohn’s acolyte and all that stems from that depraved outlook, deserves anything more than to sit in his own soiled diapers, babbling into the wind.
What enabling a delusional man like Trump’s says about the GOP’s ‘so called’ leadership of Congress is beyond reprehensible.
As Digby’s blog points out, accountability for Trump flies in the face of decades of non-accountability: for Bush in starting a war based on lies, leading to millions of deaths and driving millions more to emigrate; for Cheney for the Plame fiasco, among others; for corporate polluters; for drugs companies whose price gouging would intimidate Croesus; and especially for the TBTF banks, whose senior executives and their institutions remain free to pillage without restraint: paging Wells Fargo, paging Wells Fargo.
Roy Moore is a current beneficiary of the elites’ drive to remove accountability from the culture – for them, but not for, say, Puerto Rico or student debtors, and anyone of color besides white arrested for driving, walking, talking or for being a person of color other than white. Their possible success in ridding themselves of meddlesome taxes is only one expression of that drive.
Forcing elites to be accountable for their excesses, for their crimes, was a signal success of late modernity. It rarely happened in the medieval world. It rarely happened to Robber Barons or their 20th century successors. It rarely happens to people of great wealth today, but that violates a social norm that did not exist earlier.
We have to recapture that success, that cultural expectation that wealth is not a get out of jail free card. The current fad to hold prominent sexual predators accountable is a step in the right direction. We need more of it.
You, sir, nailed it. Even the first emperor of China (some 250 to 210 BC) reputedly made every single person accountable to all his laws (oppressive laws that they were, fines were not considered).
Our democracy celebrates every leveling of the reward/punishment arena, Magna Carta, Constitution, etc. and so on.
We have diverged from such. Our language even highlights this disparity with the word, affluenza (The term “affluenza” has also been used to refer to an inability to understand the consequences of one’s actions because of financial privilege, notably in the case of Ethan Couch.[4].)
Past time to rectify this. I find Obama’s chief failure to not imprison bankers directly, at least those who participated in the 2008 great recession, to be most egregious.
No, Lou, there isn’t. Sadly for you, there isn’t one even for former presidents who are of mixed race. There isn’t even a rule or social custom. But there is a law that says a president-elect, or any other private citizen, shall not interfere with the foreign policy of the president s/he has not yet succeeded.
The stupid, it burns, but Lou Dobbs knows he’s full of shit. He’s just waving a red flag of lies in front of Trump’s base, hoping they’ll keep his ratings up. He and Trump seem a lot alike.
LOL
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/looking-for-the-linguistic-smoking-gun-in-a-trump-tweet/547361/?utm_source=atlfb
The stupid, it burns: I wonder what the Latin translation is, because it must be emblazoned on the Trump family crest.
The press has latched onto one of Trump’s latest tweets, which involves his attempt to distance himself from his BFF, Michael Flynn, after Flynn pled guilty to a felony that might ultimately entrap the president. In it, Trump conflates past and present, commits a Freudian slurp, or tells the truth, a possibility even for Donald.
Trump claims that the reasons, plural, he fired Flynn were because he lied a) to VP President Pence, and b) to the FBI. The former is a political embarrassment, but one probably engaged in on a daily basis. The latter is a felony, punishable by up to 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. That would be news.
No one believed that Trump fired his BFF because he lied to Pence. The WH has offered no more credible excuse until now. It was generally assumed that Trump was forced to fire Flynn because investigations of him were getting close to Donald and becoming too public. That’s probably still the reason, as Trump remained steadfastly loyal to his BFF for months. That is, until the announcement of Flynn’s plea deal and the possibility it raises that Flynn, like Papadopoulos, might have been cooperating with the special prosecutor long before his plea deal was announced.
The new trouble Trump splashes in is his claim that at the time he fired him, he already knew that Flynn had lied to the FBI. That raises a host of new exposure for Trump, including offering fresh evidence that Trump obstructed justice.
Trump hangers on will attempt to reframe the president’s words into something coherent. Good luck with that. The standard Nixon-Kissinger line, oft repeated, is that lying “in service” to one’s country is not a lie or a crime, but a duty. That might persuade sympathetic readers of a memoir, but not the judges in the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse.
The President just set the record straight!
The explanation, it seems, is sadly simple. Drumpf is so unacquainted with law and so addled (with dementia starting to shut down his congenitally tiny brain) that he actually thought bragging he knew Flynn lied would make him look good (“I’m so smart, I could tell he lied and so I fired him.”). He had no clue he was copping to obstruction — a perfect storm of Drumpf’s narcissism, stupidity and ignorance.
Now apparently the NRA, via its national convention, was in on the act to get Trump and Putin together pre-election victory. Why would a leading GOP candidate for president ever need to see the head of the Russian state or government at any time before succeeding to the Oval Office? Let’s stop and think about that again. Because it makes no sense.
So now the update is Trump’s tweet was composed not by Trump but by his lawyer Dowd? If that is true, then does that mean Dowd typed it out for Trump?
excerpt of the tweet about Flynn:
“He has pled guilty to those lies.”
Does Dowd, as a lawyer, normally use the word ‘pled’ rather than ‘pleaded’ in his writings? We need an analysis along the lines of the late journalist Robert Novak’s normal usage of the word ‘operative.’ ;-)
“Pled” has apparently been found to be in widespread use among lawyers, and even previous instances by Dowd himself have been spotted…
So after months of relentless warning that Trump is risking his neck with his careless tweets, he may eventually fall by a tweet written by his lawyer. And for good measure, one that tops all of Trump’s own in legal stupidity. A double irony worth at least a single-malt and a cigar. Besides, it also raises the question who else writes Trump’s tweets. Even if you don’t believe Dowd actually wrote it, he must have been somehow involved. The lone loony unable to contain himself early in the morning may be a myth.
The stipulation of facts attached to the Flynn pleading don’t mention lying to the Vice President. Doubt a lawyer would have written the tweet. Also, Trump’s WH has previously claimed that his tweets are official statements of the President. The Court, in the travel ban decisions, has subsequently taken that claim at face value.
And if Dowd is throwing himself on a sword to save Trump (if Trump wrote the mea culpa himself), isn’t Dowd committing a form of obstruction of justice by claiming the words are Dowd’s and not Trump’s?
…and, why would he do that? [It makes me wonder: what does Trump have on Dowd?]
Maybe the obstruction occurs only if Dowd sticks to the story of being the draftee of the tweet when and if asked about it by the FBI.
If Dowd is normally able to avoid answering questions about lawyer/client discussions, it looks as if Dowd waived that privilege with the recent publicly announced update.
I actually can see how that phrase fits into the Obama narrative she was writing in the prior two bullet points, and I think it’s been blown way out of proportion.
What struck me more, actually, was point two. The first and third points are about what Obama folks might *say*, but the second point suggests hard evidence exists that might be revealed. I wish more people would talk about that.
The paranoia is just dripping from her email, though.
On 9/10/13, K.T. McFarland wrote this on Fox News Opinions: Putin is the one who really deserves that Nobel Peace Prize
Amazing, huh? But we’re overreacting to her email and Ty Cobb’s response… ~smh~