The meeting at Helsinki illustrated [i]Il Duce[/i]'s subservience to Putin more fully than the original coverage suggested. Putin "offered" to let Mueller's team question the Russians he just got indictments against -- [i]if[/i] Putin's minions can "question" a list of people including [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Browder]Bill Browder[/url] -- who isn't even a US citizen (he gave up his US citizenship 20 years ago), and Michael McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia. This is in regard to a supposed scheme to funnel 400 [strike]million[/strike] thousand dollars to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

WH Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "The president is gonna meet with his team and we’ll let you know when we have an announcement on that."

I wonder if "his team" includes Theresa May -- Bill Browder being a UK citizen...

Some more if [i]Il Duce[/i]'s kowtowing to Putin:

[url=https://www.npr.org/2018/07/18/630014819/australian-couple-who-lost-children-in-mh17-blame-trump-for-not-confronting-puti]Australian Couple Who Lost Children In MH17 Lambaste Trump For Not Confronting Putin[/url] [b]WARNING! WARNING![/b] There is possibly offensive language in the article!

[url=https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/18/state-dept-mh17-ukraine-russia-netherlands-malaysian-airlines/]State Department Silent on MH17 Anniversary Following Trump-Putin Firestorm[/url]

Now that elections are looming, and [i]Il Duce[/i]'s trade policies are hurting farmers, he's come up with a great, great solution: Put 'em on welfare!

He's using an emergency farm aid program started in the 1930's (the Commodity Credit Corporation), designed to deal with emergencies like droughts and whatnot, to cushion farmers from the effects of his own policies.

The first Trump-Cohen tape has come out, and it's interesting: [url]https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/michael-cohen-donald-trump-tape/index.html[/url]

The TL;DR of the ~3-4 minute conversation is that Trump was an active participant in the payment of hush money to Karen McDougal (or, in this case, funneling money to the National Inquirer to buy and kill the story). Based on the conversation, it's clear that this situation has happened (many times?) before as Cohen uses informal lingo and Trump understands.

The only wildcard here is the fact that they also discuss campaign things -- polling, surrogates, and so on. That [I]could[/I] bring the payments under campaign finance laws, although it remains to be seen if that actually happens.

Of course, this is only one of 12 tapes that Trump's team waived privilege on, so who knows what's coming.

It looks like political manipulation has started on Facebook:
[url]https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/07/31/1617243/facebook-has-identified-ongoing-political-influence-campaign[/url]

@DrS: That would be interesting if there were any actual credible evidence that the Russians rather than the Ukrainians brought down MH17. And re. farmers, no one ever said regaining a measure of autarky was gonna be easy: The US mfg economy wasn't offshored in a day. Of course the Chinese are gonna retaliate to some degree, but they are at a huge disadvantage due to the massive asymmetry of the bilateral trade in question.

@Wombatman: Violation of campaign finance laws is a huge nothingburger, historically and contextually speaking. and as with the Manafort tax-dodging allegations: we need a super-powered FBI task force for this kind of quotidian beltway grift, really? So why are we paying the IRS and FEC separately to investigate those kinds of issues? Again, we were promised yuuuuuuuuuuge revelations about commie subversion and treason, we instead get the DC equivalent of spitting on the sidewalk.

@Laurent: Re. FB, see the story by Glen Ford in my Thursday post [url=http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=493010&postcount=233]here[/url]. After the laughable "Russian Facebook trolls influenced the election!" hysteria, which involved some ridiculously small amount of site traffic, and included many anti-trump posts as well as ones made post-election, I treat these kinds of "revelations" with extreme skepticism. Sounds to me like FB is trying to rehabilitate its own reputation after the news of its massive and long-term for-profit data-selling and influence-peddling (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, but also its earlier 2012-campaign giveaway of its "social graph" to Team Obama operatives).

[QUOTE=ewmayer;493196]@DrS: That would be interesting if there were any actual credible evidence that the Russians rather than the Ukrainians brought down MH17.[/QUOTE]
The public prosecutor is still gathering evidence. It will be presented in court when the criminal trial opens.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;493196]@DrS: That would be interesting if there were any actual credible evidence that the Russians rather than the Ukrainians brought down MH17.[/QUOTE]

Depends what you mean by "credible." if you have already decided to parrot the Kremlin's line, and reject out of hand any evidence to the contrary, you will [i]never[/i] deem [i]any[/i] evidence the Russians are responsible to be "credible."

It is not clear to me what the current Russian version of events may be. The problem is, they keep changing their story. Or, more properly, "stories." Their faked image of MH17 being shot down by an air-to-air missile from another plane was a real hoot. This [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17]Wikipedia article[/url] for example, mentions that

[quote]Promoted by Russian media, the idea that a Su-25 could have downed the Boeing 777 with an air-to-air missile was dismissed by chief designer of the Su-25, Vladimir Babak.[186] In 2015 Bellingcat purchased satellite photos from the same area and time as used by the MoD and demonstrated that they had used older photos (May and June 2014) in their presentation that were edited to make a Ukrainian Buk launcher appear as if it was removed after the attack.[187] In the report published by the Dutch Safety Board, an air-to-air missile strike was ruled out.[6][/quote]

Although I'm sure you think the CBC is part of the US Democratic party conspiracy, I consider the article
[url=https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/netherlands-investigation-malaysia-flight17-russia-1.4675756]here[/url] to be credible.

[url]http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/400618-trump-reversal-on-russian-meeting-raises-pressure-on-interview[/url]

I guess the President just outright admitting knowingly receiving something of value from a foreign entity ([url]https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/11/110.20[/url]) is something new. This whole "yeah, I broke the law, what of it?" tact is bold, to say the least.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;493210]Depends what you mean by "credible."[/QUOTE]

Unambiguous and independently verifiable - the Dutch are staunch members of NATO, have they allowed Russian or unaffiliated investigators access? In this case, both ethnic Russian and Ukrainian forces had working units of the missile system in question in the same general area. i.e. both satisfy the 'opportunity' part of the circumstantial-evidence equation. Given that the Ukrainians knew full well that - just like with the Syrian 'moderate rebels' - the Western media would instantly pounce on any civilian-targeting incident and blame it on their predesignated bad guys in the conflict, who had the greater motive to conduct the shootdown?

LOL, Kurt cites Bellingcat 'research' - they are an activist group, not any kind of unaffiliated outfit. A kind of MH17 analog of the Syrian 'White Helments', if you will. Here the late Robert Parry on their brand of MSM-amplified BS as on display in the MH17 incident:

[url=https://consortiumnews.com/2016/07/22/will-nyt-retract-latest-anti-russian-fraud/]Will NYT Retract Latest Anti-Russian 'Fraud'[/url] | Consortiumnews
[quote]But Kramer and the [NY] Times left out that the earlier Bellingcat analysis was thoroughly torn apart by photo-forensic experts including Dr. Neal Krawetz, [u]founder of the FotoForensics digital image analytical tool that Bellingcat had used[/u]. Over the past week, Bellingcat has been aggressively pushing the new analysis by armscontrolwonk.com, with which Bellingcat has close relationships.

This past week, Krawetz and other forensic specialists began weighing in on the new analysis and concluding that it suffered the same fundamental errors as the previous analysis, albeit using a different analytical tool. Given Bellingcat’s promotion of this second analysis by a group with links to Bellingcat and its founder Eliot Higgins, Krawetz viewed the two analyses as essentially coming from the same place, Bellingcat.

“Jumping to the wrong conclusion one time can be due to ignorance,” Krawetz explained in a blog post. “However, using a different tool on the same data that yields similar results, and [i]still[/i] jumping to the same wrong conclusion is intentional misrepresentation and deception. It is fraud.”[/quote]

And answer me this - how many of the lurid Assad-nerve-gas attack allegations have panned out? The pattern of propaganda and false-flaggery in support of a warmongering agenda is simply so glaringly obvious, but you 'exceptional empire' true-believers refuse to see it. The insanity of agitating for war with a country like Russia is simply mind-boggling. Just goes to show that being a bloody neocon is not limited to either of the major parties in the US - there is only one War Party in Washington, and its cheerleaders include plenty of 'highly educated liberals'.

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In other news, [i]Roll Call[/i] has a Week 1 takeaway from the Manafort tax-dodging trial which indicates Pat Lang over at SST make have been wrong in his surmise that PM might be acquitted due to the difficulty of proving intent. Not that I would shed any tears over a conviction, I would simply like to see prosectuion for such SOP beltway-insider grifting become more common than their historical exceptional rarity:

[url=www.rollcall.com/news/politics/3-takeaways-manafort-trial-day-4]3 Takeaways After First Week of Manafort Trial[/url]

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And in actual election-meddling news, Wombatman, would you consider having POTUS have to stand by and watch a foreign leader unilaterally convene a joint session of Congress and give a high-profile speech in which he aggressively undermines the president's foreign policy as 'kowtowing to a foreign leader'? Because funnily enough, I don't ever recall HitlerPutin doing any such thing:

[url=https://www.sgtreport.com/2018/08/chomsky-israeli-intervention-in-us-elections-vastly-overwhelms-anything-russians-may-have-done/]Chomsky: Israeli Intervention in US Elections "Vastly Overwhelms Anything Russians May Have Done"[/url] | SGT Report

[QUOTE=ewmayer;493308]In other news, [i]Roll Call[/i] has a Week 1 takeaway from the Manafort tax-dodging trial which indicates Pat Lang over at SST make have been wrong in his surmise that PM might be acquitted due to the difficulty of proving intent. Not that I would shed any tears over a conviction, I would simply like to see prosectuion for such SOP beltway-insider grifting become more common than their historical exceptional rarity:

[url=www.rollcall.com/news/politics/3-takeaways-manafort-trial-day-4]3 Takeaways After First Week of Manafort Trial[/url]

------------------------

And in actual election-meddling news, Wombatman, would you consider having POTUS have to stand by and watch a foreign leader unilaterally convene a joint session of Congress and give a high-profile speech in which he aggressively undermines the president's foreign policy as 'kowtowing to a foreign leader'? Because funnily enough, I don't ever recall HitlerPutin doing any such thing:

[url=https://www.sgtreport.com/2018/08/chomsky-israeli-intervention-in-us-elections-vastly-overwhelms-anything-russians-may-have-done/]Chomsky: Israeli Intervention in US Elections "Vastly Overwhelms Anything Russians May Have Done"[/url] | SGT Report[/QUOTE]

Well, Rick Gates testified today that Manafort gave him specific instructions to knowingly commit crimes: [url]http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/400628-gates-testifies-he-committed-crimes-while-working-with-manafort[/url]

If you believe Gates, that would easily satisfy intent.

As for Netanyahu, I was furious at that stunt, both with him and with those in Congress who helped it to happen. I was also disappointed in Obama's lack of any real response, given that Netanyahu was actively tampering with our democratic elections. That the Israeli lobby commands significant influence in our gov't (and has a detailed history of spying on us as well) is not new news.

This whataboutism doesn't excuse allowing it to happen again, whether from Israel, Russia, or anyone else.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;493308]And in actual election-meddling news, Wombatman, would you consider having POTUS have to stand by and watch a foreign leader unilaterally convene a joint session of Congress and give a high-profile speech in which he aggressively undermines the president's foreign policy as 'kowtowing to a foreign leader'?[/QUOTE]
If memory serves, PM Netanyahu didn't convene a joint session of Congress. He was invited to give a speech by Speaker of the House John Boehner. Whether it was "kowtowing to a foreign leader" more than an act of overt disrespect towards President Obama, is more than I can say.

In the latter category, I would point to the Senate's refusal even to consider Obama's nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of Antonin Scalia.

If you consider these to have been subversive acts, the blame clearly lies with the Republicans.

BTW, in 2015 Boehner also invited another head of state, Pope Francis, to give a speech before Congress. His speech might reasonably be deemed critical of US policies, foreign and domestic.