Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Over 20 People Were at the Table When Trump Met the Saudis. None Were Women.

DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES

SIGH.

Bubble Bubble Toil & Trouble: Sessions & Trump's Lawyers Obliterate Ethical Lines

KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS

With Donald Trump's legal team going through yet another shakeout as Special Counsel Robert Mueller bears down on a president flailing like a wild animal caught in a trap, let's pause to consider how many people surrounding the president have lost their ethical bearings, if not broken the law.  Starting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and moving on to White House Counsel Donald McGahn.  

On March 16, a mere 26 hours before Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe would have qualified for a full pension after 21 years of service with the FBI and after months of harangues from Trump targeting McCabe and his former boss James Comey, Sessions dismissed McCabe based on the allegation he had inappropriately allowed two top FBI officials to speak to reporters in 2016 about his decision (and this is richly ironic) to open an investigation into the family foundation of right-wing nemeses Bill and Hillary Clinton and then lied to Department of Justice investigators. 

Trump not coincidentally has had a major case of the ass with McCabe and has seized on the fact his wife, Jill, unsuccessfully ran for a Virginia State Senate candidate as a Democrat in 2015 and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from a Hillary Clinton ally. 

Sessions, whose oath of office requires him to be impartial, could have deferred the dismissal decision.   

He could have explained that McCabe had not had an adequate opportunity to defend himself.  Nor could such an action be taken while the president was so publicly in a state of high dudgeon because it would create the appearance that he was not impartial.  Or he could have recused himself from participating in the decision because he had recused himself a year ago from the Justice's Russia investigation on advice of department counsel after acknowledging that he failed to disclose his meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he was working for the Trump presidential campaign in testimony during his Senate confirmation hearings. 

But Sessions, who has repeatedly incurred Trump's wrath and dismissal threats for recusing himself and not shutting down Comey's investigation, let alone impeding the investigation of Mueller, who took over from Comey, did none of those things.  McCabe has responded by denying the allegation and calling it "an attack on my credibility [as] part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but taint the FBI, law enforcement and intelligence professionals more generally." 

Sessions has learned the hard way that if you fall into Trump's orbit you will be diminished and then burned.  Or perhaps end up in deep legal doo-doo like Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, who have been indicted by Mueller.

The McCabe firing became the rationale for Trump criminal defense lawyer John Dowd to attack the special counsel, saying:

I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe's boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier.  

Trump then quickly took up his lawyer's argument in a series of inflammatory tweets, raising another brace of legal and ethical questions: Have the president's lawyers blurred the lines between representing his interests and aiding and abetting obstruction of justice, and possibly other crimes, as well? 

Of course they have, and in this respect White House counsel Donald McGahn, a West Wing survivor -- or alternately someone who wanted to keep his job so badly he kept looking the other way -- blurred the lines early and often:

As transition counsel, McGahn was told by future and short-lived national security adviser Flynn on January 7, 2017 that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign.   McGahn failed to follow up on the information. 

Now White House counsel, McGahn was told during a series of meetings with then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates beginning on January 26, 2017 that misstatements made by Flynn regarding his meetings with Russians made him vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow and criminal prosecution.  McGahn again failed to follow up on the information. 

In early March 2017, Trump ordered McGahn to stop Sessions from recusing himself after his perjerous Senate testimony.  McGahn failed to do so but is witness to one of Trump's efforts to obstruct justice. 

On May 7, 2017, McGahn was again witness to an effort to obstruct justice as Trump and an aide draft a letter firing Comey for specious reasons.  McGahn convinced the president not to release the letter. 

On June 12, 2017, McGahn was again witness to an effort to obstruct justice as Trump ordered him to fire Mueller.  Trump backed down after McGahn threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive. 

In mid-September 2017, Trump criminal defense lawyer Ty Cobb was overheard by a reporter angrily stating that McGahn had "a couple of [potentially incriminating] documents locked in a safe" to which he was not allowed access. 

In February 2018, after Mueller has summoned McGahn for an interview, he was yet again witness to an effort to obstruct justice when Trump asked him to divulge details of the interview.  

McGahn may have managed a feat hitherto unheard of in White House legal history since Watergate: His representation of Trump could get him indicted, if not lose his license to practice law. 

FOX NEWS

Things are about to get even more interesting with the news that Trump has hired a new criminal defense lawyer who pushes conspiracy theories on Fox News and may be firing Cobb, who has pushed a non-confrontational strategy of fully cooperating with Mueller.  Meanwhile, Dowd reportedly is considering quitting because he has concluded he has no control over Trump's erratic and self-destructive behavior.

Cooperation is now out and attacking the special counsel head-on is in, which makes Joseph diGenova, a ruthless veteran Washington lawyer and former federal prosecutor, a great fit for Trump's beleaguered legal team as a showdown with Mueller looms large. 

DiGenova is a frequent Fox News contributor and proponent of the unsubstantiated claim that the FBI and Justice Department (read Mueller) have manufactured evidence to frame the president.  Yes, he's one of them:

There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn't win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime. Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.

DiGenova has promised legal representation to any FBI agent who wanted to come forward and testify against Comey.  He got no takers. 

Meanwhile, diGenova's equally ruthless wife, Virginia Toensing, represents Blackwater founder and informal Trump adviser Erik Prince, former Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis and Mark Corallo, former spokesman for Trump's legal team who has accused former White House communications director Hope Hicks of planning to obstruct justice in crafting a statement related to the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who had promised him damaging information on Clinton. 

Other than appealing to Trump's base and his Republican congressional sycophancy, it's difficult to see how a fever swamp-dwelling quote machine like diGenova can defend the president against Mueller and his crack legal team.   

This is because nothing has changed.  The president's lawyers don't have a pot to piss in and never have because he's guilty as sin.  

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related events.

Forget Stormy's Bumper Bullets. Dare We Believe That She Can Take Down Trump?

MIKE PONT / GETTY IMAGES

You can't turn around in the Stormy Daniels scandal without colliding with a double entendre. 

Take the word exposure.  Please!  That not only is what the porn film star and director is all about, so to speak, it is what the scandal is all about as Donald Trump and his lawyers frantically work to limit the president's legal exposure while Daniels and her lawyer work to enhance hers. 

But beyond that tabloid-ready story line, let alone 38DD questions about whether Stormy's bazooms are real or silicone-enhanced, lurk these intriguing angles:

Trump could have mitigated the scandal had he just let Stormy blab.  So why didn't he? 

Will the scandal open the floodgates to the many other women who say Trump hit on them? 

Can Stormy be considered a feminist hero and why shouldn't feminists be supporting her?  

And most pungently, unlike other Trump scandals, could this one shorten his presidency?

Like most of the other crises in the Trump presidency, let alone his gift as a grifter, the Stormy scandal was self inflicted. 

Had Trump just let her blab, she would now be a flesh-in-the pan footnote and not threatening to crowd out crises like Tillerson, McMaster, McCabe and Mueller. (Which sounds an awful lot like a law firm.)  Had his lawyer not insisted she sign a nondisclosure agreement in return for $130,000 in hush money to pay for something Trump claims never happened and he obviously never intended to sign, the whole thing might have gone away. 

But Trump always has to have the last word, which recalls one of the more jaw-dropping episodes in a career built on disreputation: After he defaulted on repayment of $640 million he owed Deutsche Bank following the 2008 global financial crash, the bank filed for a summary judgment.  Trump then countersued for $3 billion, stating that he had no intention of repaying because the crash was a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami" co-created by Deutsche Bank. 

Malignant narcissists do stuff like that.   

And so a passing irritation has become a full-blown crisis as Michael Cohen, Trump's fixer, taunts his adversary, which seldom is a wise legal strategy. 

Trump hasn't been able to let go and Cohen hasn't been able to shoot straight, and he has now maneuvered them into a position where they will have to exhibit a savvy hitherto absent in their thrashings to prevent Stormy's suit against them from going to court where it would collide head on with the Bubba Rule. 

People with longer memories than Trump will recall that it was a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee, against Bill Clinton for repeatedly hitting on her when he was Arkansas governor that nearly brought down his presidency.  (Impeachment can do that.)  Clinton agreed to an out-of-court settlement, paying Jones and her lawyers a sweet $850,000 to drop the lawsuit to prevent Jones's lawyers from parading all the other women Clinton hit on through the witness box to corroborate Jones's story by confirming that Bill had a birthmark on his . . . er, junk. 

"I can definitely describe his junk perfectly, if I ever had to," Stormy has said, and so presumably could Karen McDougal, Summer Zervos and other women with whom he had affairs during his three marriages.  Then there are the 20 or so women we know about with whom he did not have sex but were fondled and groped.

(McDougal on Tuesday sued the company that owns The National Enquirer, which paid her $150,000 to bury her story, to get out of a 2016 legal agreement requiring her silence about her affair with Trump, which like Stormy's began at a 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.  And in New York, a judge said a defamation lawsuit by Zervos against Trump related to an allegation he sexually harassed her could go forward.) 

Yes, Stormy can be considered a feminist hero and the sisterhood -- that is, those reliably hypocritical women with public personas who instruct us on how we should think -- is missing a terrific opportunity in not embracing her. 

While the affair may have been consensual, Stormy's tale also is a #MeToo story because Trump repeatedly has tried to silence her and perhaps threatened physical violence to she and her lawyer, the shrewd Michael Avennati, through surrogates.  Yet feminists seem to be treating Stormy with the same slut-shaming disdain they and late-night comics heaped on Monica Lewinsky two decades ago.  (Jay Leno: "Did you see that?  Gained 50 pounds.  If this keeps up, she may drop to her knees just from the weight.") 

So howcum feminists applaud every time Mueller snares another Russian scandal perp but are sitting on their hands and not embracing Stormy as an agent -- albeit a somewhat improbable one -- for change?  So what if she's a porn star and not an airline flight attendant or beauty pageant contestant?  Lewinsky fled into the shadows while Stormy has confidently and boldly taken control of her own narrative even if there undeniably are career-enhancing aspects to that. 

"If for some reason Mueller does not get him, Stormy will," predicts Representative Maxine Waters, a persistent Trump critic. 

Waters' words are encouraging for those of us -- as in the many millions of Americans -- who are shellshocked over Trump still making their lives miserable while methodically tearing down the country he vowed to make great again despite all the scandals that would have short-circuited other presidencies. 

The same overweaning vanity and sense of resentment that has characterized Trump's response to the special prosecutor is driving his pushback against Stormy.  The juvenile president and adult film star.  The bully and the woman.   

For Trump the lines between lying and honesty and probity and crime were blurred long ago, but maybe just maybe in the end it will be those bumper bullets that will get him. 

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Psychedelic Donald: How LSD Prepared Me For The Hallucinatory Age Of Trump

THE DANGEROUS GLOBE

I have a confession to make: My experimentation with psychedelic drugs as a young man has unexpectedly prepared me for The Age of Trump.  This is because ingesting LSD altered perceptions of the "straight" world in strange, insightful and sometimes incredible ways that are helping me to better understand and survive the hallucinatory times in which we live. 

But lest we confuse what Trump says with what the dormouse said, to riff off the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," which is perhaps the ultimate tripping song, strains the analogy.  What I mean is that Trump's statements and actions regarding the bummer known as the Russia scandal -- as well as those of his Republican congressional sycophancy -- aren't merely obfuscations and lies in the face of the now widely accepted wisdom that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help elect him.  They are utterly psychedelic.  

Go ask Alice, I think she'll know.  

AS IT WAS, IN THE FIFTH WEEK OF THE SECOND YEAR of the Trump presidency, the man with the small hands and peculiar hair inched over so slightly away from his oft-stated claim that the Russia scandal is a "hoax" as members of his own administration and even a few dues-paying members of the congressional sycophancy acknowledged that the Kremlin not only interfered in the election, but did so with the goal of sabotaging Hillary Clinton to get Trump elected.  And is actively plotting new cyberattacks on the U.S. 

Trump's baby step toward reality actually was a quantum leap when you consider his fawning allegiance to Mother Russia and his favorite autocrat, Vladimir Putin, who was reelected handily on Sunday after stifling all opposition and barring his only serious opponent from running.

Belatedly responding to the news that a Russian-made nerve agent had felled a former Kremlin double agent and his daughter nine days earlier in Salisbury, England, Trump mumbled that "As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be." 

Then 48 hours later, under growing pressure from members of his own Cabinet and others to grow a pair, Trump allowed that "It looks like [it was Russia] . . . and we are taking it very seriously, as I think are many others."  That still was a far cry from the condemnations issued by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the latter only hours before Trump fired him by Tweet for yet again crossing swords with the boss.   

Then a day later, Trump was "studiously silent," as The New York Times chose to describe it, when the Treasury Department finally was moved to impose the sanctions Congress had approved over his objections in nearly unanimous votes a year earlier.   

But those blown-deadline sanctions are as pathetic as Trump's mumble words.   They target 19 Russians and five Russian organizations for spreading disinformation and propaganda to disrupt the election, but all with two exceptions are the very individuals and entities identified by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller in a recent indictment and in some cases were targeted in 2016 sanctions imposed by the Obama administration.  

Is this the best the Trump administration can do?   

Yes, because to do any more -- as in impose penalties with real teeth on Putin's inner circle of cronies with travel bans and asset freezes -- would only serve to amplify the president's disconnect with reality and jeopardize his bromance with the thug in the Kremlin. 

AS SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS GO, the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee has displayed a masochism that would make the Marquis de Sade proud. 

Not content with having bombed with the so-called Nunes memo, a piece of fiction cobbled together by Devin Nunes, the recused but not recused committee chairman and Trump poodle caught out last year concocting phony intelligence to embarrass former President Obama, the committee gave new meaning to the word "oversight" in solemnly announcing the other day that it had concluded there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, nor did Russia try to get Trump elected, and therefore its job was done. 

Contradicting U.S. intelligence agencies, intel committee Republicans stated in a draft report that there merely was poor judgment by campaign team members in some instances. But it turns out the poor judgment was epidemic, because the Republicans refused to subpoena witnesses and documents that would have told a very different story, committee Democrats were not allowed to contribute to the report, and they had no interest in Mueller first concluding his investigation before they wrapped up theirs.   

The central irony of the hijinks of intel committee Republicans is that they tried to deceive in precisely the same way they (falsely) accused the FBI of deceiving the FISA Court.  This glittering example of democracy in action was timed -- and these Repubs have done nothing without first getting instructions from the big guy's handlers -- to be a prologue to another flurry of White House garment rending.   

This took the form of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe being fired for telling the truth 26 hours before he could retire and Trump criminal defense lawyer John Dowd insisting that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller after Trump axed McCabe's boss for refusing to shut down the Russia probe, should end the special counsel's inquiry immediately.  This, he explained, is because collusion allegations were "manufactured by McCabe's boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier."     

This was reinforced in a Trump sieg heil tweet to his base on Sunday morning in which he lashed out at Mueller, McCabe and Comey in terms that called to mind a wild animal caught in a trap as his pursuers close in on him.   

The result of all this is that we have reached yet another tipping point in a slo-mo constitutional crisis.  Perhaps we should call this chapter the saga of McCabe and Mr. Mueller. 

And so Nunes has put another nail in Trump's coffin, Dowd made a fool of himself, Paul Ryan suffered further whiplash looking the other way, Saturday Night Live continued to struggle to be more absurd than what actually is going on, and with the energized Democrats' electoral fortunes running high, the intel committee will order a redo when (and if) the party recaptures the House, and the business of impeaching Trump finally can be addressed. 

Then perhaps America's bad trip can finally begin to end. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related events. 

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Why Gina Haspel Is The Perfect Nominee For Donald Trump To Head The CIA

CNN

Writ large, Donald Trump's nomination of Gina Haspel to be director of the CIA is a victory for torturers and a defeat for women.  Do not allow anyone to try to tell you otherwise. 

Haspel, known among her CIA peers as"Bloody Gina," was a big cog -- a franchise player, in baseball lingo -- in the Bush Torture Regime machine.  As an undercover CIA officer, she played a hands-on role in the agency's so-called extraordinary rendition program, which routinely kidnapped, detained and interrogated terrorism suspects with Nazi-like techniques including waterboarding, imprisonment in small boxes, slapping and punching, sleep deprivation, being doused with icy cold water, mock execution threats that detainees' children would be killed and their mothers raped, and forced rectal feeding. 

Most of these evil and blatantly unconstitutional techniques, adopted after the 9/11 attacks, were carried out in so-called black sites.  Haspel, for her part, ran the "Cat's Eye," a secret detention facility in Thailand where the torture of Abu Zubaydah, a senior lieutenant to Osama bin Laden captured in Pakistan earlier in 2002, began on August 1 of that year. 

The torture was supposed to begin with open-palm slaps to the belly and face, according to John Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism officer who became a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  

But the interrogators decided to start with the toughest method -- waterboarding.  They waterboarded Zabaydah 83 times in the course of one month and later subjected him to sleep deprivation and locked him in a large dog cage for weeks at a time.  He also was placed in a coffin-sized box and, knowing that he had an irrational fear of insects, put bugs in with him. 

Haspel's boss, the notorious Jose Rodriguez, later claimed that the torture worked and provided intelligence that saved America lives, but this was false. 

There is not a shred of evidence that Zabayda or any other torture victim provided valuable intelligence, while the story that torture led to locating and assassinating Osama bin Laden is simply false.  In fact, all it did was tank America's standing in the civilized world as it ran roughshod over the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties. 

After being brutalized in Thailand, Zubaydah was transferred from prison to prison in Afghanistan, Poland, North Africa and Diego Garcia, losing his left eye along the way, and landed in Guantánamo Bay, where he has moldered in isolation in the notorious Camp 7 lockup since 2006. 

When the public started to get wise to the torture regime, videotapes and recordings of the interrogations were ordered destroyed.  By then, Haspel was back at CIA headquarters and was a party to if not the person who drafted and carried out the destruction orders.

Haspel, 61, is a perfect nominee for Trump and yet another example of him not draining the Washington swamp. 

The president's enthusiasm for brutality seems boundless.  He has instructed police to treat suspects roughly, praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for murdering people suspected of having drug ties and recently advocated executing drug dealers.  There's also evidence that Trump likes rough sex -- as in being on the receiving end -- something that has come up in connection with the Stormy Daniels scandal and in anecdotal evidence from acquaintances down through the years. 

Haspel was named deputy CIA director in February 2017, prompting the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights to ask German prosecutors to issue a warrant for her arrest because of her role in the interrogations, which puts her at risk of being arrested when she travels abroad.   

Lest anyone think otherwise, her nomination will sail through the Senate despite some isolated harrumphing from the usual scolds like Senator Diane Feinstein, for whom Kiriakou worked.  The former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee is demanding a complete accounting of Haspel's involvement in the rendition program and tape destruction, but won't get it.   

Michael Morell, deputy CIA director under Barack Obama, who took a powder and refused to prosecute torture regime perps, describes Haspel as a no-nonsense gal with "grit and toughness, and yet a big dose of humanity." 

While you gag on that, consider that Haspel is the first woman to head the CIA.  That might be cause for celebration under other circumstances, but her unashamed participation in the torture regime is no victory for feminism unless you believe that women should have an equal opportunity to torture along with men. 

Because truth be known, Haspel was and will continue to be an obedient servant of a violent patriarchy.  

Click HERE for an index of previous torture-related posts. 

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Intelligence Committee Republicans Run Up The Treason Flag & Proudly Salute It

MARK WILSON / GETTY IMAGES

Imagine that members of an frontline congressional committee, sworn to seek out the truth and punish wrongdoers in connection with the greatest assault on American democracy since the Soviets stole atomic bomb secrets over 70 years ago, instead decline to interview important witnesses and follow important leads, ignore salient facts and then issue a report that contradicts the long-verified conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community and is at odds with the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. 

Well, imagine no more, because in a The Japanese Didn't Really Bomb Pearl Harbor moment, that's what the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee has done in drafting a report stating that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump win the presidency. 

As shockingly irresponsible -- if not downright treasonous -- as that conclusion is, it comes as no surprise.   

Committee chairman Devin Nunes, the bumbling Inspector Clouseau of Capitol Hill, was in the bag for Trump before he got caught out last year concocting phony intelligence to embarrass former President Obama with White House help, then ostensibly recused himself from the committee's Russia probe but like an obedient poodle continued to feed committee Republicans a stream of kibble from Trump's handlers. 

Much of the news media, which too often still gives Trump and his congressional sycophancy undeserving breaks, will portray the bad-faith Republican draft report announced on Monday and a forthcoming Democratic minority report outlining the ample evidence that the Kremlin was helping Trump and the Trump campaign was helping the Kremlin, as partisan infighting.  

Cracks were appearing in the Republicans' facade on Tuesday as some committee members acknowledged that there was evidence that Russia tried to damage Clinton's candidacy and ranking committee Democrat Adam Schiff released a "status update" listing witnesses, firms and documents that the Republicans had declined to subpoena or compel to testify and the relevance to the investigation of each.

But it's really very simple: Overall, Democrats want the truth while Republicans are running from it.

WHY ARE DONALD TRUMP'S LAWYERS SO BAD?  Beyond the serial bumblings and ethical breeches shot through the Stormy Daniels saga because of Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer and fixer, we have the Keystone Kops "defending" the president on Russia scandal-related matters.  

Their most recent Through the Looking Glass brainstorm to try to keep Trump from becoming totally immersed in hot water is a deal they are contemplating offering Mueller: In return for granting the special counsel an interview with Trump, which is well within his purview to begin with, they will require him to wrap up his investigation within 60 days, which of course would allow witnesses with potentially incriminating information to run out the clock without giving anything up. 

Not only is there no chance that Mueller will bite, there are reports that he has decided to interview Trump after he has concluded his overall investigation.

These legal intrigues come as Ty Cobb, nominally Trump's lead criminal defense lawyer, is making noises about running for the nearest exit after distinguishing himself by assuring Trump that Mueller would wrap up his work by Thanksgiving . . . of 2017.  Then by the end of the year and then by January. 

As dumb as Trump can be, he's not that dumb, and so Cobb's schtick has worn thin, prompting a Hail Mary pass to lawyer Emmet Flood as fears grow that Trump could face impeachment proceedings next year if Democrats retake the House in the November midterm elections. 

Flood, who recently met with Trump in the Oval Office, is the answer to a trivia question: Who represented Bill Clinton during his 1998 impeachment trial?

To be fair, Cobb and fellow criminal defense lawyers John Dowd and Jay Sekelow have not had a pot to piss in because they known Trump is guilty as sin even if his malignant narcissism enables him to see things otherwise.  As a result, and beyond contemplating making an offer to Mueller he can and will refuse, they have had to resort to arcane legal interpretations. 

As in, for something to be a crime, there has to be a statute to be violated, but because there is not a statute refers to criminal collusion, there is no crime of collusion. Or, the president cannot be charged with obstructing justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer and has every right to express his view of any case.   

IS IT MERELY A COINCIDENCE that only hours after Rex Tillerson broke with Trump over the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, the president -- ever the coward when it comes to delivering bad news in person --  fired the secretary of state by Twitter?

Hard to tell since every White House upheaval -- and Tillerson is the umpteenth top administration official to get the ax -- is surrounded by high drama and low lies.  But Tillerson, in echoing British PM Theresa May, did say he had "full confidence" that Russia was the culprit in the strongest condemnation of Russia ever issued by the Trump administration.

Under "normal" circumstances, the U.S. would immediately offer its closest ally technical assistance, the president would call his counterpart in a show of solidarity and reporters would be invited into the president's inner sanctum where he would wag his finger in the direction of the Kremlin.   

But more than a week after Skripal, his daughter and a police officer were exposed to Novichok No. 5, a deadly nerve agent with Russia written all over it, and upwards of 500 people were exposed to neurological risk, none of that has happened beyond a brief call to May.  Instead, we have the most astounding example yet of the Russia-loving Trump defaulting on his responsibilities as the White House rebuffs questions about whether the U.S. even supports the U.K. finding of fact about Kremlin responsibility.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related events. 

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

The Thick Plottens: They Call It Stormy Daniels, But Tuesday's Just The Same

STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Its utter tawdriness aside, what is so mind blowingly delicious about the Stormy Daniels saga is that unlike the many other scandals swirling around the presidency of a profoundly unqualified and very sick man, this one is sticking, and a porn star may end up doing to Donald Trump what no one else has done -- seizing and keeping control of the narrative, something Trump has long been accustomed to doing. 

The next few days will be a crash course in contract law for those of us who have only recently become conversant with white-collar criminal law (as in, there's no such thing as collusion; it's conspiracy) thanks to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's relentless investigation of the Trump campaign's 2016 fandango with the Kremlin. 

The facts, more or less, of the Daniels scandal are these:

In 2006, Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) began an affair with Trump, but one of his 20-plus consensual liaisons and unwelcome sexual assaults of which we are aware.  In 2016, with the election only a few weeks away, Trump fixer Michael Cohen sought to silence Daniels with a $130,000 payoff through a shell company established just for that purpose. 

But Trump never signed the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) drafted by Cohen in which Daniels promised to remain silent and turn over videotapes and such in return for the hush money.  She has now sued Cohen (read Trump) for violating the NDA because of Cohen's amateurish effort to enable the president to maintain deniability about the affair. 

Cohen then got a temporary restraining order (TRO) from an arbitrator barring Daniels from speaking out, which she did in an interview with Cooper Anderson for 60 Minutes that has not yet aired.  Cohen is expected to seek to try to make the TRO permanent and seek an injunction to silence 60 Minutes and make the whole thing go away. 

The whole thing is not going away and the scandal bristles with sidelights, among them that Cohen and Trump may have violated campaign finance laws in not reporting the payoff.  Cohen also may have violated a slew of ethics rules, including making Daniels think that she was dealing with Trump when she was not.

The bottom line is that some 17 months after Cohen sought to silence Daniels, she is controlling the narrative, and perhaps shortening a shambles of a presidency that long has been on life support. 

With the focus of the scandal shifting to legal and press freedom issues, the president and his fixer effectively have become bystanders, and if they are unable to make the TRO permanent, let alone obtain a stay against CBS News, the floodgates will open to the whole magillah landing in open court, raising the Triple X-rated prospect of Trump being deposed if the NDA is declared invalid, which would stir Trump's numerous other sexual encounters and hush money payoffs into the mix just as Bill Clinton's other sexual encounters were addressed in the Paula Jones lawsuit. 

We can only hope. 

SO MANY DEALS, SO LITTLE TIME.  Not to forgive Trump's behavior, but Cohen has made such a hash of things that he has no good options.  Under a deal proposed by Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti, she is willing to return the $130,000 but with some major strings attached. 

They are:

After returning the hush money, Daniels will be free to speak openly about a relationship the White House continues to deny, as well as publish any photos, videos or text messages related to the president that she may have in her possession.

Oh, and there will be no attempt to block the airing of the 60 Minutes interview, which Cohen may not be able to do anyway because CBS News is not a party to the NDA. 

The First Amendment that Trump loves to hate provides the news media with strong protections, including barring preemptive efforts to prevent a story being published or aired, while the Supreme Court has roundly and repeatedly rejected attempts at prior restraint.   

Remember the Pentagon Papers? 

NOT THAT WE NEED REMINDING, but the Daniels scandal -- coming as it does as the #MeToo movement has gained serious traction and echoes from the Rob Porter wife abuse scandal continue to reverberate -- etches in even sharper relief what an abominable person the man entrusted with the nuclear football is. 

In an op-ed column titled "Melania Knew," Charles Blow of The New York Times lays out a timeline of Trump's infidelities. 

It goes something like this:

Trump was on a date with another woman the night he and Melania first met at a New York Fashion Week party in February 2003 to which he had been invited by a fixer who had brought Melania to America on a modeling contract, but he still asked for her phone number while his date was in the bathroom. 

Melania gladly provided her number because she had been briefed about Trump by the fixer and knew that he was in the process of divorcing Marla Maples, his second wife, with whom he had an affair while still married to his first wife, Ivana, who bore him three children, including daughter, Ivanka. 

In April 2004, Trump proposed to Melania, the same month he boasted to Howard Stern that he'd screw Ivanka if she wasn't his daughter.  They were wed in January 2005, while in October 2005 Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women while taping an "Access Hollywood" interview.   

Melania was four months pregnant by that time with son Barron, who was born on March 20, 2006.  In July 2006, Trump's affair with Daniels commenced at a celebrity golf event in Lake Tahoe and continued into early 2007.

Yes, Melania knew damned well what she was getting into.  Yes, the scandal can seem like a tawdry and pointless distraction.  But at its heart it is about Trump's utter corruptibility and his worldview that women are mere objects to be exploited as a billionaire playboy who happens to be a sleazebag, shyster and now president of the United States.

And we are all diminished for that.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

West Meets East: Stormy & Vlad Make It Clear That It's All About Sex & Blackmail

GABE GINSBERG / FILM MAGIC

What do Stormy Daniels and Vladimir Putin have in common?  More than you might think. 

This is because when you strip away the layers of sleaze around Donald Trump's now well-documented affair with the pornographic film star and the layers of deceit around his now well-documented relationship with Russians, you end up with a president profoundly susceptible to blackmail over sex.   

A president who in at least three instances has paid women substantial sums of hush money through surrogates and a frenemy in Putin who, as ex-British spy Christopher Steele wrote in his infamous dossier, has evidence of Trump's "sexual perversion" that can be used to manipulate him.  And, in my view, has been doing just that with another kind of hush money -- unquestioning obeisance in the face of the Kremlin's extraordinary assault on American democracy in the 2016 election and likelihood of an encore performance in 2018 that Trump seems disinclined to want to stop.      

It should go without saying that a president susceptible to blackmail is a security risk, leaving us even more vulnerable to the demons of a sicko as scandal after scandal washes over him and he sinks ever deeper into legal jeopardy.  

IT IS NOTABLE THAT IN THE VAST SWEEP of the crap and corruption that Trump has visited on America, the Stormy Daniels story actually barely qualifies as a scandal.   

Yes, we are fucked . . . er, in truly dreadful shape as a nation when the people who should be most outraged by the president's pussy-grabbing exploits -- Evangelicals -- have made a deal with the Devil by declaring that everyone sins and God (their God anyway) has forgiven him despite breaking, by my count, at least seven of the Ten Commandments.   

Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford) and Putin have something else in common: They are smart, clever and then some, and know they can play Trump like a cheap violin.  In Daniels' case, this includes enlisting a lawyer who has run legal circles around Michael Cohen, the president's longtime fixer.     

Keith Davidson, Daniels' previous lawyer got Cohen to agree to a nondisclosure agreement (NDA in legalspeak) dated October 28, 2016, 11 days before the election, in return for $130,000 he paid Daniels though a dummy corporation to keep her piehole shut about an affair that began in 2006 at a Lake Tahoe celebrity golf event and continued well into 2007 and is now null and void.  This, according to her new lawyer Michael Avenatti, is because (oops!) Trump himself never signed the NDA and the signature line where he is supposed to have done so under the alias "David Dennison" is blank.  (Daniels is referred to as "Peggy Peterson.")    

This has, in turn, prompted Peterson . . . er, Daniels to sue Cohen and assert that she no longer has to hush about what the suit calls her "Hush Agreement" and that Trump deliberately failed to sign the NDA because he wanted to maintain deniability about the affair.

While you chew on that delicious morsel, consider this one: Besides being a sex scandal, we've got a campaign finance scandal.

The $130,000 in hush money may have constituted an in-kind contribution to Trump's campaign in violation of federal campaign law.  Which again brings us back to the Russia scandal and the fact Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, in addition to pursuing illegal domestic campaign contributions, is busily teasing out contributions from interests in the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine and Russia, to name but three foreign players who are prohibited from providing goods and services like financial contributions to federal campaigns.  (Which raises an intriguing question: Is the extensive Russian cybersabotage of Hillary Clinton's campaign also an illegal campaign contribution?) 

Wait!  It gets better. 

The NDA stipulates that Daniels agreed to turn over to Trump certain so-called "property," including still images (wince), video images (double wince), paintings, Facebook postings, Instagram messages, text messages and emails.  She was not even allowed to keep a copy of the agreement.  Trump was required to report ownership of this property on his federal financial disclosure forms, but of course did not.  

Cohen's claim that he paid off Daniels all on his own doesn't wash because he used a Trump Organization email account in early negotiations with Daniels.  He has a longtime professional relationship with Trump, who under the Hush Agreement clearly is a party to the deal, which may be a violation of New York legal ethics rules.  As would be any effort by Cohen to make Daniels think that she was dealing with Trump when she was not.  (Oh, and the bank that wired the $130,000 to Daniels flagged the transaction as suspicious and reported it to the Treasury Department.)  

In any event, Daniels has kept her part of the deal but Trump has welshed on his.  So what's new? 

 

THE SCANDAL MAY SEEM LIKE A REALITY SHOW, but unlike The Apprentice, it's not going to go away at the end of the season. 

People with longer memories than Trump will recall that it was a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee, against Bill Clinton for repeatedly hitting on her when he was Arkansas governor that nearly brought down his presidency.  (Impeachment can do that.)  Clinton agreed to an out-of-court settlement, paying Jones and her lawyers a sweet $850,000 to drop the lawsuit not because he was guilty, or anything, but so he could move on with his life.  (Cough, cough.)

Just when it looked like the Daniels scandal might retreat into the shadows, joining the Rob Porter debacle and other recent White House conflagrations, Cohen stepped in it again, followed by Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who for the record is the daughter of an Evangelical minister. 

Cohen won an emergency temporary restraining order (TRO in legalspeak) from an arbitrator barring Daniels from speaking out, which prompted Sanders to tell reporters at a press briefing last week with a practiced na na na nah na snear that "arbitration was won in the president's favor," effectively exploding heads throughout the West Wing because it was the first time anyone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had conceded that Trump was involved with Daniels. 

The TRO and lawsuit open the door to the whole magillah landing in court, raising the Triple X-rated prospect of Trump being deposed if the NDA is declared invalid, which would stir Trump's numerous other sexual . . . uh, interactions and hush money payoffs into the mix just as Clinton's other interactions were addressed in the Paula Jones case. 

Meanwhile, Daniels has taped an interview with Anderson Cooper to be broadcast on 60 Minutes.  (Jones was interviewed by Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live in 1994.) 

The interview is tentatively scheduled for airing on March 18 unless lawyers for Cohen (which is to say Trump) decide to go to court to block CBS News by seeking to make the TRO permanent.  In 2011, Cohen was successful in stopping In Touch Weekly from publishing an interview with Clifford after threatening legal action.  The magazine finally published the interview last month after the Wall Street Journal broke the story of Cohen's $130,000 payment. 

"Our aim and our messaging is very simple," Avenatti said on Sunday in taunting the White House.  "We're going to shoot straight, we're going to provide evidence and facts, and we are going to consistently advocate for the American people being able to make their own decisions as to who’s telling the truth and who’s lying to them.  She wants a forum to tell her version of events and let the chips fall where they may."

Seventeen months after Cohen sought to silence Daniels, she is controlling the narrative, something the president is accustomed to doing, but getting her lawsuit into a public court is a yuge hurdle, as David Dennison himself might say. 

While I am confident there really is a God and not just some guy with a long, white beard whose robes those Evangelicals hide their unholy hypocrisy behind, my guess is that an out-of-court agreement will be hammered out.  And if we get really lucky, we can rid ourselves of Cohen and Sanders in the process, if not Trump himself -- at least for the time being.

Click HERE to read "Melania Trump May Be

The Only Person Capable Of Blowing Up The Presidency."