'O Captain! My Captain! Rise Up And Hear The Bells . . . '

MARK BRYAN

The Ship of State is rudderless, its once mighty sails shredded, and all the crew can do is look on in horror as the lifeboats are lowered. 

Everything we had feared about the Captain — his malignant narcissism, inability to separate reality from fantasy and so much more — has come to pass.  In these once proud United States, we cower in fear of a "leader" who is unable to feel compassion and when called out by the "fake" news media reliably doubles down.  The world is flat because I say so, dammit to Hell! 

First Mate Bannon is not the problem.  His poisonous presence on the bridge is merely a reflection of a Captain who is unable to distinguish between a monument to George Washington honoring his visionary patriotism and one to Robert E. Lee erected in the service of maintaining white supremacy.  Who sees a moral equivalence between Nazis and those who oppose Nazis.  Who is blindered to the reality that Heather Heyer is dead because of the dystopian dream of her executioner to make Amerika great again -- a white, fascist ethnostate. 

But that moral equivalence thing can't be right because the Ship of State has no moral compass.   

And it seems like only a matter of time before the ship topples off the edge of that flat earth and into the abyss, Second Mates McConnell and Ryan desperately hanging onto the Captain's coattails as they continue to defend the indefensible. 

The Captain is ignorant of the waters in which he sails.  And so besodden with grievance that he erupts into a spray of spittle-inflected rage when questioned about his hateful views and then in response tramples on Ms. Heyer's freshly dug grave, Chief Navigator Kelly bringing neither order nor calm to the bridge, merely crossing his arms and staring at his shoes in impotent dismay as the Captain rages.

This is the point when we might reasonably ask, "So what are we going to do about it? How to get the Ship of State back on course when the crew shows no signs of mutinying?" 

Weep, my friends.  And then pray. 

Sergei Millian Flew Too Close To Donald Trump's Sun. Now He Fears For His Life.

2007: MILLIAN (LEFT) WITH TRUMP AT A MIAMI RACETRACK

Sergei Millian has learned the hard way that if you get too close to Donald Trump -- or in his case even claim that you are close -- you can get burned.  Or worse. 

Millian is a not atypical expat from the former Soviet Union who came to the U.S. because of the opportunities it offered but kept in close touch with friends and family in the Old Country.  But he took that a big step further by trying to cash in -- literally and figuratively -- by claiming he was a friend of Trump as well as boasting about his associations with some of the key figures in what has become known as the Russia scandal.  A question must also be asked: 

Beyond Millian's boasts, was he a recruiter, perhaps even an unwitting one, for Russians looking for people who might be used as so-called "entry points" to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign? 

Today Millian is said to be in hiding, possibly in the Atlanta area, while his father claims that his son has asked for but been refused U.S. government protection. 

It was only a few months ago that Millian asserted that he had inside knowledge of collusion between Trump's campaign and players in the wildly successful Vladimir Putin-directed plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton and hand the 2016 election to a billionaire reality television star who enthusiastically embraced the autocratic Russian leader. 

Millian fears for his life for good reason.  One of the associates to whom he boasted was assassinated, almost certainly because he had blabbed to a former British spy about what Millian had told him.   

The 38-year-old naturalized American citizen is a native of Belarus, a grindingly poor one political party republic that was a founding member of the former Soviet Union and is the last dictatorship in Europe under the thumb of strongman Alexander Lukashensko, a longtime Putin ally.  Born Siarhei Kukuts, Millian is said to have changed his name to something that he thought sounded less provincial.   He is a local hero in the village of Sharkaŭshchyna, where a framed photo of him hangs in a place of honor at School Number One. 

Millian trained as a lawyer and military interpreter before moving to the U.S. in 2001.  

He has lived in Atlanta, which has a large Russian population, and in Astoria, Queens in New York, dabbled in real estate and established a series of enterprises that have survived on shoestring budgets, including an entity called the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA and a translation service that for a time had a contract with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  More recently, he is said to have been working on developing business ties with Beijing through an organization called the World Chinese Merchants Union Association. 

Millian has said he first met Trump in Moscow in 2007 at a "Millionaire's Fair" where the future president was promoting Trump Vodka, then again when Trump invited him to a Miami racetrack, and finally in New York. 

"He introduced me to his right-hand man—Michael Cohen," Millian said in an interview with RIA Novosti, a Russian media outlet.  "Cohen is Trump’s main lawyer, all contracts go through him.  Subsequently, a contract was signed with me to promote one of their real estate projects in Russia. . . .  You can say I was their exclusive broker."  

2016: OLEG DERIPASKA (LEFT) AND MILLIAN IN ST. PETERSBURG 

Millian is well connected, at least to a point.   

He knows George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who repeatedly tried to interest Trump in meeting with Russian officials, including Putin, and likely was viewed by Moscow as an "entry point" into the campaign.  And he knew Oleg Erovinkin, a former Russian intelligence chief and liaison between Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin and Putin. 

He has traveled to Russia fairly frequently and was a periodic interview subject in Russian-language media where he is considered an expert on U.S.-Russia relations. 

Among his most recent trips was one last summer where he was seen consorting with Russian officials and businessmen, including aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Putin pal who has become ensnared in the Russia scandal because of his business dealings with Paul Manafort, a former Trump campaign manager who is a leading focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. 

Millian may also be shrewd, but his proclivity for schmoozing and need to feel self important has finally gotten him in a lot of trouble.  It also may be the reason Erovinkin is dead. 

Enter former MI6 spy turned investigator Christopher Steele, who in his by now famous dossier on Putin's sock puppetry of Trump, wrote that the Russians have been "cultivating, supporting and assisting" Trump for years and have personal and financial kompromat (compromising information) on him that could be used for blackmail. 

In a memo, Steele calls one of his informants "Source D." 

Steele identified Source D as "a close associate of TRUMP who had organized his recent trips to Moscow. . . . "  Source D, Steele wrote, asserted that there was a "well developed conspiracy of cooperation between [Trump] and Russian leadership" managed for the future president by Manafort.

He wrote that Source D also spoke of a salacious incident that has overshadowed  more portentious aspects of the dossier -- the  "golden showers" episode. 

According to this allegation, in 2013 Trump rented the "presidential suite" at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow because Barack and Michele Obama has stayed in that room, hired prostitutes to "defile" the bed in which they slept by urinating on each other, and the Kremlin has videotaped evidence of the encounter.  This among all of the dossier's allegations (which Steele wrote was corroborated by his Source F, a Ritz Carlton employee) especially infuriated Trump, who pushed back by claiming he is a germophobe.  

Source D is Millian. 

Steele, who wrote that Source D's assertions had been corroborated by Russian government and intelligence sources, wrote the memo on June 20, 2016 based on reports from his sources on the ground in Russia.  This is two days after Millian had attended the government-sponsored St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in that northern Russia city. 

Millian is now in hiding because he is alleged to have told an associate believed to be Erovinkin what he knew and Erovinkin may have passed that information on to Steele, whose dossier is considered to be so credible that it underpinned the early phase of the Justice Department investigation into the Trump campaign's collusion with Russians led by FBI Director James Comey before he was fired by Trump, which in turn led to Mueller's appointment. 

Erovikin was found dead in the back seat of his black Lexus off of Red Square in Moscow last December 26.  Authorities claimed that he died of a heart attack, which is the default cause in many of the 10 or so suspicious deaths linked to the scandal.  

2017: MILLIAN HAMS IT UP BEFORE TRUMP'S INAUGURATION

Millian has now walked back from his previous boasts about his Trump and Russian connections in the face of what he called "false statements" and "the fake news hatchet job operatives' attack [on me] employed by our political enemies," in an exchange of emails with me over the weekend. 

He now portrays himself as an innocent bystander caught up in an international drama, and began his walk back in an appearance on Russian television in late January in which he denied knowing any information that would be damaging to Trump. 

"I want to say that I don't have any compromising information, neither in Russia nor in the United States, nor could I have," he pleaded in Russian.  "Without a doubt it is a blatant lie and an effort of some people -- it's definitely a group of people -- to portray our president in a bad light using my name.   

Millian also has removed any mention of his Trump contacts in an online biography and on the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce website, where he had boasted of formal agreements with the Trump Organization.  And last week he threatened to sue the editor-in-chief of a current affairs website for libel if he did remove a paragraph from a post I wrote on Manafort's growing legal woes in which I noted that Steele had written in his dossier that Source D had cited Manafort as the go-between for Trump and Russian leadership.  

"I have never said that I worked personally for Mr. Trump," Millian told Mother Jones magazine.   "I said I was a broker for one of his many real estate projects.  I have never represented Mr. Trump personally and I am not working with Mr. Trump." 

Millian asserts that all of the Russia scandal dirt attributed to him is false, as is the scandal itself.  He says he admires Trump and complained in a recent tweet that Trump has fulfilled all of his campaign promises but that has not been noted by the mainstream media. 

"The media must stop radicalizing terrorists with their hysterical anti-Trump fake news," he said in another tweet, using buzz words such as terrorists, hysterical and fake news in dutifully echoing the White House and alt-right line about the Russia scandal. 

Millian says that it has only been in the last eight months that negative information began to appear about him, and only then because he said that he "personally supported Mr. Trump in his desire to be the president." 

"Thank God we are alive and healthy -- and we can tell the truth," he recently told a British newspaper.  "And the truth is that sadly there is some group of persons who are interested in the impeachment of our president, for whom millions voted."

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal. 

Will Paul Manafort Become A Russia Scandal Casualty? Or Rat Out The President?

CNN

When the predawn quiet in the leafy confines of an upscale Alexandria, Virginia neighborhood was broken two weeks ago by the sound of FBI agents pounding on the door of Paul Manafort, it might have signaled a significant turning point in the Russia scandal. 

Manafort, once referred to as Donald Trump's consigliere and his presidential campaign manager for an eventful two months during the summer of 2016, has been a marked man for years because of his laissez-faire approach to financial wheeling and dealing with shadowy Russian figures abroad and corporate shell games and money laundering at home.  All that baggage and his role as a campaign insider who is not a loyal Trump family member has made him an especially lucrative target for Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who obtained the search warrant the blue windbreaker-clad agents were holding when they woke Manafort on July 26. 

The fact they had a search warrant and showed up at Manafort's home without warning is significant. 

A search warrant is granted only if a judge agrees that there is probable cause that evidence of a crime will be found.  Mueller and his investigative team believed that despite Manafort's claims of cooperating (he had voluntarily appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee the previous day), he had not handed over all of the pertinent tax documents and foreign financial records they wanted.

There also is a possibility that Manafort was holding out on something even more important -- the contemporaneous notes he is said to have taken during the now infamous meeting with several Russians with spy agency ties in Trump Tower on June 16, 2016 after he, Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner were lured to the sitdown by the Russians' claim they had official documents that could "incriminate" Hillary Clinton and would be a windfall for the then struggling Trump campaign. 

Mueller's aggressive tactics -- and one of Trump's lawyers has characterized the FBI's uninvited visit to Manafort as "an abuse of power" -- include subpoenas from the Washington grand jury he convened last month to global banks for records of their transactions with Manafort and putting pressure on son-in-law Jeffrey Yohai, who is estranged from Manafort's filmmaker daughter Jess, to cooperate in order to get "into Manafort's head," as one investigator put it.  

"A search warrant is very bracing for the person who is being searched," said Jack Sharman, the former special counsel to the House Banking Committee during its Whitewater investigation of President Clinton in the 1990s.  "It's very invasive and sends a loud statement from the prosecutors to the person that there should be no doubts about the seriousness of the investigation." 

Manafort's dealings with Trump date to 1980 when Trump became one of the first clients of the lobbying firm of Black, Manafort & Stone, which he, Republican activist Charles Black Jr. and Roger Stone had just founded.  Stone, a future Trump confidante and political dirty trickster on whose recommendation Manafort was brought into the campaign in March 2016, also is under investigation.   

Manafort was elevated to campaign manager four days after the Trump Tower meeting following tough guy Corey Lewandowski's unceremonious ouster, which even given the anarchy and amateurishness that characterized the campaign seemed like a unusual choice since Manafort had no experience running a national political campaign.   

What Manafort did have was connections. 

He had lobbied on behalf of a rogue's gallery of corrupt foreign leaders, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seiko in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angolan guerrilla heavyweight Jonas Savimbi. 

It seems inevitable that a person with Manafort's nose for really bad people would be attracted to some of the scumbags in Russian leader Vladimir Putin's orbit.   

These include Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich.  Manafort vacuumed up over $12 million in off-the-books payments from Yanukovich, which led to his ouster from the Trump campaign in August 2016 because of embarrassing news accounts regarding the payments, which Manafort steadfastly denied receiving until a ledger book with a meticulously detailed records of them was shown to journalists.  Manafort nevertheless remained in touch with the White House, and was giving advice on how to fight Russia collusion charges as recently as April.

It has not helped that among the thousands of iPhone and email messages from Manafort's daughter Andrea to her sister Jessica hacked and posted online by Ukrainian hackers include one saying that their father had "no moral and legal compass," another that "He's a sick f*cking tyrant and we keep showing up and dancing for him . . . We just keep showing up and eating the lobster," and yet another that their mother Kathleen and father could not go through a "public divorce" because Manafort had "too many skeletons." 

Manafort's legal woes include failing to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department, which he did retroactively in June, the stink emanating from his $10 million a years deal with Putin pal and oligarch-mobster Oleg Deripaska to help rehabilitate Putin's image outside of Russia, and suspicion of money laundering involving New York real estate investments and his numerous transactions with the Bank of Cyprus, the offshore haven for money laundering by Russian oligarchs and mobsters.  There may be the skeletons that his daughter alluded to, and now even the National Enquirer, the president's favorite sleazy supermarket tabloid, has turned on him.  

He also is heavily in debt, owing pro-Russian business interests as much as $17 million before he joined Trump's campaign, according to financial records, and he has lost considerable sums of money because of failed real estate investments he made with Yohai, who is the subject of a lawsuit alleging he ran a Ponzi scheme using his New York real estate businesses. 

Among Manafort's own properties under investigation are a $3 million four-story brownstone in the posh Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn that Manafort purchased through a shell company and he is said to have given to Yohai and his daughter as a wedding present.  It has sat empty and neglected for four years.

Beginning in the summer of 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies' electronic surveillance revealed that senior Russian intelligence and political operatives were discussing how to influence Trump through Manafort and Michael Flynn, Trump's short-lived national security director, who has gotten into plenty of trouble on his own and sent mixed signals about cooperating. 

Among Manafort's contacts with Russians are meetings in early May 2016 and August 2016 with Konstantine Kilimnik, a Ukrainian businessman who served in the Russian army and may be working for Russian intelligence. 

The big reason why Mueller is leaning so hard on Manafort is, of course, because he plays an important role in virtually every aspect of the special prosecutor's hydra-headed investigation.  Amazing.   And because of that, there is the possibility that he will give up Trump to save his own ass.  There also is the intriguing prospect (which at this point is entirely a product of my own febrile imagination) that Mueller might be able to prove that Manafort did not just happen to become a Trump campaign insider but was "placed" in the campaign by the Russians scheming to interfere in the election. 

Manafort giving up the president may be wishful thinking.   

He may not have the knowledge to directly implicate Trump; hearsay evidence won't float anyone's boat.  The penalties for failing to register as a foreign agent, a crime that has not been prosecuted for many years, are relatively small, while using the very serious money laundering allegations as leverage still may be insufficient although he is extremely vulnerable legally. 

What it might come down to is Manafort having to choose between the lesser of two evils -- Mueller's sleuths or Putin's goon squad.        

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal.

Why A Grand Jury Means Big Trouble For Trump As The Russia Probe Accelerates

TING SHEN / EYEVINE / REDUX

It was early August 2016.  Election Day and the final showdown between Hillary Clinton, who was widely expected to become the first woman president, and Donald Trump, the longshot celebrity windbag who improbably had won the Republican nomination, was three months away.  Washington was sweltering through a mid-summer heatwave, but it was cool in CIA Director John Brennan's secure situation room at the spy agency's headquarters in suburban Langley, where he had called an emergency meeting of high-ranking representatives from the U.S. intelligence community.   

Participants would recall that it soon seemed as if the air had been sucked out of the room as the Brennan announced he was convening a secret task force to keep President Obama and senior government officials informed of a nascent investigation into what appeared to be the greatest assault on American democracy since Soviet spies stole atomic bomb secrets over 70 years ago -- a plot directed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin to elect Trump by sabotaging Clinton's campaign through an army of cyber thieving computer hackers who, according to the then sketchy evidence, were being assisted by Trump's own inner circle.

In the year since that fateful meeting, Brennan's deep concern has been validated many times over as subsequent intelligence, most of it in the form of intercepted communications between Russians stationed in the U.S. and their superiors in Moscow, has unearthed a trove of evidence that Trump became president not by popular mandate (after all, he received three million fewer votes than did Clinton) but the fiendishly successful efforts of Putin's hackers, as well as a measure of luck, that enabled these saboteurs to take the information provided by Trump's advisers and suppress the Clinton vote in enough key districts in enough key states to assure Trump of victory where it mattered, the strange and uniquely American institution known as the Electoral College.  

A year after Brennan's meeting -- and perhaps improbably, given all the so-called norms that Trump has shattered, collapse of many constitutional checks and balances and deeply partisan nature of Washington in the new millennium -- the several Russia scandal investigations are lumbering forward.   

Robert Mueller is at the head of the lead investigation as a special counsel appointed because of efforts by Trump to obstruct the course of justice, notably firing FBI Director James Comey, that are so brazen that in another time they would have gotten a president impeached.   

Mueller has convened a grand jury that has been meeting for several weeks at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse on Constitution Avenue in Washington.  The presence of a grand jury does not mean that Mueller has the goods on collusion between Russia and Trump's inner circle.  But neither can there be any doubt that the initial phase of Mueller's accelerating investigation has produced enough evidence of collusion for him to empanel a grand jury to issue subpoenas for documents and compel reluctant witnesses to testify or risk being jailed on contempt of court charges. 

The scope of Mueller's investigation is reflected in the expertise of his team of 20 or so criminal attorneys and seasoned investigators who have worked on cases ranging from Watergate to Enron to cyber crime, money laundering and bribery that he has assembled in a suite of commandeered offices at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building a few blocks from the courthouse. 

The investigation has three tracks:

* The original reason for the investigation -- the possibility of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. 

* Whether Trump himself obstructed justice by firing Comey under false pretenses, among his other actions to sabotage the investigations. 

* Whether wrongdoing -- including finance and banking law violations -- is uncovered in the course of investigating the first two tracks.

Unfortunately for Trump, grand juries don't investigate hoaxes -- or "a total fabrication" -- as Trump declared at a campaign-style rally in West Virginia a few hours after the grand jury story broke.  

There are an abundance of signs that the heat from Mueller's investigation and an unending stream of damaging leaks to the news media -- which has added significantly to the paralysis that characterizes Trump's presidency in particular and Republicans in general despite their control of all three branches of government -- are forcing him to turn to his only safe harbor.   

That is his base. 

Trump's message to that base, delivered in hysterical denials by Kellyanne Conway and other sycophants, in his own tweet storms and rallies in friendly climes like West Virginia, is that the very institutions constitutionally obligated to pursue his wrongdoing -- or in the case of the news media constitutionally protected to pursue it -- are evil forces conspiring to undo the election by illegitimate means. 

It is by casting the scandal as fiction and trying to undermine the credibility of the intelligence services, Mueller, the news media and more recently certain Republicans who have left the reservation in proposing legislation to discourage him from firing the special prosecutor, that Trump maintains a chokehold on a base that has deep rooted feelings about being mistreated by government institutions. 

This has prompted fears that Trump will demagogue his supporters into a riotous frenzy, but I believe that many of them are as exhausted, if not as disillusioned, as the rest of us are. 

Trump's greatest fear has to be that the financial track of Mueller's investigation will connect some pretty obvious dots.

That Russians -- the very people Trump continues to swear he did no business with evah -- kept the Trump Organization afloat for years through grossly overinflated condo purchases, secretive deals with shadowy offshore corporations and money laundering through those condos and Atlantic City casinos.  It is probable that this rogue's gallery will include Trump's eldest son, son-in-law and perhaps his daughter, as well. 

If the thought has not occurred earlier to Trump that he is in very big trouble, he ain't seen anything yet.  Be afraid, Donald Trump. Be very afraid.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal. 

It Seems Like Trump Can't Dance To The Russian Bear's Tune Anymore. Or Can He?

GETTY IMAGES

Vladimir Putin is only the latest person to learn to his dismay that if you try to get close to Donald Trump, you get burned.  But unlike Anthony Scaramucci, Reince Priebus, Chris Christie and . . . well, the 62 million people who voted for him, there is a divine thug-meets-thug serendipitousness about this bit of political arson. 

Putin thought he was doing a proklyatyy shtraf (damned fine) job of getting Trump to dance to the Russian bear's tune by helping elevate the former Soviet Union  to its Cold War glory, never mind that Crimea dust-up and Putin's kleptocratic tendencies in general. Trump was more than happy to oblige Putin after Russia whacked Hillary Clinton with the connivance of his presidential campaign.  (Then there is the not small matter of Vlad probably having something yuge with which to blackmail Trump, but that's another story.)

This is the part of the movie where it should be noted that as fiendishly ingenious as Putin has seemed to be, he also got lucky even if his little bump -- cyberbot-delivered manufactured news to embarrass Clinton, hacked emails, James Comey and all -- might have made a difference.   

And perhaps misunderestimated that one consequence of Trump's raving narcissism is that he is capable of doing really stupid things he does not believe will put him at legal risk. 

But now Putin's luck seems to have run out.  Or has it?

The overwhelming view of the punditocracy is that Putin's courtship of Trump has "backfired spectacularly," in the words of a New York Times scribe. 

This has nothing to do with Trump souring on his longtime bromance with the embodiment of America's past and present enemy and everything to do with Congress souring on an unceasingly bombastic president and its dawning awareness of how destructive Trump has become to the Grand Old Party, not to mention the country. 

Would the bromance have taken a dark turn earlier if Trump had not continued to believe he is innocent and insist that the Russia scandal was "fake news" and "the greatest witch hunt in political history"? 

Possibly, but it matters not because a coalition of Democrats who blame Putin for contributing to Clinton's defeat and Republicans horrified that an overmatched Trump doesn't understand who he is dealing with in Putin rammed through and sent to the White House a package of new Russian economic sanctions by nearly unanimous 98-2 and 419-3 votes in the Senate and House wrapped with a warning that Trump vetoes the legislation at his own peril.   

And so all those meetings between Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and who knows who else, and Russian officials to discuss, if not promise, the easing of sanctions when the billionaire reality television star became the leader of the free world, not to mention those friendly Trump-Putin chitchats in Hamburg last month, seem to have been for naught.

Putin's initial response to the new sanctions was to impose the harshest measures on the U.S. since the Communist revolution in 1917.  His second response was to order upwards of 100,000 troops to the eastern edge of NATO territory in Belarus.  Both Cold War-style tactics will boomerang on poor Donald, who had only recently learned to sing "The Volga Boatman."

There will be other reminders that the Russian leader is trying to undermine American democracy, that the president has been complicit in those efforts, and that there is a great likelihood that Moscow will launch fresh cyber attacks against which the U.S. is unprepared and Trump has shrugged off in refusing to heed warnings from intelligence and election officials. 

Then there are Putin's expansionist tendencies.   

The original sanctions imposed by the Obama administration were a consequence of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea.  Trump didn't just soft-pedal that as a candidate, his campaign team rewrote the Republican National Convention platform on Ukraine, removing a pledge that the U.S. would provide lethal weapons in its fight over Crimea, as well as a call for maintaining or increasing sanctions.  Trump will be unable to be so blasé when Putin next scratches his expansionist itch.

Yet despite all that, I'm not ready to declare the Trump-Putin bromance dead and I suspect my decidedly minority view may look a whole like smarter over the long haul. 

For one thing, Trump signed the sanctions bill with a gun to his head, appending to it a signing statement delineating his assertion that Congress intruded into his constitutional powers to conduct foreign affairs.   

For another, in Trump's responsibility-free alternate universe, Congress is to blame for the downturn in relations with Moscow, not Russia or (heaven forbid!) the thug who directed the election cyber-interference.

For yet another, there is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who is just one of several Cabinet members with Russia connections.  (The others are Wilbur Ross at Commerce, who led the 2014 rescue of the Bank of Cyprus, a favorite conduit for Russian oligarch and mob money laundering; Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who met who knows how many times with a Russian official during the campaign, and the late, lamented Flynn, whose brazen contacts with and payoffs from Russians short-circuited his tenure as national security director.)  

Tillerson's mere presence in the job as the U.S.'s lead diplomat is a reflection of Trump's outlook on all things Russian.  He is a personal friend of Putin and made tens of billions of dollars for ExxonMobil from Russian oil when he was CEO of the multinational energy giant. 

Tillerson doesn't break wind without Trump's permission, so the president's small hands are all over a dispute regarding $80 million to fight Russian disinformation and terrorist propaganda, not that there's much difference between the two.   Although the money already has been appropriated by Congress and Tillerson is legally obligated to spend it, he refuses to do so. 

And so sanctions or not, Trump is still putting Russian interests above America's.  

GETTY IMAGES

Legislation is in the offing to shield special counsels from political influence, as in should Trump makes good on his threats to fire Robert Mueller. 

On Monday, a bill was introduced by Senators Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican, and Corey Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, that would require the Justice Department to seek a request from a federal judge before firing Mueller or any other special counsel.

Another bill to be introduced by Senators Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, and Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, would allow any Justice Department special counsel to challenge their firing in court and to have it reviewed by a three-judge panel. 

Both bills would apply retroactively to May 17, 2017, the day Mueller was assigned as a special counsel after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in a brazen and botched attempt to shut down the primary investigation into Russia election interference and the collusion of the Trump campaign in that successful effort. 

The bills also would limit a president's authority to hire and fire special counsels, a right that fell under the president's purview after Congress let an independent-counsel law established in the wake of the Watergate scandal expire in 1999 following Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Clinton.  

While Trump cannot fire Mueller directly, there are concerns that he might seek to replace AG Sessions, who has technically recused himself from the Russia investigation, and that would be easier to do while the Senate is in recess.  But in another slap to Trump, lawmakers agreed to a series of so-called pro forma sessions that ensures it never officially goes on recess although it has adjourned until after Labor Day.  

Mueller reportedly has now impaneled a grand jury in Washington in connection with his investigation.  Despite the breathlessness with which many people have greeted this news, it's no big deal.  Grand juries are how federal prosecutors conduct their investigations, including the need to compel reluctant witnesses to testify under oath and issuing subpoenas for documents such as bank records -- and yes, tax returns -- that people won't produce them voluntarily.  

There is broad, bipartisan support in Congress for Mueller's investigation, so the bills would appear likely to pass, setting up another confrontation with the president over Russia.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal. 

Book Review: Roger Steffens' 'So Much Things To Say' & The Majesty Of Bob Marley

BILLBOARD

There are no facts in Jamaica, only versions. ~ OLD FOLK SAYING 

For an average white boy from the suburbs, reggae grabbed me hard and has never let go. 

It was the summer of 1973 and I was visiting San Francisco with old friend George

Wolkind.  We drove over to Berkeley one night and caught the Jerry Garcia Band at the Keystone.  They were great, but the revelation of the evening -- and of what turned out to be a 6,500-mile Delaware to Florida to California to Washington state to Delaware trip -- was the mind-blowing music pulsing through the PA system when the band took a break.  I had cut my teeth on Motown in my early teens and adored soul and R&B, but I was knocked over by the swinging backbeat, mellifluous vocal stylings and hypnotic minor chords that ran through what turned out to be the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, the 1972 Perry Henzell-directed classic starring Jimmy Cliff.

I inquired of Garcia Band sound guy Dan Healy and he suggested I could find the album at Trench Town Records in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. The next day I bought The Harder They Come and, on the recommendation of the record store clerk, Catch a Fire, which happened to be the debut American album of a group called Bob Marley and The Wailers.  

Roger Steffens tells a not dissimilar story in the preface to the just published So Much Things To Say, a marvelous oral history of Marley's life and times.  A resident of

DAVID BURNETT

Berkeley, Steffens saw The Harder They Come about the time I heard the soundtrack, and he too journeyed to Trench Town Records where he too bought the album.  He was similarly grabbed, over the years has become the leading Marley authority, and like me came to value reggae as not just a wonderful musical genre but a very special way to see the world. 

Oral histories can be messy, but that is why they can be far more illuminating than straight nonfiction prose.  In the case of So Much Things To Say, this format and the sometimes contradictory memories of Bob render a humanness to a man who has been endlessly mythologized.   

(One close acquaintance of Bob has it that "I Shot the Sheriff," which was an even bigger hit for Eric Clapton, was an allegory about birth control. Another claims it was a private joke about hanging out with white people.  Yet another swears it was a reference to the police-state violence gripping Jamaica after independence from Great Britain and through much of the 1970s.)  

Ras Rojah, as Steffens' Rasta friends call him, interviewed dozens of people.  Among them were the other original Wailers -- Neville "Bunny Wailer" Livingston, Peter Tosh, Beverly Kelso, Junior Braithwaite, and

DENNIS MORRIS

Carlton and Family Man Barrett -- as well as wife Rita Marley and lover Cindy Breakspeare, and mother Cedella Booker.   

Then there are the producers and managers, including Lee "Scratch" Perry, Coxson Dodd, Chris Blackwell and Don Taylor.  And Johnny Nash, who introduced Bob's reggae sensibility to the U.S. before Marley himself broke through with his hit "I Can See Clearly Now."       

§  

Sadly, I never saw Bob live although I did get to know Rita, his mother Cedella and uncle Gibson, as well as future reggae star Ziggy when he was still in nappies, because of the proximity of the farm on which I lived to Cedella's home in Wilmington, Delaware and the accidental profusion of organic Jamaican foods that we grew, which made them frequent guests.   

Beyond Bob's stupendous abilities as a songwriter, he had a unique capacity to take the suffering of Jamaicans and other people and turn them into poetry.  He was and arguably remains the only global superstar, although some of his friends told Steffens they

GETTY IMAGES

believe he had drifted away from his radical roots bredren, into the arms of the white and brown Jamaican elite and eventually became a "beggar of the jet set," in Taylor's harsh estimation. 

Nesta Robert Marley survived an assassination attempt in 1976 and died in 1981 of cancer, his weakened dreadlocks too heavy for his weakened frame.  He was only 36.  His legacy includes an extraordinary range of paraphernalia -- posters, hats, bags, soaps, creams, coffee, dietary-supplement drinks, cannabis oil and Tuff Gong t-shirts (I own two) -- that have made Rita and others who have cashed in on his esstate very wealthy.  Most of Bob's 60 albums and remixes (not counting innumerable bootlegs and marginally listenable pre-Wailers recordings) remain in print, including Exodus (1977), which is my favorite.  

Linton Kwesei Johnson, the dub poet and former reggae star, has this to say about Bob in the introduction to So Much Things To Say:

The Rastafarian soul rebel, armed with his distinctive voice, a guitar, a great backing band and fine backing vocals, was a man on a mission to challenge the "isms and schisms" of principalities and powers as he fought against spiritual wickedness in high and low places.  His legacy of catchy danceable songs of defiance, resistance, rebellion, love and hope continues to reverberate around the world; his lyrical and melodic genius guarantees the contemporaneity of his music. 

Irae. 

How The Right Wing Kept Murdering Seth Rich With The White House's Eager Help

FACEBOOK

What if the White House could assist Fox News -- The Donald's favorite go-to source in the right-wing media firmament -- in fabricating some particularly insidious fake news in order to push back against increasingly serious Russia scandal allegations?  Given the opportunity, it leaped at it. 

The White House -- and perhaps President Trump himself -- provided a willing hand to Fox News and a millionaire Trump sycophant to push a fabricated story about the murder of Democratic National Committee data specialist Seth Rich in a brazen attempt to "lift the cloud" of the Russia scandal by discrediting the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia hacked the DNC and stole emails published by WikiLeaks.  

That is the stunning conclusion of a defamation lawsuit filed on Tuesday, first reported by David Folkenflik at National Public Radio, that would seem to be preposterous on its face had Trump and his administration not engaged in so many other efforts to discredit the scandal and undermine investigators, including using media that is slavishly supportive of Trump to push dubious or false stories beneficial to the president. 

In fact, fake conspiracies have been effective weapons for Trump in trying to hide real conspiracies.  Consider his false claim that Barack Obama personally ordered the phones at Trump Tower be tapped. 

"The landscape has basically been saturated with fairy tales, conspiracies and deliberate disinformation," Media Matters president Angelo Carusone tells Salon's Amanda Marcotte. "When you have a large portion of the news cycle being consumed by a conversation around conspiracies, that people get fatigued." 

This has conveniently played into Trump's hands as polls consistently show people are confused by and have become tired of the Russia scandal. 

The main players in the Rich lawsuit drama are plaintiff Rod Wheeler, a private investigator,  Fox News contributor and former Washington, D.C. homicide detective hired by Rich's family to investigate the murder, and defendants Fox News Channel, Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, a pro-Trump Republican donor and frequent Fox News and Fox Business contributor who is accused by Wheeler of creating a fake news story that Rich and not Russia provided WikiLeaks with the DNC emails.  

Rich, 27, was shot to death on July 10, 2016 about a block from his apartment in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Northwest Washington in what D.C. police describe as an unsolved attempted armed robbery.  WikiLeaks released a trove of stolen DNC emails 12 days later. 

The right-wing noise machine was riding the Rich story hard before his body was cold, accusing Hillary Clinton of his assassination with a fervor previously reserved for the Hillary Murdered Vince Foster evergreen.  Fake news maestro Alex Jones of InfoWars and former House speaker Newt Gingrich harped on the story, and it became a personal cause for Fox News's Sean Hannity.   

Lest this seem like just another episode in a long-running soap opera, readers are reminded that it has been quite okay in the twisted minds of right-wingers and other Trump acolytes for Russia to attack the very foundation of American democracy by cyber-sabotaging a presidential election because it was a grand opportunity to further work their long-running mischief against the Clintons.   

Zimmerman's explosive Fox News report --  a conspiracy theory with no corroborating evidence -- was based on an interview with Wheeler, who Butowsky introduced to the Rich family.  U.S. intelligence agencies dismiss the Rich-WikiLeaks link and say their own evidence suggests that the DNC computer network was hacked over a long period of time by two different Russian government agencies, and that the cyber intrusions began as early as 2015.    

WikiLeakers founder and latter day right-wing stooge Julian Assange cryptically suggested later in the summer of 2016 that the Rich murder may have been linked to the email thefts, while Zimmerman said in her story that Democrats might have been connected to the murder and a cover-up had thwarted the official investigation.  

DETAIL FROM THE LAWSUIT

"We have the full attention of the White House on this," Butowsky told Wheeler in a text message quoted in the suit. 

Butowsky later texted Wheeler to ask him to join an April 20, 2017 meeting with then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer to "keep him abreast" of the investigation.  Butowsky told Wheeler that Trump had read Zimmerman's article and wanted it published. 

Spicer has acknowledged the meeting, although when asked about the Fox News story in May at a press briefing he said he was unaware of it.

Spicer and Butowsky deny that the president was involved, although the suit says Butowsky sent Wheeler another text message stating, "Not to add to the pressure but the president just read the article.  He wants the article out immediately. It's now all up to you."    

Butowski now says he was just joking, the excuse Trump reliably uses when he gets caught out, most recently when he advocated the use of violence in a speech to police officers.   

Zimmerman's story was published in Washington by a Fox News affiliate on May 15 and, described as a "bombshell" by the network, went up on its national foxnews.com website on May 16 and then was aired on "Fox & Friends," the president's favorite news show.  The story included quotes from Wheeler about an FBI source corroborating the Rich-WikiLeaks claim that Wheeler states in the suit he never gave Zimmerman.   

Wheeler does not come off as the most trustworthy of people.  In 2007, he retracted a segment on Fox News's "The O'Reilly Factor" in which he claimed violent lesbian gangs armed with Glocks were "performing sex acts" nationwide.  (Really.)

But everyone except poor Seth Rich is covered in slim on this one, and there is no question of the damage the Fox News story -- as well as a fake news story linking her to a pedophile ring at a Washington pizzeria -- did to an already beleaguered Clinton campaign.  Wheeler's lawyer says that he "has suffered irreparable damage to his reputation and his career will likely never recover,"  while Butowsky , Zimmerman and Fox News deny the allegation. 

Fox News retracted the story on May 23, saying it had been published prematurely.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Not to get all graphic, but I laughed until coffee ran out my nose the other morning as I read accounts from a swooning Washington press corps about how the Mooch was history and Trump's new chief of staff, General John Kelly, was going to impose military-style order on the Wild West West Wing.  Goodfellas was out and Patton was in. 

The man who handles everything now has a handler, as one pundit put it. 

By my rough calculations, the ascendancy of the former Marine is about the 10th "pivot", "reboot," "turning point" or "brand new day" in the mere six months since Trump descended deus ex machina from his Fifth Avenue penthouse to Make America Great Again.  Less than 24 hours after Kelly's appointment, he already was being undercut as suggestions were made that the president's daughter Ivanka, unlike the rest of the West Wing staff, will not be reporting to him.   

Then again, the handler-in-chief also had told Kelly's predecessor, Reince Priebus, that he would be totally in charge.  

And while the appeal of a manly, granite-jawed and ramrod straight military man moistened the panties of CNN's Gloria Borger, among others, there's only one general Trump has ever liked getting advice from. 

That's Michael Flynn, and we know how that worked out. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal.