The revelation that Combover Crybaby Donald Trump’s idiot son had, along with two of Dad’s close associates, met with a lawyer linked to the Russian state for the explicit purpose of obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton, and that Dad very soon afterwards miraculously discovered the “33,000 deleted emails” line, have moved the bonfire under his Presidency from smouldering to ablaze in very short order.
This could be the end of a beautiful friendship
So now, all those pundits who had been willing to stick with The Donald through thick and thin had to ask themselves just how lucky they felt, especially his alleged pal, former Screws and Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, no longer a CNN host but instead now co-presenter for three days a week of ITV’s Good Morning Britain. The mountain of evidence was set to precipitate an avalanche of bad news. Which way would The Great Man jump?
Slowly, oh so slowly, the Morgan loyalty began to crumble. “He spoke to someone he thought was a Russian govt. attorney offering information to influence an election. They're not allowed to do that” he mused. But was it an illegal act? “Probably not, as it would seem no information was acted upon”. Wrong, it seems - if it was indeed an agent of the Russian Government, the meeting itself is grounds for collusion or even Treason charges.
But he was still equivocating, not yet willing to throw his pal under the bus: “US media will intensify investigations into Trump/Russia pre-election links. I still don't think election-influencing collusion occurred”. Not much it didn’t, something he then appeared to believe himself: “I call things as I see them. This meeting suggests there was at the very least an appetite for Russian collusion from Trump camp”. He was starting to move.
Morgan was reminded that he didn’t think it was such a big deal yesterday: “The emails make it a much bigger deal”. The emails just underscore what he’d been told, and brushed off, so often in the past. And, inch by painful inch, he was beginning to distance himself from the Combover Crybaby: “I'm sure many real journalists are ... it all looks very dodgy to me” he replied to the suggestion journalists would be all over it by now.
And then, after driving it round the houses for so long, came the confirmation that on the next circuit, that bus would have Trump under it. “NEW: The Russia collusion story ain't no 'nothing burger' now.. it's a Triple Whopper leaking all over the place”. But just to hedge his bets, he was prepared to defend Trump Junior. “I've known @DonaldJTrumpJr a long time & he's definitely not stupid. But taking this meeting was not his smartest move”.
Wrong and wrong. He is stupid, and taking the meeting was yet more stupid. And just to signal that he really was dumping Trump, he returned to Twitter to confirm “The Trump/Russia collusion smoke just caught fire”. Real collusion, right now. But he had to maintain the pretence that he had been right all along, so when Emma Kennedy welcomed him on board, he sniffed “It's always better to go with evidence than prejudice, Ms Kennedy”.
If Piers Morgan has dumped Trump, there is really no way back. Whether there is any path to redemption for Morgan’s own credibility is another matter entirely.
14 comments:
This is the equivalent of that moment in the Simpsons when Homer tells Marge that Lisa's 'gonna nark on our stash!'
Marge (Susanna Reid): We don't have a stash!
Homer (Piers Morgan, moving his eyes from side to side suspiciously): No, of... course not...
Idiot son? He's a high quality individual. Well according to his idiot father.
First reading of Emma Kennedy's email, I miscued: "Welcome on board (Firefly)".
I assumed "Firefly" was a response to "Snowflake".
The Veselnitskaya business gets murkier by the minute.
She maintains she went to US to lobby on the Magnitsky Act (i.e. adoption from Russia). She had been refused a visa, before Attorney-General Loretta Lynch resiled, and allowed entry on an "immigration parole", specifically that Veselnitskaya might aid Denis Katsyv's defence against a Justice Department asset seizure. Apparently the lady speaks only Russian. That parole, which was extended for a week further in January 2016, seems to have allowed https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/us/politics/trump-russia-election-meeting.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news to wander round umpteen political gatherings, and to Trump Tower, for a further six months or more.
The New York Times also has an illuminating time-line on how Veselnitskaya meeting with Trump-ette slots neatly into the campaign process.
Can we have similar "exposes" of ALL lobbyists tramping around US political party camps?
Just, you know, to level up the playing fields, so to speak.
And "The New York Times also has an illuminating time-line" has it?......More illuminating about its own propaganda than anything else. That decaying rag wouldn't know the truth if it tripped over it coming out of a Yank establishment lobby. Nor would the WAPO.
What a crock of know-nothing no-evidence shit it all is.
Still, it keeps the proles from wondering why NATO is threatening Russia and why the US Navy is trying to do the same to China. And why the Middle East is being slaughtered and/or destabilised. To say nothing of South and Central America and Africa.
Yes, it's all there to be played for. All there to be lied about.
I hope Trump DOES end in jail.
@ Anonymous (13 July 2017 at 17:00):
Lobbyists are supposed to register. Veselnitskaya (as far as I can determine) didn't. She somehow was able to inversely-womble free, have access to Senators, Congressmen and women, and enjoy a face-to-face with the closest aides of one presidential candidate. As everyone, including Tim Fenton, has observed: she only got into Trump Tower by promising to have dirt to dish on Hillary Clinton. As my Yorkshire relatives would tellingly say: "Think on."
Now VP Pence — after several evasions — has to deploy Fox News to deny any involvement with Russians.
Far from being "know-nothing no-evidence shit", what the the NYT, WaPo, The Hill, CNN, AP, ABC News, et al. are doing is addressing (at the very least) serious domestic misdemeanours. Telling all those "to look over there" by flaunting gross misrepresentations of world affairs, is the reaction of a "firefly" (see above).
By the way, apologies for screwing up an HTML link, "Conspiracy or Coincidence? A Timeline Open to Interpretation", in previous post.
@Malcolm Redfellow.
This is sophist nonsense.
Every US election since the beginning of that unhappy country has involved "dirty politics" which sought to smear opponents. Every one of the eventual two main competitors has looked for "dirt" and hasn't hesitated to use it if found. Any attempt to show such interest by the Trump camp as "unusual" or "traitorous" is utterly ludicrous.
Gore Vidal never hesitated to write about this in his published essays and other works. You'll find the best popular exposure of it in his play, later made into a film, "The Best Man". The public record is replete with many other examples before and since. Nixon even refused to investigate Kennedy's wafer-thin 1960 majority because it would expose his own skullduggery. Later, of course, came Watergate.
The whole point of this is not to paint Trump as anything other than the spiv he is. The US establishment want him out because he's out of their control. Attacking "Russia/Putin is an added bonus. In the long run, Trump's staying or going won't make a blind bit of difference to USA long term evil goals.
And I'm still waiting for EVIDENCE which shows Russian government "interference" in the US election. Until I see that, it's all tin drummer noise. Recorded history shows why.
Malcolm Redfellow 18:40
This is not the only "look over there" firefly distraction operating in this context because regardless of whether there was or was not any Russian interference in the US election the fact remains that if Clinton and her team had not gerrymandered the Democratic Convention to deny Sanders the nomination this conversation would not be taking place.
As a result, the whole "look at what the Russians have/may have done" is in itself a distraction to divert attention from the information about the way Clinton subverted democracy within the Democratic Party to steal the nomination. The Russians may well have been up to no good but without the behaviour of Clinton on this issue they would not have got to never mind beyond first base.
Too many of those rightly appalled at Trump getting the presidency seem to have come far too late to the party. Where were all these concerned citizens during the shennanigans at the Democratic Convention. Being AWOL on this made its own contribution to us ending up with Trump. As has totally ignoring the information of Clinton and her team's anti-democratic actions in favour of the consistent distraction about the Russians.
The question arises as to whether this is deliberate on the part of those practicing this distraction to continue giving Clinton a free ride or accidental?
A Different Anonymous.
There is a reason Trump Jnr is affectionately known as Fredo and no, it has nothing to do with chocolate bars
Allow this (from HuffPo):
Speaking at a press conference in Paris, the President said he had done nothing wrong and anyone in the same situation would have done the same.
"Trump was responding to a reporter who quoted his nominee for FBI Director, Christopher Wray, who said yesterday that anyone in an election campaign team who received such an email should have alerted the FBI. [1]
"Trump said: “My son is a wonderful young man and he took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a [Russian] government lawyer but a Russian lawyer[2].
“It was a short meeting [3]. It was a meeting that went very, very fast, two of the people in the room, one left almost immediately and the other, I guess, wasn’t very focused on the meeting.[4]”
“As I see it they talked about adoption and some things, adoption wasn’t even part of the campaign. But nothing happened from the meeting, zero happened and honestly, I think the press made a very big deal over something that really, a lot of people would do.”[5]
[1] "should have": implies a legal transgression? What would J. Edgar Hoover have been doing in similar circumstances?
[2] Veselnitskaya "has a long-standing personal connection with Yuri Chaika, Russia’s powerful prosecutor-general" (Guardian); "had been engaged in a lobbying campaign to have the US sanctions lifted and was defending a client facing civil charges of laundering $14m from the alleged tax fraud in New York" (FT). Suggests, like Yogi, "Smarter than the av-er-age bear!"
[3] The meet seems to have been timed for at least half-an-hour.
[4] Does not compute, Captain! "Veselnitskaya also said that Kushner (Trump's son-in-law) was only present at the meeting for the first 7-10 minutes and Manafort (then campaign co-ordinator) looked at his phone during the meeting and did not actively participate" (CBS News) So Trump Jr was not alone at any time, and all three major aides were present for some of the time.
[5] R-i-g-h-t. A lot of people, in particular three of the four at the top of the campaign, in the throes of a tense election campaign, would take time out to hear a Russian bring dirt on their opponents. Y-e-a-h.
Was there any dirt Malcolm? What was the dirt? Where did it come from? Does the dirt stand up as substantive evidence regardless of source?
So instead of focusing on the real story of what anti-democratic antics Team Clinton got up to in order to deny Sanders the nomination we get this constant distraction of "look over there at those nasty other people."
I think everyone with a functioning sense of objectivity fully understands what's really going on here.
A different Anonymous.
@ A different Anonymous, 14 July 2017 at 11:08:
Was there any dirt Malcolm? What was the dirt? Where did it come from? Does the dirt stand up as substantive evidence regardless of source?
Good questions.
For the record:
3rd June 2016: Rob Goldstone offers “very high level and sensitive information” that would “incriminate Hillary” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
17 minutes later, Trump Jr responds: "If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
7th June: Trump Jr and Goldstone agree to meeting at Trump Tower to include “Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.” As far as I can see Veselnitskaya had been in the US, illegally over-staying her "immigration parole" and now definitely "off-piste", since the New Year
9th June: Approx 4:00-4:30pm EDT: Veselnitskaya is waved past the Secret Service security protection, and Trump Tower's own security for the pre-arranged meeting with Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner.
4:40 pm EDT: Trump Sr tweeted about deletions of Clinton's personal e-mails from her private server.
13th June: Trump Sr pulls his promised speech about Clinton's alleged Russian connection.
15th June: Guccifer 2.0 (generally accepted to be Russia-sanctioned, and posting from a Russian VPN) posts hacked documents from the DNC. Trump Sr urges the hacking of "Crooked Hillary’s 33,000 missing emails"
22nd June: WikiLeaks posts 20,000 emails from DNC officials. Trump senior comes up with the speech promised for 13th June.
24th June: Trump Jr denounces Clinton and DNC, denying that Russia was hostile to Clinton.
27th June: Trump Sr's demand that Russia hack Clinton's missing emails.
18th July: Guccifer 2.0 provides The Hill with hacked banking information of party donations.
22nd July: Guccifer 2.0 claims it was source of DNC leaked emails.
13th September: Guccifer 2.0 issues 700MB of DNC data.
12th July 2017: Kushner three times has to update his federal disclosure form, of his foreign contacts (as was a pre-requirement for his security clearance). Veselnitskaya is included for the first time, and a further three-figures list of other foreign names is added. This is preparatory to Kushner's appearances before Senate and House Intelligence Committees.
So, no pattern there, huh? Not even a scintilla of evidence of a Russian link?
Apart from all the "whataboutisms" of the intrigues in US politics (to detract from a hostile power that be the Russians) the Sanders/Clinton scenario is also thought to be in some circles(without hard evidence!) an attempt at a divide and rule strategy by guess who?
I suspect that there are some, who even if DJT confessed to being a Russian spy, that that would not be enough evidence of collusion as he is known to be a liar.
Guys, where is this "firefly" thing coming from? The tweet clearly says "finally".
Anybody yet got any evidence of "Russian government interference"?
No?
Thought not.
Post a Comment