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Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Donna Brazile and Paul Manafort, 1988

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the mechanics of the 2016 campaign and other problems that brought down the Democrats. 

I am currently writing a book about the 1988 campaign.

Donna Brazile has courted controversy with a new book about that campaign.  She was controversial in the 1988 campaign, too.

 The Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1988:
A Democratic presidential campaign official resigned Thursday after the Dukakis campaign disavowed her comment that "George Bush owes it to the American people to fess up" about a rumor concerning an extramarital affair that rippled through Wall Street on Wednesday.
Dukakis personally apologized to Bush for the remarks, made by deputy field director Donna Brazile, when the two candidates met Thursday night in New York for the Catholic archdiocese's annual fund-raising dinner.

Brazile told reporters accompanying the Democratic candidate that "the American people have every right to know if Barbara Bush will share that bed with him in the White House."
Paul Manafort is in trouble over foreign lobbying.  On September 11, 1988, Robin Toner reported at The New York Times: 
Escalating his response to Bush campaign efforts to raise doubts about him, the Massachusetts Governor demanded at a news conference in Boston that Mr. Bush ''answer some questions that are being raised about the fact that several of his top campaign advisers had a contract with a foreign government, some of whose top officials were under investigation for drug profiteering.''
Mr. Dukakis read from a memorandum from Black, Manafort & Stone, a Republican consulting firm whose partners work as unpaid consultants to the Bush campaign. In the memo, he said, the firm ''brags about its ability to reach into high offices in this Administration as a result of what it calls back channel relationships.'' He added, ''I think the American people have a right to know that the back door of the White House will not be the front door for paid agents of foreign governments.''
''In a Dukakis White House,'' he continued, ''there will be no back door for foreign lobbyists. My staff will not have divided loyalties.''
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Monday, November 6, 2017

Russia Today


Andrew Desiderio at The Daily Beast:
The so-called Paradise Papers were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the same publication that obtained the “Panama Papers.” Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the new documents with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which led a global effort of 96 media organizations from 67 countries to pore through the records. The findings were published on Sunday.
The documents show that many of the wealthy individuals Trump brought into his administration have worked to legally store their money in offshore havens where they would be free from taxation in the United States. Trump has promised repeatedly to “drain the swamp,” in condemning the idea that well-connected individuals in Washington, D.C., preserve their own interests at the expense of the rest of the country.
Among the Trump administration officials implicated in the leaks is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who according to the documents concealed his ties to a Russian energy company that is partly owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s judo partner Gennady Timchenko and Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov. Through offshore investments, Ross held a stake in Navigator Holdings, which had a close business relationship with the Russian firm. Ross did not disclose that connection during his confirmation process on Capitol Hill.
Irina Reznik and Henry Meyer at The Daily Beast:
A Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump’s oldest son last year says he indicated that a law targeting Russia could be re-examined if his father won the election and asked her for written evidence that illegal proceeds went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, said in a two-and-a-half-hour interview in Moscow that she would tell these and other things to the Senate Judiciary Committee on condition that her answers be made public, something it hasn’t agreed to. She has received scores of questions from the committee, which is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Veselnitskaya said she’s also ready -- if asked -- to testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
...
“Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it,’’ Trump Jr. said of the 2012 law, she recalled. “I understand our side may have messed up, but it’ll take a long time to get to the bottom of it,” he added, according to her.
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Saturday, November 4, 2017

"Jenna Abrams" and "Pamela Moore"

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.

Ben Collins and Joseph Cox at The Daily Beast:
Those same users who followed @Jenn_Abrams for her perfect Kim Kardashian jokes would be blasted with her shoddily punctuated ideas on slavery and segregation just one month later.
“To those people, who hate the Confederate flag. Did you know that the flag and the war wasn’t about slavery, it was all about money,” Abrams’ account tweeted in April of last year.

The tweet went viral, earning heaps of ridicule from journalists, historians, and celebrities alike, then calls for support from far-right users coming to her defense.
That was the plan all along.
Congressional investigators working with social-media companies have since confirmed that Abrams wasn’t who she said she was.
Her account was the creation of employees at the Internet Research Agency, or the Russian government-funded “troll farm,” in St. Petersburg.
Jenna Abrams, the freewheeling American blogger who believed in a return to segregation and said that many of America’s problems stemmed from PC culture run amok, did not exist.
But Abrams got very real attention from almost any national news outlet you can think of, according to a Daily Beast analysis of her online footprint.
Abrams, who at one point boasted nearly 70,000 Twitter followers, was featured in articles written by Bustle, U.S. News and World Report, USA Today, several local Fox affiliates, InfoWars, BET, Yahoo Sports, Sky News, IJR, Breitbart, The Washington Post, Mashable,New York Daily News, Quartz, Dallas News, France24, HuffPost, The Daily Caller, The Telegraph, CNN, the BBC, Gizmodo, The Independent, The Daily Dot, The Observer, Business Insider, The National Post, Refinery29, The Times of India, BuzzFeed, The Daily Mail, The New York Times, and, of course, Russia Today and Sputnik.
Rob Tornoe at the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Pamela Moore, another popular online personality during the 2016 election who tweeted using the handle @Pamela_Moore13. was also created in the same Russian troll factory with the same basic mission — to sow division and heighten racial tension among Americans.

Unlike the Abrams account, which went out of its way to say it wasn’t pro-Trump, nearly all of Moore’s tweets leading up to the election appear to have crafted to support Trump’s campaign. Among the account’s most widely shared posts leading up to the election were tweets repeating lies and conspiracy theories about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and pushing themes of Trump’s campaign, including this anti-refugee post that was shared more than 4,700 times.


Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn followed both accounts. His son, Michael Flynn Jr., shared a tweet from the Abrams account just days before the election.

Flynn wasn’t alone: Donald Trump Jr., Kellyanne Conway and Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign digital director, all retweeted fake Russian Twitter accounts in the month before the election. Vice President Mike Pence followed five different accounts tied to the Internet Research Agency, according to the Daily Beast.

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Friday, November 3, 2017

"Complete and Total"

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character.
The redundant phrase "complete and total" is among Trump's favorites.








For the sake of variety, he sometimes uses "total and complete."



And of course, his most famous "total and complete" was...

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Trump's Banana Republic

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character and impact on America.

Philip Rucker at WP:
President Trump on Friday pressured the Department of Justice — and specifically the FBI — to investigate Hillary Clinton, ticking through a slew of issues involving the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and her party, and urging law enforcement to “do what is right and proper.”
Trump's advocacy for criminal probe of his political opponent marked a significant breach of the traditional boundaries within the executive branch designed to prevent investigations from being politicized.
In a Thursday radio interview, Trump said “the saddest thing” about being president is that he is not supposed to give orders to the Justice Department or FBI. The president said he was “very frustrated” that he could not be involved with those agencies, and said it was “very discouraging to me” that they were not “going after Hillary Clinton.”
“Hopefully they are doing something and at some point, maybe we are going to all have it out,” Trump said Thursday on “The Larry O'Connor Show.”



Back to Rucker:
The president directing a particular investigation — especially of a former political rival — would be viewed by most in law enforcement as inappropriate. When Trump made similar comments on the campaign trail a year ago, even former Republican attorney general Michael Mukasey, a vocal Clinton critic, said Trump ordering a prosecution of her would be “like a banana republic.”
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Thursday, November 2, 2017

The DNC Disaster

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the mechanics of the 2016 campaign and other problems that brought down the Democrats.

Donna Brazile writes at Politico about a 2015 victory fund agreement between DNC and the Clinton campaign.  Its effect was to give the campaign de facto control of the committee.
Debbie [Wasserman Schultz] was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.
By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.
“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”
That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016.
Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.
If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

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Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Where's Papa?

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.

Jennifer Rubin at WP:
Papadopoulos also has stipulated that “other foreign policy” types were at the March 31 meeting. In the photo from the Trump campaign Web Site we see one of those who was in attendance was now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was named on March 3 chairman of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee. You will recall he testified under oath he knew of no such contacts between the campaign and Russian officials. That will require explanation.
Related image

Anyone who was present, heard about the contacts and later denied any campaign contacts with Russians should be very nervous. Anyone who attended the meeting, knew about the contacts and then recommended Trump fire Comey who was exploring possible collusion, should be very nervous. And Trump, who is now placed in the same room as Papadopoulos has even more reason to be nervous, not the least because he does not know what else Mueller has up his sleeve.
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