Pelosi within rights to uninvite Trump to give SOTU address

The U.S. Constitution establishes three co-equal branches of government:   legislative, executive, and judicial.   Each has areas in which it has the upper hand for certain functions.

By tradition, the president (executive) is invited annually by the House of Representatives to address a joint session of Congress on the State of the Union.   This is not mandated by law, except for the general expectation that the president will keep the congress informed.    Also by tradition, the event is held in the House chambers because its size can accommodate both the House and the Senate members.   Thus, the invitation goes to the president from the Speaker of the House of Representatives (currently Nancy Pelosi), although resolutions to back the invitation are traditionally passed by both the House and the Senate.

At this point, those resolutions have not been passed, although the initial invitation to President Trump had been sent and the date set for January 29th.

A gathering in one place of the president, the vice president, all but one cabinet member, all members of the House, Senate, the Supreme Court, as well as the top military commanders -- is an extraordinary collection of our government in one place and one time.   The unlikely, but devastating, risk of an almost complete eradication of our governing bodies requires the utmost in logistical planning and manpower security.

Only the one "designated survivor" -- usually a lower level cabinet member -- is chosen not to attend so there would be one member of the government surviving a catastrophic disaster and able to preserve the continuity of government.

All that is background to Speaker Pelosi's decision to postpone the State of the Union gathering on January 29th, given that the government is shut down.    Whether out of genuine security concerns, given that security officers are working without pay, or whether this is a cover for not wanting to give President Trump the bully pulpit to bray out his side of the shutdown controversy -- Speaker Pelosi has written to President Trump asking they find another time to schedule the even after the shutdown has ended.

She has also suggested as an alternative that he could give the speech in writing.   Or he could give it by television from the Oval Office.

Whatever the official reasoning, there's no doubt that there is a power play going on here.   Pelosi is sending Trump a message that she too has power.   The Constitution gives her as Speaker the right to invite -- or not -- the president to give the speech.

So score another win for Nancy Pelosi -- and, incidentally, score another one for exerting the power of Congress -- and another for a woman standing up to a man.

Ralph

Eighteen facts support idea of Trump as a Russian asset

Max Boot, a highly respected, conservative political analyst, published an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which he gives 18 reasons to support the case that Trump is a Russian asset.   Here are some excerpts.

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Boot begins by referring to the FBI's investigation into whether President Trump may have been working on behalf of Russia.  That investigation was subsequently subsumed within the Mueller investigation, and no public information about findings has been released.    But, Boot says, "we can look at the key, publicly available evidence that both supports and undercuts this explosive allegation."    He then lists his 18 supporting reasons:

"— Trump has a long financial history with Russia.  As summarized by Jonathan Chait . . . :  'From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. . . Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.' . . .   These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners, and they could leave Trump vulnerable to blackmail.

" — The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president.

" — Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails . . . on the very day that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton’s personal and campaign servers.

" — There were . . . 101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives, and the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.  The most infamous of these contacts was the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower . . . 

" — The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.

" — Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.

" — Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks, reportedly knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. . . . 

" — Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the 'Russia thing' — and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. Later, Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he would not end the special counsel investigation that resulted after the firing of Comey. . . . 

" — Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference. He has accepted Putin’s protestations that the Russians did not meddle in the election over the “high confidence” assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that they did.

" — Like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI . . . 

" — Again, like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO . . . the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.

" — Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do.

" — Trump has praised Putin (“a strong leader”) while trashing just about everyone else . . . . [even] congratulated Putin on winning a rigged reelection.

" — Trump was utterly supine in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspicious, . . . Trump 'has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with . . . Putin . . . taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials . . . 

" — Trump defends the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and repeats other pro-Russian talking points.

" — Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

" — Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

" — Trump is sowing chaos in the [U.S.] government, most recently with a record-breaking partial government shutdown . . . 

"Now that we’ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let’s look at the exculpatory evidence. . . 

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"I can’t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. . . .

"This is hardly a 'beyond a reasonable doubt' case that Trump is a Russian agent . . . But it is a strong, circumstantial case that Trump is 'an unwitting agent' . . . or a 'useful fool' who is 'manipulated by Moscow' . . .  If Trump isn’t actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one."

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Thus wrote the conservative journalist Max Boot.

As journalist and Russia specialist Natasha Bertran noted:   If we were not so infiltrated on a daily basis with news -- often shocking news -- about Trump, some of the recent stories reported would be "the biggest news . . . ever."

We must not get so lost in the fog that we cannot see clearly what is happening today.  For example, perhaps Trumps refusal to really negotiate with Democrats to resolve the government shutdown is part of the plan to weaken our country and our democracy.

Ralph

Paranoia or treason?

Coming immediately on the heels of the blockbuster New York Times reporting about the FBI's investigating whether Trump had been compromised into becoming a Russian asset was another shocking hint at the possibility that we have a president who is acting in the interests of an adversarial foreign government.

The Washington Post wrote about the lengths to which President Trump goes to keep his discussions with Putin private -- even from his own closest advisers.

I've long suspected that this might be true.   But now we have good reporting sources that confirm it.   In the five in person meetings Trump and Putin have had, Trump has not followed the important custom of having staff aides and advisers sitting in on the meetings.

The reasons to have them there are obvious:    first, for someone to take notes for a record of what was said by whom in the meeting.    Without this minimal, Putin can claim that Trump said something -- and we would have no record to back up a challenge to him.    Second, foreign affairs are too complex and require too much knowledge for any president to be the master of without advisers who are experts in that particular area.    And third, things agreed to in the meetings may require action by the president and his advisers.

But Trump thinks he knows more than any adviser, so why does he need them there?

Or, is he so paranoid that he really believes his own hand-picked advisers are only there to spy on him?

Or is it even more sinister than that?    Does he not want anyone else in the room because it would become obvious that Putin is using Trump, manipulating him -- or even that Trump is willingly plotting with Putin against his own country . . . our  country.

The latter seems best to explain some of Trump's actions.   In one of his early meetings, where both Putin and Trump brought translators, Trump later demanded that his own translator turn over to him the notes made during the discussion.   Further, the translator was forbidden from telling anyone what was said in the meeting with Putin.

In at least one meeting, Trump did not even have his own translator, relying on Putin's translator for telling him in English what Putin said.

Now paranoid lack of trust in his own staff, or arrogant belief that he does not need advisers could explain this behavior.

But not as succinctly or as well, I suggest, as the third explanation -- that Trump is colluding and conspiring with Putin.

Especially when you add this to the mounting stack of evidence that Trump is under Putin's influence and is betraying the United States, even as he occupies the Oval Office as its president.

Ralph

PS:   Trump, of course, denies that he is, or has, worked for Russia.   But his word means nothing;  his credibility for truth-telling has fallen below zero.

FBI began investigation of whether Trump was a Russian asset in May 2017

New York Times reporters Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt, and Nicholas Fandos reported one of the biggest news scoops in the daily news about Trump-Russia a few days ago.   This summary is based on Andrew Prokop's reporting for Vox.com.

According to the Times, the FBI began "a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign's Russia links in July 2016," and we knew that they had also begun "investigating the president himself for obstruction of justice in May 2017."

However, this new reporting from the Times is far more alarming.   The May 2017 investigation, they now report, was not just for obstruction but "whether the president himself" was either "working on behalf of Russia against American interests" or "had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence" in a way that put our national security at risk.

What is new here is "the first outright confirmation" that "the FBI explicitly began investigating Donald Trump's Russia ties -- including whether, as president, he was acting on Russia's behalf."

At first glance, this story borders on the "duh -- so what's new?"   Isn't this what all the shouting has been about since Mueller began his work?

But, the Times authors suggest, "take a step back.   It's rather incredible that the FBI officially opened an investigation into whether the president of the United States was compromised by Russia."    As Natasha Bertrand, a writer for The Atlantic, says:  "If no other reporting existed on Trump/Russia, [this fact] would be the biggest political story . . . ever."

The Times story continues:
"Now, this news is about an event that occurred a year and eight months ago, before Robert Mueller was even appointed special counsel -- so it gives us little insight into what the investigation has found since that point. . . . 

"To understand how the information in the new Times report fits into what we knew about the probe, it's helpful to keep the timeline of the investigation in mind:

• "Back in July 2016, the FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation into whether various Trump campaign officials were linked to Russia.   This probe would focus particularly on four campaign advisers:   George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Carter Page.
• "In late 2016 and early 2017, the FBI was 'suspicious' of Trump's own Russia links . . . but they did not yet choose to explicitly name the president as a focus of their investigation . . . perhaps out of fear of political controversy.
• "In May 2017, after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, that changed.  The bureau then quickly approved an investigation into not only whether Trump had criminally obstructed justice . . . but also into whether Trump had been acting on Russia's behalf.  Shortly afterward, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel to take charge of the prove.

"So, why did the FBI suddenly move to open this investigation into Trump?

"Partly, it may have been because events that the FBI had long been aware of now appeared more suspicious.   The Times says investigators were also influenced by two new developments:  that Trump urged Rosenstein to mention the Russia investigation in his letter recommending Comey's firing, and that Trump publicly tied Comey's firing to the Russia probe in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt. . . .

"Additionally, Trump met with two top Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after he fired Comey.  In that meeting, the president disclosed classified information.  He also told the Russian officials that by firing the 'nut job' Comey, the 'great pressure' he'd faced about Russia had been 'taken off. . . ."  [However, the FBI only learned of this comment later.]

The lead Times reporter, Adam Goldman, emphasized that the FBI must have felt the evidence to open this new phase of the investigation was quite strong and that they would have had to lay out their reasons in detail, in a classified document, for the FBI officials to approve it.

This new reporting raises new questions about what the "obstruction investigation into Trump has been about," according to the Vox article.    After Comey was fired, Mueller was appointed to take over the Russia investigation in May 2017.   About a month later, the Washington Post reported that Mueller was investigating Trump for obstruction of justice, "related to firing Comey and other matters."

"After that, the conventional wisdom in Washington quickly formed:   The true interest of Mueller's probe, at least as it related to President Trump, was obstruction of justice -- not Russian collusion."

However, according to Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes, this new Times report "certainly appears to suggest that the obstruction probe of Trump was closely connected to interest in his Russia ties all along. . . .  Observers of the Russia investigation have generally understood . . . Mueller's work as focusing on at least two separate tracks."   But Wittes now believes those two tracks "are far more integrated with one another than I previously understood. . . .  What if the obstruction was the collusion -- or at least part of it?" he writes.

Perhaps it was "part of an effort to obstruct justice to Russia's benefit."    And Goldman concludes that this is a question Mueller is going to have to address in his report.   "You don't need me to tell you that the American public expects an answer to:  'Is Trump working with Russia?'  It's the sixty-four thousand-dollar question."

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Yes.   It's time to wake up from the malaise that saturation with Trump news has lulled us into.   History once told us:   All roads lead to Rome.    In this investigation, all secret contacts, all lies from Trump associates seem to lead to Russia.   Why?  is a question that must be answered.

Ralph