If you’re trying to make sense of just what Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump, do not miss this interview with retired CIA Clandestine Service Officer John Sipher.
John Brennan: “Well yes, I — as a young analyst, I wouldn’t have had direct interaction with Andropov, but I have studied Russian intelligence activities over the years, and have seen it — again, manifest in many different of our counterintelligence cases, and — and how they have been able to get people, including inside of CIA, to become treasonous. And frequently, individuals who go along that treasonous path do not even realize they’re along that path until it gets to be a bit too late. And that’s why, again, my — my radar goes up early when I see certain things that — I know what the Russians are trying to do, and I don’t know whether or not the targets of their efforts are as mindful of the Russian intentions as they need to be.”
Today we are kicking off a ten part series on voting rights and democracy that will run through the November election. Please take a moment to read my introduction. Why we’re doing it, why it matters, what we’ll include.
With election year blowback over his trade wars, President Trump is proposing an aid package for American farmers to offset their losses from his trade policy, the Washington Post reports:
Good morning. Here’s what our editors and writers are watching today.
I haven’t written much in recent days because my family suffered an unexpected loss last week. I was in one day and kept up on the toplines of the news. But I was generally too insensible to write, even as the new revelations piled up. Everything I’ve seen at a distance over recent days brings me back to this post I wrote on Thursday. Helsinki seems like an inflection point. On a long drive yesterday I listened to cable news chatter and I noticed a difference: the default assumption was that President Trump is compromised in some way. Or perhaps it’s better to say that there was a common assumption that the most logical explanation of Helsinki and what we’ve seen before and since is that Vladimir Putin has some leverage over the President. One former diplomat who said something like this pointed out that it’s not the only possible answer, just the most likely one. He’d really like to find another answer. But he hasn’t.
I continue to be struck by how resistant the system is to this now elementary conclusion. In this case, I don’t mean the formal constitutional framework or “the system” in some 60s Marcusean sense. I just mean a more general function or consensus of elite opinion, what is an acceptable premise of discussion and what is not. But this resistance is hardly a surprise. It is an almost fantastical proposition, something out of cheap finish-it-in-90 minutes TV movie fiction. And yet here we are. It is hardly unimaginable if we set the context with everything we’ve seen over the last two years. And just in recent days the pace of revelations, always matched by new flare-ups as rage covering for feelings of threat.
We’re barreling toward the start of the first trial to arise from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, but there could be a hitch:
Good morning! Here’s what our writers and editors have their eyes on today.
The Washington Post is out with its own story on the secret Michael Cohen recording of then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, and it offers a different account of what the two men were talking about:
Maggie Haberman was just on CNN and went farther than her co-bylined New York Times bombshell that Michael Cohen secretly taped Donald Trump discussing payments to Playboy model Karen McDougal, with whom he allegedly had an affair.
As I mentioned yesterday, the biggest impact of the Helsinki Summit is a lot of the serious people, the big wigs, starting to think, “yeah, Putin must have something over Trump. Something just does not add up about any of this.” Even President Trump’s intel chief Dan Coats seemed to be feeling the ground moving under his feet yesterday.
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