Let’s walk through this chain of events today that mixes together Julian Assange, President Trump, Nigel Farage and Sean Spicer.
Sean Spicer was just asked about Trump ally/advisor Nigel Farage meeting today with Julian Assange earlier today. When asked whether Farage was delivering a message to Assange from Trump, Spicer said “I have no idea.”
The questioner said the actual meeting had yet to be confirmed. It actually has now been confirmed. Here’s the exchange …
VIVIAN SALAMA/AP: Thank you. And second thing is, Nigel farage was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London today where Julian Assange happens to be staying. Don’t know if they met or not. Was he there? He’s a close ally of President Trump. Was he there in any capacity?
SPICER: I don’t keep his schedule.
So how much has Nigel Farage been in DC since the inauguration? “A lot,” one close Farage-watcher tells me. My snoop says he thinks Farage has visited DC at least three times since President Trump’s inauguration election. He was here on election night. He was the first foreign politician to meet with Trump after his win. He came to DC against in December. He came at least once in January for the inauguration. And he came again in February. That’s a lot. All of these trips have been about deepening Farage’s alliance with President Trump and his coterie. The last meeting that we know of between the two men was on February 26th when they dined together at Trump’s DC hotel. What business would Farage possibly have meeting secretly with Assange today?
Nigel Farage, ex-leader of the UK Independence Party and key Brexit campaigner, has been spending a lot of time in Washington with President Trump recently. Today, he went to the Embassy of Ecuador in London where Julian Assange has been holed up since 2012 trying to avoid questioning and possible arrest for sexual assault in Sweden.
If you’re trying to get to the heart of just who Donald Trump’s business partners were, where he was getting his money for projects like Trump SoHo and where Russia and organized crime fit into the mix, there’s a little known 2003 book which is sort of the Rosetta Stone of maybe half the mysteries involved. In Episode 14 of The Josh Marshall Show I talk to the co-author of that book. You’ll want to hear this.
The outlook for the GOP leaderships’ ‘repeal and replace’ bill looks bleak. That said, I would not underestimate the ability of GOP leaders to get their members to vote for basically anything in the crunch. Also remember that House Republicans have a 20+ vote cushion. But it’s worth reviewing what I believe are three key reasons why the current legislation looks to be on life support just a day after it was released.
According to Wikileaks, the new tranche of CIA documents was provided by a government contractor or ex-government operative concerned at the overreach of various CIA hacking capabilities. But Wikileaks role as a de facto arm of Russian cyber-warfare and disruption operations against the United States certainly complicates its role as a purported or former whistleblower organization.
Here is the simple secret of health insurance and health care provision policy: You can create efficiencies and savings by constructing functioning markets. But at the end of the day, more money equals more care. Or in the proxy we judge these things by, more money means more people are insured. If you see a plan that costs a lot less money than Obamacare, it means many fewer people will be covered. It’s as simple as that. You may have to look closely at the details to see just where the care reductions are made. But it’s there, just as certain as night follows day.
I’ve mentioned a few times that a big source on Felix Sater, his criminal background and his cooperation with the federal government is the memoir written by his longtime accomplice and coworker Salvatore Lauria. This is a book called The Scorpion and the Frog: High Times and High Crimes which was written by Lauria and a journalist named David S. Barry. I just talked to Barry about the book and Lauria and Sater. It was pretty fascinating.
There are a few points worth making on the President’s claim about former President Obama wiretapping him.