The Washington Post published a story this evening that adds a significant new piece to the Trump puzzle. The headline is that in the summer of 2016 the FBI obtained a FISA warrant to monitor the communications of Carter Page, a key player in the Trump/Russia story. Obtaining a FISA warrant is significant in itself since to do so the government must show probable cause that the target of the warrant is acting as the agent of a foreign power. What this means, what the government has to show is set forth very specifically in statute.
Let me run through what I believe are the key points in this story.
Let me share a few thoughts on Sean Spicer’s latest self-inflicted wound.
As you know, Spicer started off trying to make an argument about Assad by arguing that even Adolf Hitler hadn’t used chemical weapons during World War II. In a polarized and fractious environment, this was obviously an ill-advised argument. Spicer is such a doofus that in trying to explain and clean up the comment he managed to make it worse with clumsy claims that he didn’t use chemical weapons against “his own people.”
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This afternoon Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech down at the USA-Mexico border at Nogales, Arizona with an amazingly stark line which mixed right wing apocalyptic snuff flicks and the kind of talk you hear from Steve Bannon and top aide Stephen Miller.
Here’s one key passage from the speech as prepared for delivery …
The premise of most liberal internationalist interventionism is not just preserving norms about human rights and preventing mass killing but the belief that totalizing violence is inherently unstable and spreads. This was the idea in the Balkans in the 1990s. By and large, the Clinton administration’s efforts, long delayed, often incomplete, largely vindicated this idea. The Balkans are no paradise but there are no mass killings there today. And there’s a slow progress of integration into European norms and the European state system.
Over the weekend, I wrote this piece on the bizarre, surreal, totally Trumpian situation in which Steve Bannon, ersatz “nationalist”, part-time anti-unrooted (((cosmopolitan globalist elite)))) and all around Trump ideologue had managed to somehow summon up a situation out of his and his followers deepest fever dreams: he’s on the verge of getting pushed out of the White House by the President’s Jewish legacy real estate tycoon son-in-law, a couple of Jewish bankers from Goldman Sachs and … well, that’s really enough right there, isn’t it?
Kevin DeGood, from American Progress, will be in the Hive to discuss all things infrastructure. Drop your questions about American infrastructure, Trump’s proposed budget in regards to infrastructure and more, and be sure to join us on Wednesday at 1:00 pm. If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.
Glenn Thrush of The New York Times has a very interesting article out on Paul Manafort. It contains no one blockbuster piece of information. In fact, it is oddly understated, leaving it to the reader to draw what I think is a fairly straightforward conclusion. The article is based on access Thrush received to a series of emails and memos Manafort prepared for Trump (Glenn, WTF? Please publish the actual memos and emails.)
The upshot is that Manafort aggressively courted Trump for the job, sold himself creatively and – key for Trump, one imagines – offered to work for free.
According to the AP, President Trump is ditching his tax plan and starting the search for a tax plan he can pass.
Here’s notable news this morning. K.T. McFarland, a key Flynn holdover at the NSC and a comically unqualified Fox News National Security ‘analyst’, has been fired as the number two person at the National Security Council. This is more house-cleaning by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. (Initials and Irish surnames? No, no idea. Maybe there’s a Times trend piece.)