You’ve seen that President Trump has now canceled his meeting with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit. That’s a shift. You may think it’s good news. The real issue here is that the President’s most crucial foreign policy decisions (remember, major crisis right now between Russia and Ukraine) are being driven both by his financial interests and, in this case, the fall out of his criminal acts. Meeting with Putin or not, Saudi-friendly or not – these have never been the core issue. The core issue is the root of his foreign policy, which is driven by personal enrichment and perceptions of threat. That’s a pressing danger for the state on all fronts.
Sometimes it’s worth stepping back and stating the obvious. Over the course of these thirty months of cover-ups, every player in the Trump/Russia story has lied about their role in the conspiracy. And not hedging and spinning fibs but straight up lies about the core nature of their involvement, their overt acts. Most – though here what we know is a bit more tentative – seem to have lied under oath, whether to congressional committees or a grand jury. Not a single one of them told a story that wasn’t eventually contradicted and disproved. Not a single one. Read More
Small point in the rapidly unfolding batches of information about the Trump campaign’s dealing with Russia in the summer of 2016. There’s this thing called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The gist of it is that American business people can’t bribe people abroad to do business overseas. There are some questions on the margins about what entails bribery or related corrupt practices. But offering a $50 million penthouse to the strongman of the state where you’re trying to build a luxury real estate development is definitely not legit. Read More
A very succinct explanation from Jeff Toobin of the vulnerability this week's Russia news has created for President Trump. pic.twitter.com/WXyDgpOg37
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 30, 2018
That’s amazing. A TPM Reader points out that just yesterday Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave a speech at a big conference on … guess what? … enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – the one President Trump, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater and the President’s criminal brood might have a problem with. It was the American Conference Institute’s 35th International Conference on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Long and august title. This was just yesterday over in Maryland. Here’s the text of Rosenstein’s speech.
Here’s a noteworthy quote … Read More
When news came out earlier this week that Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman would meet to discuss the death of Jamal Khashoggi on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, I jokingly said it would likely begin with a high five. Well, Good Lord!, that actually seems to have literally happened, as you can see here.
Good Lord! I actually predicted this (maybe low energy high five or side five but still!) pic.twitter.com/2TXnl70V4o
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 30, 2018
TPM Reader MK shared some thoughts on this disturbing development … Read More
As the country mourns the death of the first President Bush and considers his historical legacy, there is a very strong measure of nostalgia about his political career, his presidency and post-presidency. As there was after the death of Sen. John McCain, the encomiums are impossible to separate from the comparisons – implicit and increasingly explicit – with President Trump, a graceless egotist and predator who honors no code or set of values beyond self-aggrandizement. This harsh present reality forces a great deal of retrospective clean up and sanitization of Bush’s legacy, of which there was a good deal of good and a good deal that was not so good. Read More
More or more these days you hear people drawing comparisons between our era and the 1850s, the decade before the outbreak of the US Civil War. There are great differences of course. But in both eras you see an intense political polarization, violence creeping into the realm of politics and a general failure of political institutions to contain or absorb great public controversies and disputes. To discuss this question and comparison I spoke to James McPherson, one of the preeminent Civil War historians of the last forty-plus years. I found it a fascinating conversation both about this pivotal decade from our past and about today. You can listen to it here.
George H.W. Bush’s death, like that of John McCain, has brought forth glowing tributes that are veiled critiques of our current president. In response, some commentators on the left have pointed to Bush’s flaws and failures – from his rejection of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the Willie Horton ad in the 1988 campaign and from the Iran-Contra scandal (of which he was an unnamed conspirator) to his tacit acceptance of the Tiananmen Square massacre. I want to sidestep this debate to say something 80 percent positive about one aspect of Bush’s foreign policy that most clearly came to the fore in his dealings with Europe, the Soviet Union and the Middle East.
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