The Silence Breakers

The City of Gold: Yesterday Trump fulfilled another campaign promise by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, though he also pushed off moving the embassy anytime soon.  Arguing that years of not recognizing Jerusalem as the capital had been a failed policy that hadn’t brought peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians any closer, he said that recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital was “nothing more or less than a recognition of reality.”  Ironically, his argument was similar to the one that Obama used to justify changing US policy towards Cuba.  However, that change was widely supported by world leaders and was brokered with the help of the Pope, and Trump who rejects it is trying to reverse Obama’s changes.  Trump’s Jerusalem change, a nod to evangelists including a fully supportive Vice President Pence, one of his biggest donors Sheldon Adelson, and a small percentage of American Jews, was roundly condemned by world leaders including Germany’s Angela Merkel who "does not support this position because the status of Jerusalem can only be negotiated within the framework of a two-state solution,” France’s Emanuel Macron who called the announcement regrettable and said that France did not support it, and the UK’s Theresa May who spoke out in favor of clarifying the status of Jerusalem under an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and a two-state solution. The Pope also expressed his disapproval saying “I cannot keep quiet about my deep worry about the situation that has been created in the last few days.”  Despite Trump’s insistence that Saudi Arabia was okay with the move King Salman strongly contradicted the assertion and not surprisingly, Turkey’s Erdogan was close to apoplectic, saying US was “plunging the region and the world into a fire with no end in sight.”  Israel was the only country that supported the decision but even there the move was not uniformly applauded.  Haaretz said that Trump’s “Jerusalem gesture is tainted by his overall record of recklessness” and “constitutes another step in the American withdrawal from the Middle East.” The UN has called for an emergency meeting, Palestinians have organized a national strike, are burning US and Israeli flags in the street and are calling for their leaders to withdraw from the peace process and to revoke recognition of Israel and the US State Department has told its employees to stay home. In other international news, Putin announced that he is running for reelection and since he controls all of the votes he will probably coast to a decisive victory. However, his athletes won’t have as easy a time on the Olympic slopes, they can still participate in the upcoming South Korean Olympics but they will not be able to compete under the Russian flag and to the extent that they take home the gold it won’t be the Russian anthem played at the award ceremony.  It turns out that the Olympic Committee takes state sponsored doping more seriously than Trump takes state sponsored election tampering. At least the Russian athletes will get to compete, yesterday UN Ambassador Nikki Haley cast doubt on whether Trump will allow US athletes to participate because of the Olympics proximity to North Korea, slighting still another one of our supposed allies, South Korea.  This was the first time that they had heard about US concerns about the venue and their ability to keep US athletes out of harm’s way.

Moore Men Behaving Badly:  On the day that Time Magazine named all of the “Me Too” Silence Breakers as People of the Year a woman told Politico that Minnesota Senator Al Franken tried to forcibly kiss her after a 2006 radio show saying it was his “right as an entertainer.”  The kissing incident took place well before Franken was a senator.  The beleaguered Franken completely denies the accusation however, his colleagues, led by a very strident NY Senator Kristen Gillibrand who’s says that she’s had it with trying to grade levels of harassment, are done with Franken and the shadow that the accusations about his behavior are having on the message that Democrats are trying to convey about how they are morally superior to Republicans.  By the end of the day thirty-two Democratic senators, 13 female and 19 male, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, called on Franken to resign. Republican Sen. Susan Collins joined them.  Guilty or innocent, its looking more and more like Franken is on his way out, later today he is expected to announce his next steps at a press conference.  Thought it’s been reported that he will resign, last night his office sent out a tweet that he had not yet reached that decision so we will have to wait for his morning statement.  If Franken resigns, moral superiority has its price, next week the Senate may find itself down one kissy, tushy pincher but up one serial child molester if Alabama candidate Moore wins his election.  And despite the best efforts of 58 Democratic members of Congress who voted yes yesterday on a measure introduced by Representative Al Green to begin impeach proceeding against him, Trump, the serial molester will still be president.  Another Republican, Congressman Farenthold, is trying to hold on to his seat by offering to pay back the $83,000 that the Congressional slush fund paid to his accuser. While Democratic Congressman John Conyers Jr is now officially out of the House, his favored replacement, son John Conyers III might not be such a good addition. Yesterday it was revealed that John III got into a knife fight with his girlfriend earlier in the year leaving her a little worse for wear. 

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Donald Trump Jr spent over eight hours testifying in a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee yesterday.  It’s been reported that he was generally polite and somewhat cooperative though he, like Attorney General Sessions, appears to suffer from odd bouts of amnesia, a common malady among Trumps and Trump surrogates. For example, Donny Jr has no memory of the calls he made about the arrangement of his meeting with the Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and his cooperation did not extend to his discussions with his father about the drafting of the statement concerning his meeting with her.  He claimed that those conversations were protected by attorney-client privilege because both his lawyers and his father’s lawyers were present when they were discussing how to portray the meeting in the statement that ultimately referred to adoptions but failed to mention the offer of Hilary Clinton dirt.  After the testimony Ranking Member Adam Schiff, a seasoned prosecutor, said that there is no legal basis for Trump Jr’s refusal to talk about that discussion but Republican members of the committee were pleased as punch with Donny Jr’s performance.  Also on the Russian front, yesterday it was revealed that last June a whistleblower told Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings that during the Trump inauguration ceremony former national security advisor Flynn excitedly texted one of his business colleagues, a man named Alex Copson, to report that one of Trump’s first official actions would be “ripping up” the Obama sanctions against Russia and that he should get ready to move forward with their business venture to build nuclear reactors throughout the Middle East because the plan was now “good to go.” The unnamed whistleblower knew this because Copson was so excited about the news that he bragged about the text message and said that “this was going to make a lot of people wealthy.”    Cummings had forwarded the whistleblower’s account to Mueller who had asked him to hold the communication in confidence until he’d had time to investigate the relevant facts.  The whistleblower’s account of Flynn’s comments provide further evidence of Flynn’s expectations and his economic incentive to push Russian interests and Cummings’ disclosure and Flynn’s recent guilty plea provide evidence that Special Counsel Mueller has probably completed his review of the related facts.  New Jersey’s soon to be ex-Governor Chris Christie is telling anyone who will listen that his distrust of Flynn and his recommendation that Flynn not be hired by Trump is the main reason that he lost his role as head of the Trump transition team, he also reports that his binders full of competent, vetted possible appointments were thrown out when he was kicked out the door.  As to Mueller, his boss Rod Rosenstein reports satisfaction with the Special Counsel’s work.  Trump, not so much, but he’ll have to fire Rosenstein to get to Mueller and history tells us that that probably wouldn’t work out well, for him.