Side Effects

The Korea Conundrum:  Last night  Secretary of State Pompeo dined with Kim Yong Choi, North Korea’s former military intelligence chief, who arrived from Pyongyang to negotiate the agenda for the upcoming on again, off again meeting between Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong Un. Kim Yong Choi is on the US sanctions list and ordinarily wouldn’t be allowed to visit the US, however the US lifted those restrictions given the importance of figuring out the topics for the upcoming meeting.  Pompeo and Kim Yong Choi plan to continue their conversation today, a good thing because they have lots to discuss. Odds are that Kim Yong Choi knows what North Korea is willing to put on the table which puts him far ahead of Pompeo.  Reports are that the Trump administration is at internal odds over what they would be willing to negotiate.  Though Trump has stated time and again that immediate denuclearization is his goal, no decision has been made over whether or not he would be willing to allow the North Koreans to pursue civilian use of their nuclear capability or whether he would be willing to sign off on an incremental approach to the elimination of North Korea’s nukes.  In discussions with some allies, the Trump team has also said that they want to see the elimination of North Korea’s chemical and biological weapons.  And then there is the whole discussion of missile capability and whether or not the elimination of both long range and short range missiles should be required.  If all of these issues sound familiar it’s because they are, they are the same issues that the Obama administration faced when they negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran, the deal that Trump subsequently rejected because of its lack of comprehensiveness.  As to the North Koreans, their definition of denuclearization calls for the US to remove its nuclear capability from the Korean peninsula, something that’s not going to happen.  Bottom line, Trump and has team really should get their ducks in order before Trump meets with Kim Jung Un.  Sadly, they probably won’t, though he excels at heated rhetoric, details and preparation aren’t among Trump’s strongpoints.

The Investigations:  Yesterday, we all got an update on the status of the review of the documents and tapes seized from Trump fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen’s office.  Judge Kimba Wood wants the review process to be accelerated and has made it clear to Cohen’s lawyers that despite their pushback and stalling tactics she expects the review of the remaining “millions” of files to be completed by June 15.  We also learned that of the one million files reviewed to date only 250 were determined to contain privileged information, that the FBI has sent a few of Cohen’s blackberry’s to Quantico for their analysis and that the FBI has a team playing puzzle master with the documents that Cohen shredded before the FBI raid.  Whatever he shredded, Cohen should be concerned, apparently the FBI is very good at putting shredded paper back together.  Moreover, the fact that any documents were shredded justifies the FBI’s decision to raid Cohen’s premises in the first place.  Judge Wood also threw shade at Stormy Daniel’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti.  Apparently she isn’t all that fond of his talk show appearances and though she said that he has the right to advocate in public she doesn’t want him in her court room.  Avenatti responded by telling anyone who would listen that he’s absolutely positive that Cohen retained tapes of some of his conversations with Trump and that some of those conversations were about the Stormy Daniels case.  He wants them made available immediately if not sooner.  We also learned yesterday that Andrew McCabe, the former Acting Director of the FBI was another one of those guys who memorialized his thoughts in contemporaneous notes.  Among other things his records describe his conversations with Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein about the firing of former FBI Director Comey.  McCabe’s notes say that Trump wanted Rosenstein to mention his dismay over the Russia investigation in the Comey dismissal letter, the one that Rosenstein drafted at Trump’s request.  Ultimately the Russia related language was deleted from the final draft but McCabe’s notes and earlier versions of the letter live on, in Special Counsel Mueller’s office and are now filed under O for obstruction..  

Other News:  Though Trump gave himself an A plus for his handling of last year’s hurricanes, we’ve known for a while that at least with regard to Puerto Rico, he probably didn’t deserve anything higher than a D.  Now by virtue of a recently released Harvard University study, we know that things were even worse in Puerto Rico than anyone imagined.  The Harvard study concludes that 4,645 people died as a result of the hurricane, far more than the 64 deaths earlier reported and cited by Trump and Puerto Rico’s governor days after the storm.  Harvard’s higher mortality numbers include thousands of people who died later from storm related trauma and the failure to obtain the kind of medical treatment, including dialysis and diabetes care, that became unavailable in Puerto Rico during the days, weeks and months following the storms.  To be fair, many of Puerto Rico’s problems were and continue to be attributable to local government mismanagement but that said, many are also due to Trump’s failure to adequately allocate resources to the largely Democratic island full of US citizens who he seems to have forgotten are really US citizens.  On Tuesday it was reported that Arkady Babchenko, one of those Russian journalists who regularly reports on Putin’s corruption, had been killed in Ukraine by a Kremlin directed assassination team.  Yesterday we learned that Babchenko is alive.  Apparently, though he really was a target of another one of those Russian hit squads, with the help of Ukrainian officials, he managed to escape the hit, instead faking his death as part of a sting operation to catch the killers.  Though one of the attempted murders, a local for hire hitman, was captured, another, the person more directly involved with the Kremlin escaped.  As to Babchenko so far he is just fine and he hopes to stay that way. His wife, however,  is reported to be somewhat livid.  Apparently, she was kept in the dark about the sting and had already started mourning. Putin called the whole thing out as another one of those silly charades.  Trump had nothing to say about the Kremlin attempt on Babchenko’s life and little to say to Roseanne Barr about her racist tirade, the one that she blamed on Ambien, a side effect that Sanofi the company that manufactures the sleeping pill wants you to know is not associated with their drug.  However,  Trump is fairly upset with Disney’s Bob Iger.  Specifically he tweeted “Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ‘ABC does not tolerate comments like those’ made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?”  Just another ordinary day in the Trump centric world.