Shekels and Sharks

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Something is cooking on the Manafort front.  A pre-trial hearing that had been scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed to Friday.  It’s reported that Manafort’s lawyers are seeking a plea deal but that he remains resistant to cooperating with prosecutors about anything that he knows about Trump. Apparently despite Manafort’s resistance, Mueller is continuing to push him to come forward about what he knows about any of the things that took place during the 2016 campaign.  Trump’s lawyer/spokesman  Rudy Giuliani insists that Manafort has nothing bad to say about Trump so Trump isn’t worried.  Giuliani asserts that he knows that for certain because Manafort and Trump’s joint defense agreement is still in place, at least Giuliani says that it is still in place.  To that end, Giuliani added that even if Manafort cops a plea to avoid another trial, Trump would still consider him pardonable.  He didn’t promise a pardon, nor did he add that any future pardon would depend on Manafort keeping his mouth shut about any Trump misdeeds, but he was clearly sending a signal to Manafort to stay strong. In a separate case that may have no direct bearing on election meddling but is still significant, US prosecutors secured a guilty plea from Peter Levashov, a Russian accused of commandeering a network of 100,000 or more computers in order to engage in nefarious cyber activities.  A few things are interesting about the Levashov case, first though he was indicted while outside of the US, authorities managed to nab him while he was in Spain, extraditing him back to the US to face trial, something that sends a message to those other Russians, the ones that Mueller has indicted for election interference, that to the extent they leave the comforts of Russia, they too could end up in the clutches of the US criminal system.  Second, Levashov’s sentencing is being put off for almost a year, an indication that, he might be cooperating on some of those other Russian related cybercrime investigations, even those that fall into the Mueller universe.  Also, on the Russian front, the talkative George Papadopoulos says that he would be happy to testify before Congress.  Among other things, if taken up on his offer, he plans to say that though he lied to the FBI, it wasn’t his fault, he now asserts that he might have been set up by western intelligence officials seeking to incriminate Trump.  Lastly, though Trump still doubts that any election interference ever took place and that anyone has plans to interfere in future elections, yesterday he signed an executive order meant to punish foreign entities for interfering in US elections, the order will allow the Director of National Intelligence to assess and identify foreign actors responsible for election meddling and direct the Treasury Department to apply sanctions against any bad players. Trump’s  decision to finally sign the order, something that he did behind closed doors, provides another example of how his staff and advisors push him to go forward with policies that he’d rather not pursue.  Senators Rubio and Van Hollen responded to the signing by saying that the “announcement by the administration recognizes the threat, but does not go far enough to address it. The United States can and must do more. Mandatory sanctions on anyone who attacks our electoral systems serve as the best deterrent."  They’ve been jointly pushing bi-partisan legislation to do that but so far have made little progress.

Storm Clouds:  Although Florence has been downgraded to a category 2 hurricane, forecasters still predict that an extreme storm surge is likely to result in historic flooding rains and damaging winds and that the storm’s impact will be catastrophic for millions of people.  Then again they could be wrong, or at least that’s what Rush Limbaugh, that great weather prognosticator says. He asserts that predictions of vast "doom and gloom" from Hurricane Florence are meant "to heighten the belief in climate change," that made-up science pushed by those liberal conspiracists.  Though he doesn’t think that the storm will be as bad as forecasted, he is concerned that “Sharks are being lifted out of the Atlantic Ocean and dumped into the storm because it’s so strong. It’s sucking ’em in there—and then they’re gonna be in the waters. Of course, the only water that might contain sharks would be storm surge—it isn’t gonna be raining sharks—and that’s the predominant water source in a hurricane is rainfall." Makes you wonder how many evenings Limbaugh has spent watching Sharknado episodes with his good buddy Trump.  Though FEMA appears to be truly concerned about Florence, the Trump administration in its infinite wisdom has other priorities.  During the summer they reallocated about $10 million from FEMA to the INS, around the same time that an additional $29 million was redirected from the Coast Guard, one of the key participants in hurricane relief, that money also went to the INS. Those INS guys have been very busy. Yesterday, the NY Times reported that as a result of the administration’s immigration policies the “overall number of detained migrant children has exploded to the highest ever recorded.”  More than 12,800 children are now being held in custody, a number that includes the children that were separated from their parents at the border, but is mostly made up of those who crossed the border alone. Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to discourage migrants from coming to the US, roughly the same number of children are crossing the border as in years past. Though the number of children crossing the border has remain constant the number of children held in custody continues to grow because fear brought on by stricter immigration enforcement has discouraged relatives and family friends, many of whom are themselves undocumented, from coming forward to sponsor children resulting in more of them remaining in the increasingly overburdened shelter system.  Costs associated with the stricter policies combined with budget constraints are probably responsible for that need to siphon funds from other pressing needs, like hurricane relief, and who really needs hurricane relief anyway?

Another Dog Whistle:  During an appearance on Fox and Friends, second son Eric Trump accused Bob Woodward of making up stories about his father’s administration in order to sell extra books, specifically he said “you sell three extra books you make three extra shekels.” He is now being accused of taking his shekel reference from one or more white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites.  Apparently those sites use that expression to push forward anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews and money.  I have to admit that I missed the connection, probably because I just think of shekels as the currency of Israel and spend no time on any of the websites favored by members of the Trump family.