Buzzsaw, Not the Movie

Free Expression: As more and more of the gruesome details about the brutal murder of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi surface, Trump continues to assert that no one really knows what happened in the Saudi Istanbul embassy. He’s even gone so far as to suggest that the widely discussed audio tape of the murder that the Turks assert they have might not be real because he hasn’t heard it.  Trump remains more focused on the value of Saudi Arabia’s US military equipment purchases, an amount that he continues to exaggerate; that Khashoggi, a legal US resident, was a Saudi national so his US status didn’t afford him any protection; and the House of Saud’s denials, than any of the damning facts that in all likelihood have been presented to him by US intelligence agencies. He and son in law Kushner, who has been working behind the scenes to come up with a solution for this horror show, are both reported to be very focused on not doing anything that would cause the Saudis to stop investing in their real estate enterprises because both intend on tapping the Saudi wealth funds again to the extent they survive their years in Washington.  Regarding those facts that Trump doesn’t want to hear or believe, after his meeting with Saudi royalty Secretary of State Pompeo reported that neither he nor the Saudi government want to talk about them, that is they don’t want to discuss them until the US and the Saudis can come up with a mutually agreed upon explanation for how Khashoggi was murdered.  As to that murder, reports are that when the Saudi’s Istanbul counsel grew distressed that the bloody dismemberment was messing up his office, the interrogation/assassination team told him to shut up or face the consequences. He shut up, but to maintain that silence, the Saudi government has recalled him back to Riyadh.  It’s also reported that the buzz saw wielding “forensics” expert who sliced and diced Khashoggi’s body blocked out the noise of his whirring saw by listening to soothing music through noise blocking headphones, something he advised his compatriots to do too to minimize their discomfort. The Washington Post has now published Khashoggi’s last column, a piece received from his translator the day after he disappeared. They hadn’t published it earlier out of concern that it’s release would further inflame his captors in the off chance that he was still alive, but now recognizing the certainty of his death, they’ve gone ahead.  The prescient column titled “What the Arab world needs most is free expression” laments the dearth of free press in most of the Arab world which he said “is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors, but through domestic forces vying for power.”  Sadly, that observation and his willingness to speak openly about repression in Saudi Arabia are probably what infuriated Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, widely believed to be the one who authorized his murder.  

The Revolving Door:  Don McGahn is no longer White House Counsel, he left the building yesterday following his final meeting with Trump, a meeting in which the two discussed how much they disliked working with each other.  McGahn may be gone but the work he did during his time as White Counsel will reverberate for decades as he was depressingly effective at orchestrating the confirmation of a huge number of extremely conservative judges, a list that includes newly minted Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.  In any case, though McGahn is physically gone, his spirit, in the form of the hours that he spent spilling his guts to Special Counsel Mueller about the goings on in casa Trump, is likely to haunt Trump for some time.  Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein remains employed, at least for now.  Yesterday, the generally restrained Rosenstein gave an extraordinary interview to the Wall Street Journal. He defending the Mueller investigation, telling the paper that  the probe is both “appropriate” and “independent.”  He said that “people are entitled to be frustrated, I can accept that, but at the end of the day, the public will have confidence that the cases we brought were warranted by the evidence, and that it was an appropriate use of resources.” He also pointed out all of the convictions and indictments already announced as proof that, contrary to Trump’s assertions, Russian election interference really did take place.  Separately, the NY Post reported that Mueller is getting close to completing his investigation, predicting that he will present his findings to Rosenstein right after the mid term elections.  It’s not clear that Mueller’s work is nearing completion, or that either he or Rosenstein will be around for much longer if Trump gets his way, but it any case it is widely expected that additional indictments will be handed down right after the elections.  Suggested targets include Trump’s long-time associate Roger Stone and possibly even first son Donald Jr.  It’s also been reported that former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen, who Trump now refers to as a PR guy who did one or two small tasks on his behalf during their long professional relationship, has been spending lots of quality time, upwards of 50 hours, with an array of federal and state prosecutors from Mueller’s team, the Southern District and the State of New York.  Given Cohen’s tortured relationship with the truth, little of what he says will be taken at face value, but to the extent that what he says can or has already been corroborated those meetings are likely to lead to more and bigly trouble for the Trump dynasty. Though we will still have to wait for Mueller’s results we now know how Buzzfeed received copies of some supposedly highly confidential “suspicious activity reports” from the Treasury, the ones that detailed payments between people like Manafort and his criminal Putinesque cronies.  Apparently a Treasury employee named Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, really that’s her name, leaked them.  She has now been arrested and charged.  She’s claiming that she is a “whistleblower” and that she released copies of the reports to prevent them from being   destroyed.   

And…:  Trump blames the growing deficit on all of those stupid, wasteful projects and programs that the Democrats snuck into the spending bill at the same time that they failed to fund his extraordinarily expensive and unnecessary border wall. To remedy the problem he plans to command his cabinet members to slash at least 5% from each of their budgets. He also called for voters to cast their ballots for more Republicans to make his budget plans more viable.  To that end on the Senate front, prospects for North Dakota’s Democratic Senator Heitkamp took another hit when one of her aides signed off on a “me too” advertisement which was supposed to hit back at her Republican opponent’s dismissal of the whole movement as a farce but instead mistakenly identified some women as victims of sexual abuse without their signoff.  Heitkamp has now apologized and taken full responsibility for the mistake. It’s increasingly likely Majority Leader McConnell will retain his leadership post, prospects in the House continue to be problematic for Republicans, or at least they appear that way for now. Its nail biting season.