Happy Halloween

    

Go Nats:  The Nationals won the first World Series, California is still burning and the impeachment inquiry continues to rev up.  Trump wasn’t at last night’s game because he’s heard enough booing for one week; he hasn’t mentioned the dire California fires because he’s mad that Governor Newsom hasn’t taken his “sweeping” advice and because it’s California; and things must be totally insane inside the White House because the Ukraine witch hunt continues to boil over and over with more and more implicating details emerging every day.  Well, it all looks implicating to Democrats, most Republicans, who can, continue to avoid questions and cameras. The few who are talking continue to either slam the legitimacy of the investigation with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, the leader of the pizza insurrection, threatening to sue or like Ohio Senator Portman they say that while demanding dirt in exchange for aid is a bad thing, it’s just not an impeachable thing.  For his part, though he’s still tweeting, Trump appears to be taking Senate Leader McConnell’s advice, for this nanosecond he’s laying off publicly shaming Senators like Mitt Romney and instead has taken to tweeting out photoshopped pictures of his little hands draping a medal on last weekend’s hero dog.  So basically, nothing and everything is normal in Trumpland.   

The Cauldron:  The Ukraine story continues to overwhelm.  Since all of the testimony to date has been behind closed doors all the facts still aren’t public but those that have leaked out aren’t good for team Trump.  It’s fair to say that if anything exculpatory is being revealed, the Republicans are doing a really bad job of leaking. Yesterday two more career diplomats, Christopher Anderson and Catherine Croft, testified in the House SCIF.  Anderson, a foreign services office, said that Trump had a dark view of the Ukraine, one that was fed to him by Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts but that conflicted with the official State Department position.  He detailed how the State Department’s efforts to condemn Russia after it seized Ukrainian ships was blocked by the White House. Croft, who worked at the NSC as a Ukraine expert, introduced still another character to the Ukraine plot, relaying how former Louisiana Congressman/current lobbyist Robert Livingston called her several times to press for former Ambassador Yovanovitch, who he referred to as a “Obama holdover” and “George Soros associate,” to be fired.  Livingston, who appears to have earned big bucks from an unidentified source for pressing for Yovanovitch’s dismissal, may well have earned himself an invitation to testify.

More Skeletons:  A few more details about everyone’s favorite twin, Lt. Col Vindman’s testimony also surfaced.  After two contentious July 10 meetings in the White House in which EU Ambassador/Trump donor Gordon Sondland pushed two senior Ukrainian officials from President Zelensky’s newly elected government to investigate the Bidens and the Burisma gas company, Vindman made the first report of his concerns to NSC lawyer John Eisenberg.  Then national security advisor John Bolton was present for the first one of those meetings but didn’t attend the second because he didn’t want to have anything to do with that “drug” deal, a reference to what Sondland was pushing rather than to actual drugs.  After the now infamous Trump-Zelensky July 25 call, Vindman again went to Eisenberg who, in response to Vindman’s concerns, took the unusual step of hiding the call “transcript” in the super-secret White House server. 

Newts and Lizards: One bizarre aside, Trump apparently didn’t know that Vindman was his NSC Ukraine expert because he’d been getting Ukraine information and advice, all of it disparaging, from a former long-time Devon Nunes aide named Kashyap Patel who worked in the White House.  The wily Patel had convinced Trump that he, not Vindman, was his senior Ukraine expert.  Vindman became aware of this when he tried to update Trump about Zelensky’s inauguration when he was told by Bolton and Russia expert Fiona Hill not to bother, that Trump would be confused to learn that Vindman rather than Patel was his Ukraine expert.  Because why would anyone want to confuse Trump with the facts?

Future Goblins:   Tim Morrison who replaced Fiona Hill as the top Russia and Europe expert on the NSC is due to testify in the House SCIF today.  Perhaps to facilitate his testimony or maybe because he’d had enough with the White House, Morrison resigned his post last night.  Like Vindman, Morrison listened in on Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky.  In really bigly news, it appears that John Bolton will be testifying on November 7, unless he changes his mind, people who know him say that he is unpredictable.  Last night Bolton’s lawyer kind of confirmed that he would appear by saying that he wouldn’t show up voluntarily but would be open to receiving a subpoena, lawyer speak for he’s coming but only if he can say that he has to.  NSC lawyer John Eisenberg and Michael Ellis, another former Devon Nunes aide, are also on next week’s schedule but it’s not clear that either plans to show up. It doesn’t appear that the Whistleblower will be  called in to testify, largely because despite Republican insistence that he should come forward so they can throw darts at him, everything he said in his letter has now been confirmed by others; however his name, or at least the name of someone that various right wingers have identified as his, is circulating on Twitter.   

Past and Present Ghosts:  One time national security advisor Michael Flynn is now telling his judge that he is innocent, the victim of a deep state plot.  George Papadopoulos whose drunken bragging about the purloined emails triggered the Russia investigation is running for the seat vacated by California Congresswoman Katie Hill who stepped down last week due to a sex scandal.  There could be more to that story because it appears that Papadopoulos knew about Hill’s problems before any of her hacked sex photos were released, leading some to surmise that the Russian’s are at it again.  And they are, Facebook has now taken down accounts linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin also known as Putin’s chef, the businessman behind Russia’s notorious troll factory.  Those accounts were actively seeking to influence the domestic politics of a range of African countries.  Though Facebook has no plans to ban political advertising, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has announced that  he is banning all political advertisements.  So far only Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale has complained, calling it a dumb decision.