Elderly Uncles

Ukraine Fiasco:  Another Ukraine related transcript was released yesterday. This one includes State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent’s testimony.  Kent’s transcript confirms what was said about Trump’s extortion/quid pro quo plan in the others that have already released. Kent, who is scheduled to testify in public next week, was another one of those who took copious notes, reflecting his increasing distress as he realized what Trump and his surrogates were up to.  He felt his mission and the mission of the US was to help emerging democracies like Ukraine become less corrupt and was excited about the new Zelensky administration’s plans but believed that Trump, his Three Amigos and Rudy Giuliani were, if anything, advancing corruption. As to President Zelensky, the NY Times reports that by early September he was convinced that Ukraine wouldn’t get its much military aid unless he publicly announced plans to investigate the Bidens, Burisma and the DNC server so he reluctantly decided to make the announcement that Trump wanted during a previously scheduled interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that was supposed to take place on September 13.  However, after word of the aid freeze leaked out and Congress went into an “uproar,” two days before the scheduled interview, the Trump administration released the aid leading Zelensky’s office to cancel his interview.  Notably, by then the White house already knew about the Whistleblower’s complaint, knowledge that most likely also influenced the decision to release the held up assistance. As to the Whistleblower, his lawyer Andrew Bakaj, sent the White House a cease and desist order yesterday, warning that Trump’s rhetoric and activity are placing his client and his family in physical danger. The letter requested that Trump be counseled  “on the legal and ethical peril in which he is placing himself should anyone be physically harmed as a result of his, or his surrogates, behavior."  That ought to work, right?  It’s also reported that CIA Director Gina Haspel, who provides Trump with his daily security briefings but has managed to stay under the radar, is being pressured by her staff to stop acting like a Pompeo clone and instead to stand up publicly for the Whistleblower.    

Pointing Fingers:  Yesterday, Jennifer Williams, an aide to VP Pence testified.  She was one of the people who listened in on the September 25 Trump/Zelensky call.  She reported being surprised by what was said, but didn’t raise flags about it which may confirm Pence’s party line that though he knew that aid was being held up, he thought that it was just part of Trump’s push against corruption.  That’s hard to believe given how much time Pence spends with Trump and how little Trump, who now has to cough up $2 million to NYS for his charitable foundation’s corrupt behavior, cares about corruption.  Pence is either a complete moron or was shrewd enough to maintain personal deniability on the whole mess because he knew it was a mess.  As to deniability, Trump’s cronies in Congress appear to have come up with another strategy to protect him, they’ve decided to lay blame for the Ukraine fiasco on some combination of lawyer/fixer Rudy Giuliani, Three Amigo/contribution/EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland and Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, saying that they were all up to no good but that Trump had little if anything to do with their plans.  Last night House Democrats upped Mulvaney’s invitation to testify to a formal subpoena but no one really expects him to appear today for his scheduled time on the hot seat although given that his former colleagues are looking to him to be a fall guy, he really should reconsider showing up to defend his own interests.  At least for now former national security advisor John Bolton will remain silent.  He says that he might consider testifying but only after a court says he can and then only in public but Adam Schiff’s team isn’t willing to wait for any court decisions and isn’t interested in having Bolton testify in public before he shows up to the SCIF.  

And teasers from the upcoming Anonymous book “A Warning” have been leaked out.  Among other things Anonymous says working in the White House is “like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants tried to catch him.  You’re stunned, amused, and embarrassed all at the same time. Only your uncle probably wouldn’t do it every single day, his words aren’t broadcast to the public, and he doesn’t have to lead the US government once he puts his pants on.”  The author also says that many of his/her cohorts have at time considered resigning en masse.  So far they haven’t, but they do appear to be disappearing in ones and twos.  Yesterday, Earl Matthews, the rare African American official on Trump’s National Security Council who attended Pence’s Warsaw meeting with Zelensky announced that he’s exiting stage left.                 

2020:  Yesterday, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Trump’s least favorite former Cabinet member, announced that he is running for his old seat in the Senate, the seat currently occupied by the most vulnerable Democrat up for reelection, Doug Jones, who only won his “special election” for Sessions’ vacated seat because he ran against a child molester. Trump has already told Sessions, who announced his candidacy with a video expressing his love and support for all things Trump, that he will campaign against him to prevent him from getting the Republican nomination and Speaker McConnell asked him to stay out of the race but Sessions wants back into the Senate and is really popular in Alabama so he is already viewed as the front runner.  On the Democratic side, former Mayor/philanthropist Mike Bloomberg, who earlier said that he wasn’t running for president because the Democrats had plenty of good candidates and all of them would be better than Trump, is now gearing up to run. As a first step, he is filing the paperwork required to run in the Alabama presidential primary. Reports are that he’s concerned that Biden isn’t adequately fulfilling the role of competent moderate, that none of the other moderates have what it takes to win the nomination and that Warren and Sanders are too far to the left to beat Trump.  It’s not clear that he’s really running, he may be just trying to push Warren to take more moderate positions. It’s also not clear that he’ll be able to gain significant traction among the left leaning Democratic base but then again his pollsters, and he’s got many, might know something that we don’t.  In any case, with $53 billion to play with, he gets to do what he wants and if he wants to run, he’ll run. 

International Strategery:  It turns out that pulling from the Iran nuclear deal without pushing an alternative may not have been the best strategy.  Iran has now begun the process of fueling lots of centrifuges, the ones that were supposed to only be used for research but are now being prepared to make weapons grade uranium.  In another bad sign, Iran has also expelled a UN inspector.  We may or may not have reached an agreement with China on tariffs, one that rolls back some of the tariffs that Trump imposed on China and that China imposed in retaliation.  At least that’s what China says, the official US position is that we are optimistic that a phase one agreement will be made soon.  The stock markets like the idea of the rollback not because they accomplish anything new but because they return things to the way they were before the tariff war began.