The second Steele dossier

This comes Charlie Pierce blogging about Jane Mayer's piece about Christopher Steele, which I still haven't completed reading.

In the piece, Mayer reveals the existence of a second dossier prepared by Steele in which the president* is accused, essentially, of letting Russian officials have a veto over the people he picked for his candidate. (Jesus, Russians, couldn’t you have stepped in on Zinke or DeVos. Give a brother a break here.)

  Charles P Pierce

This was the claim that the Kremlin blocked Trump's first choice for Secretary of State to be Mitt Romney, who has always seen Russia as the world's bogeyman (or as we here in the middle of nowhere say, boogie man).

Leaving aside the fact that this story has Mitt Romney at its center as a hero, which, albeit, is a very hard concept to grasp, can we all stop pretending now that the current president* isn’t at least half a Russian asset? He hasn’t done a single thing to prove otherwise. And the guy he picked instead of Romney, the Putin-decorated oilman Rex Tillerson, is proving to be less of an impediment to the Volga Bagmen than the usual Secretary of State would be.

[...]

The Congress earmarked $120 million for the State Department to use to counter [Russia's] continuing assault on the country [in this year's midterms]. Of that money, Tillerson and his undermanned operation have spent exactly zero dollars, according to The New York Times.

[...]

Mr. Tillerson has voiced skepticism that the United States is even capable of doing anything to counter the Russian threat. “If it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that,” Mr. Tillerson said in an interview last month with Fox News. “And we can take steps we can take, but this is something that once they decide they are going to do it, it’s very difficult to pre-empt it.”

Well, fck it, then. Let’s all go get a beer.

I can’t think of one administration in my lifetime that wouldn’t have thrown Tillerson out the window for saying something like that and then fired him before he hit the pavement.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.



Do you ever wonder how the White House communications people decide what to lie about and what to avoid lying about? I can't figure it out.