An example of why Trump really hates Elijah Cummings

(Other than Elijah being black.)

“The Trump Administration has virtually obliterated the lines normally separating government policy making from corporate and foreign interests,” according to a report overseen by House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, who commissioned the investigation into back channel business dealings between certain Trump aides and Middle Eastern countries.

Two weeks before Trump was scheduled to deliver [a major energy speech during the 2016 campaign], Thomas Barrack, a California investment tycoon with extensive contacts in the Middle East and who later helped oversee Trump’s inauguration, provided a former business associate inside the United Arab Emirates with an advance copy of the candidate’s planned remarks. The associate then told Barrack he shared them with UAE and Saudi government officials, after which Barrack arranged for language requested by the UAE officials to be added to the speech with the help of Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Paul Manafort.

[...]

Barrack sent a draft of the candidate’s energy remarks to al-Malik and a message that said, “What do you think of his energy message given to American executives with a pro Middle East point of view -- for you and Saeed to rebiew [sic] for me quickly. I need a few pro Middle East aspects.” The report does not identify “Saeed.”

[...]

Trump traveled to North Dakota in May of 2016, having just clinched the Republican nomination for president. He intended to give a policy speech that would solidify his position on oil, gas and coal – an energy speech that would make clear he would prioritize American energy jobs over grand multi-national environmental pacts like the Paris climate agreement.

Trump called his approach an “America First” energy plan that would “make America wealthy again.”

“Under my presidency, we will accomplish complete American energy independence,” he told the crowd. “Imagine a world in which our foes, and the oil cartels, can no longer use energy as a weapon.”

In the midst of the muscular, America-first approach that became a hallmark of his campaign, he added a phrase intended to placate an audience far away in the United Arab Emirates, telling the crowd “we will work with our Gulf allies to develop a positive energy relationship as part of our anti-terrorism strategy.” The language was modest when compared to what was requested by officials in the oil-rich emirates, according to the text messages exchanged between Barrack and Rashid al-Malik, a former business associate in UAE.

[...]

House investigators note in their report that none of the documents they gathered indicate “whether Trump was aware that drafts of his speech were circulated to foreign officials in the Middle East or that feedback had been provided through Mr. Barrack and Mr. Manafort.”

[...]

ABC News has obtained copies of more detailed emails and texts from House investigators, who gathered more than 60,000 documents showing what they say are the intermingling of private interests and public policy decision by Trump aides both before and after he took office.

  ABC

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

Colluding with the UAE

Is the involvement of the UAE in Trump's election a more likely illegal aspect than that of the Russians? Or is it essentially a co-equal part of what Sarah Kendzior calls the internationl crime syndicate that's pretty much running the world?

[Rashid al-Malik, a onetime business associate of Thomas Barrack Jr, chair of Trump's inaugural committee was a subject of] a federal probe into potential illegal donations to Trump’s inaugural fund and a pro-Trump Super PAC by Middle Eastern donors. Al-Malik was interviewed by members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and was “cooperating” with prosecutors, his lawyer told The Intercept last year. The New York Times recently reported that investigators are looking into “whether Mr. al-Malik was part of an illegal influence scheme,” although no details of that potential scheme have been made public.

In fact, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that al-Malik served as a paid intelligence source for the UAE throughout 2017 [reporting to UAE intelligence about Trump's Middle East policy].

[...]

A tiny country of fewer than 10 million people, the UAE does not have a robust intelligence service, but has used businesspeople and wealthy citizens with personal relationships with its royal families as assets to carry out secret intelligence-gathering missions for the government, according to former U.S. intelligence officials.

Al-Malik was likely enlisted as a spy “because he has pre-existing access, a natural role,” said the person with knowledge of UAE intelligence operations.

[...]

The National Intelligence Service of the UAE gave al-Malik a code name and paid him tens of thousands of dollars a month to gather information, a role for which his investment business would have provided a convenient cover.

After he was interviewed as part of the Mueller investigation, al-Malik left Los Angeles, where he’d been based for several years, and went back to the UAE.

  The Intercept

Hmmm. Kind of like letting all the Saudis take a flight home immediately following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though all other non-governmental planes had been grounded?

[A]l-Malik was tasked to report to his Emirati intelligence handlers on topics of consequence to the UAE, such as attitudes within the Trump administration toward the Muslim Brotherhood; U.S. efforts to mediate the ongoing feud between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar; and meetings between senior U.S. officials and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

[...]

Al-Malik also told his handlers that he had approached unnamed U.S. individuals about a possible business venture that was indirectly associated with Trump. It is not clear what the undertaking was, who al-Malik was talking to, or whether any deal was made.

Al-Malik's lawyer denies it all.

U.S. counterintelligence officials regularly monitor foreign governments’ efforts to influence U.S. policy, but an operation by the UAE would be particularly sensitive for the Trump administration, and would underscore the hazards posed by a president whose ongoing business ties expose him to potential conflicts of interest. The Trump Organization has made millions per year off a Trump-branded golf course in Dubai.

And let's not forget about Jared's infamous best friend relationship with bin Salman.

The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the CIA and the Justice Department, both of which also declined to comment. The UAE Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

If no one admits it, it's fake news.

Little is publicly known about al-Malik, who began his career as a pilot for Emirates, Dubai’s government-owned airline. He came to the U.S. in 1998 to study aviation at Western Michigan University and was honored by the UAE Embassy in Washington for scholastic achievement in the program, according to a profile on an industry website. But he left the university in 2000 without receiving a degree, according to the Western Michigan registrar’s office.

Learned all he needed, I suppose. And then had something important to do.

Barrack has also cultivated a friendly relationship with Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s powerful ambassador to the United States.

[...]

Al-Otaiba was also on the guest list for the Chairman’s Global Dinner, the extravagant inaugural event to which al-Malik was invited. The dinner was unusual not just because of its opulence but because it seated so many foreign businesspeople and diplomats alongside future cabinet-level officials, providing direct access to members of the incoming administration.

A week after Trump won the election, al-Otaiba sought insider information from Barrack. “If you have any insights about postings to places like state, DOD, CIA and national security adviser, I would be grateful,” al-Otaiba emailed Barrack on November 16, 2016, according to Middle East Eye. “I would only brief my bosses. Any indicators would be highly appreciated.”

Barrack responded, “I do, and we’re working through them in real time and I have our regional interest in high profile. When you get a chance let’s talk by phone.”

Barrack told the Washington Post that he was offered a job in the Trump administration. Instead, he stayed with his investment firm, which contemplated a plan to channel his foreign connections into lucrative deals that would support Trump administration policy.

Earlier this year, ProPublica published a February 2017 memo from Barrack’s firm, Colony Capital, then known as Colony Northstar, outlining the scheme to leverage connections to the Trump administration and foreign VIPs for profit. The plan was reportedly written by Rick Gates, Paul Manafort’s longtime associate, who served as deputy chair of the inaugural committee and then as a Colony consultant. Gates was fired by Colony after being indicted in the Mueller probe; he ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI.

[...]

A Colony spokesperson told ProPublica that the plan was “never acted upon or implemented.”

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

Erik Prince, Iran, and the Trump Tower meeting

Check out this Jeremy Scahill video.

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

And then there's the lies of Junior

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

Shades of the twin tower attack days

The US authorities are looking into cases where Saudi students in American colleges, who were facing criminal charges, managed to escape the country.

It is alleged that the government in Riyadh might have helped them flee.

  alJazeera

By calling on assistance of some high level US official who's "in their pocket" perhaps. 

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

Speaking of conspiracy theories

The prurient details of this scandal surrounding Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and foibles of a man worth $160 billion (before his looming divorce, anyway) sending sexts just like every horny 17-year-old, could fuel TV cable news and newspaper headlines for weeks — and it probably will.

But what if I told you that Bezos’s smartphone self-portrait gallery is arguably the least sexy thing (heh) about this entire affair? That a billionaire’s racy texts are merely the tip of a global iceberg that — as Bezos himself darkly hinted in his shocking Medium post exposing his alleged blackmail by the publishers of the National Enquirer — potentially involves the oil billions of Saudi Arabia and the president of the United States?

  Will Bunch

Pretty damned sure it involves the president of the United States.

Or that it could tie into shadowy international hacking operations, and maybe even the high-profile murder of a U.S.-based journalist?

And what if I told you something else: That the Bezos scandal is ripping away the curtain on a secret world that’s been hiding in plain sight: That a nation founded in the ideals of democracy has been increasingly fallen prey to a new dystopian regime that melds the new 21st century dark arts of illegal hacking and media manipulation with the oldest tricks in the book: blackmail and extortion.

Media manipulation isn't new, but I take his point.

In January the Amazon mogul announced that he and his longtime wife MacKenzie are divorcing, hours ahead of a report in the National Enquirer laden with the content of racy texts between the billionaire and his mistress. On Thursday, Bezos — who’d hired a well-known investigator to find out how the supermarket tabloid got his private communications — took to Medium with a post accusing the Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, whose CEO is David Pecker, of threatening to publish embarrassing photos of Bezos and his lover if he didn’t drop his investigation and state (falsely, Bezos asserts) that its coverage was not politically motivated.

[...]

The [Bezos-owned] Washington Post — where the slain [journalist Jamal] Khashoggi was a beloved colleague and where the political murder of a columnist was seen as a threat against all journalism — vowed to stay on the story until the truth was revealed. In mid-December, the Post memorialized Khashoggi in a full-page ad and its publisher Fred Ryan said its reporters would push the Saudi regime “until meaningful action is taken.”

[...]

Only now is the world figuring out that making up stories to sell papers may have been the least of the sins committed by the [AMI-owned National] Enquirer, which was propped up in its 1950s’ infancy by Mafia money and which later forged a close relationship with Roy Cohn, the notorious New York fixer attorney who took an up-and-coming New York developer named Donald Trump under his wing while fighting off allegations including (wait for it) extortion and blackmail.

[...]

[David] Pecker’s AMI reached a deal with federal prosecutors in Manhattan to avoid prosecution and tell all about how it aided Trump by working with Trump’s legal fixer, Michael Cohen, to pay Trump’s mistress Karen McDougal $150,000 in a scheme to keep her out of the news right before the November 2016 election [...] paying off a doorman with a salacious Trump rumor [about an illegitimate child] to publishing false stories that his opponent Hillary Clinton was gravely ill.

[...]

[W]hile the Enquirer was aiding and protecting Trump it was also — according to reports — holding onto a remarkable source of protection: a safe containing damaging stories about the president it had buried over the years.

[...]

What the public didn’t know in the early months of Trump’s presidency was that Donald Trump Jr. had secretly met in Trump Tower in early August 2016 with a longtime emissary for the Saudis and its closest ally, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), George Nader, and two figures from the world of intelligence: Erik Prince, founder of the notorious firm known as Blackwater, and an ex-Israeli intelligence agent named Joel Zamel.

Nader, according to the New York Times, said the Saudis and the UAE wanted to help Trump win the election. Zamel proposed a covert social media campaign.

[...]

In July 2017, the president invited his good friend David Pecker to the White House and — after chatting with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was developing close ties with [Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman] MBS — the two men had dinner with Kacy Grine, a French businessman who’s a longtime adviser to MBS. Two months later, Pecker went to Saudi Arabia and met personally with MBS and Grine and pitched business opportunities.

About six months later, shoppers in U.S. supermarkets, Walmart and other retailers might have been shocked to see a colorful piece of pro-Saudi propaganda at the checkout.

The magazine — just ahead of an MBS visit to America where he met Trump, Pecker (and, ironically, Bezos) and other luminaries — was of course published by AMI.

[...]

At the same time, Trump fumed over the investigative journalism of the Bezos-owned Washington Post. Even though Bezos is by all accounts a hands-off owner with no say in the Post’s journalism, Trump at one point reportedly demanded that the U.S. Postal Service hike the rates charged Amazon.

Which brings us to Oct. 2, 2018, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and the Post’s vow to get to the bottom of it. Three months later came the salacious Enquirer report on Bezos.

[...]

Bezos didn’t take the news lying down. He hired a well-known investigator, Gavin de Becker, to launch a detailed investigation of how the Enquirer obtained his private text messages. Early reports suggested a focus on the brother of Bezos’s paramour, Michael Sanchez, who is a political supporter of Trump and a friend of Trump-Russia scandal figures such as Carter Page and (wait for it … again) Roger Stone.

Okay, I need to stop right there. Conspiracy? Hell yes. How did Bezos meet this woman whose borther is a friend of Roger Stone? Honey trap perhaps?

Bezos, in his Medium post, noted some of the AMI-Trump-Saudi history chronicled in this column. He said that Trump has “wrongly concluded” that Bezos is an enemy and that the Post’s Khashoggi journalism is “highly unpopular in some circles.” He added: “For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve” with AMI, which then allegedly threatened Bezos, verbally and then (incredibly) by email, with publication of the photos.

[...]

In December, a Saudi dissident who lives in Canada and was close friends with the murdered Khashoggi filed a lawsuit alleging that an Israeli software company called the NSO Group — which according to reports sold its spyware program called Pegasus to Saudi Arabia for $55 million — had used its technology to hack into his smartphone and his communications with Khashoggi. Other dissidents have made similar allegations — that the Saudis have used phone hacking to spy on them.

[...]

Which brings us back to the question of why AMI was demanding not only that Bezos drop its investigation of the hacking but to state that the probe found no political motivation behind its article on the Amazon chief.

[...]

Remember, AMI signed an agreement with federal prosecutors to avoid prosecution in the Michael Cohen-Karen McDougal plot that included a promise to refrain from criminal activity for three years or else the deal was off and AMI, and presumably Pecker, could be charged in the Cohen case. Why, then, would they take the insane risk of opening that can of worms with a threat to Bezos that could meet the legal definition of blackmail? They must be hiding something very bad.

[...]

Meanwhile, Trump is ignoring a congressionally mandated deadline to find if the Saudis violated human rights in Khashoggi’s murder. And a top Saudi official just warned that linking MBS to Khashoggi’s murder would be crossing “a red line.”

[...]

We know that what we’re experiencing now is not true democracy. And with the Bezos and Khashoggi revelations, it’s totally fair to ask: Are we increasingly ruled by blackmail and extortion?

That's not new either. J. Edgar Hoover, anyone? House UnAmerican Committee? Spiro Agnew? New York "boodle" Board? San Francisco post 1900 earthquake? San Francisco & LA Chinatowns? Huey Long in Louisiana? Chicago and New Jersey pretty much all the time? To name a few big ones. "Increasingly"? I don't know. But undoubtedly it hasn't been so pervasive in an administration as in this one.

[I]s Trump’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller getting $15,000 a month from the Republican National Committee for his do-little-or-do-nothing job, or because he knows too many secrets? What are we to make of the fact that Michael Cohen and Roger Stone knew all about a hidden sex-abuse scandal involving then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman — and that the New York AG’s office didn’t investigate the Trump Foundation until after Schneiderman was forced out? Why do so many GOP senators who once brutally criticized Trump now support him?

[...]

What if America’s new amateur blackmail regime is being blackmailed by a professional: Russia’s Vladimir Putin? Much like the government’s kowtowing to the Saudis and MBS, there is too much about the administration’s bending to Russia’s will.

[...]

Shocking as it may seem, it’s not unreasonable to now ask: Who are the world’s leaders blackmailing, and who is blackmailing them?

As Sarah Kendzior always says, the world is being run by an international crime syndicate.

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

Impeach the bastard

Trump is the biggest threat to the United States that exists. And that is not hyperbole.

The White House is preventing the CIA director, Gina Haspel, or any other intelligence official from briefing the Senate on the murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the defence secretary, James Mattis, are due to give a briefing on US relations with Saudi Arabia to the entire Senate behind closed doors on Wednesday, ahead of a vote that could cut off US support for Riyadh’s military campaign in Yemen.

On a national security issue of such importance, it would be customary for a senior intelligence official to take part. On this occasion, the absence of the intelligence community is all the more glaring, as Haspel travelled to Istanbul to hear audio tapes of Khashoggi’s murder provided by Turkish intelligence, and then briefed Donald Trump.

Officials made it clear that the decision for Haspel not to appear in front of the committee came from the White House.

[...]

[T]he administration is increasingly nervous that the Senate will rebel against its policy of maintaining support for Riyadh and Prince Mohammed, asserting its powers under the War Powers Resolution.

As of Tuesday, however, the Senate was told by the administration to expect only Pompeo and Mattis at the Wednesday briefing. The White House did not respond to a query on the absence of an intelligence official.

“There is always an intel person there for a briefing like this,” a Senate staffer told the Guardian. “It is totally unprecedented and should be interpreted as nothing less than the Trump administration trying to silence the intelligence community.”

  The Guardian

And to do the bidding of Muhammed bin Salman, putting Saudi Arabia's interests above that of the US. Is there also some information that Trump and Kushner actively aided and abetted bin Salman in the murder of Khashoggi? They're certainly giving him cover.

The timing of the vote on the Saudi resolution is unclear. Senator [Bernie] Sanders has said there is support for holding it this week. The Republican majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, can try to postpone it, but cannot put it off indefinitely, as any measure under the War Powers Resolution has privileged status and cannot be stopped from going to the Senate floor for a vote.

UPDATE 12/3: After backlash, Haspel will speak to the Senate leaders now.