Tuesday, December 12, 2017 3:16:33 AM
Did President Donald Trump Tell Michael Flynn To Lie To The FBI? | All In | MSNBC
"Michael Flynn's Text Shows Donald Trump WH Was All About Money | Morning Joe | MSNBC"
Published on Dec 11, 2017
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is examining the period before Flynn's firing, according to NBC News, focusing on what the president knew and when.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzBPvI_32E4
The article mentioned in the video.
What Putin Really Wants
Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.
Julia Ioffe January/February 2018 Issue
[...]
Putin governs with the twin collapses of 1917 and 1991 at the forefront of his thinking. He fears for himself when another collapse comes—because collapse always comes, because it has already come twice in 100 years. He is constantly trying to avoid it. The exiled oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky has publicly spoken of deposing Putin, and until recently did not eschew violent means. People like Alexey Navalny, the opposition leader, openly talk about putting Putin and his closest associates on trial. The Russian opposition gleefully waits for Putin to fall, to resign, to die. Every misstep, every dip in oil prices, is to them just another sign of his coming personal apocalypse. The hungry anticipation is mirrored in the West, especially in the United States.
Alexey Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption crusader and presidential candidate, meeting with staff (Max Avdeev)
For the most part, the Kremlin is focused not on any positive development program, but on staving off that fate—and on taking full advantage of its power before the state’s inevitable demise. That’s one reason corruption among the ruling elite is so breathtakingly brazen: A Russian businessman who works with government clients describes the approach as the “last day of Pompeii,” repeated over and over. Another businessman, who had just left the highest echelons of a big state-run bank out of frustration at its corruption and mismanagement, told me, “Russia always rises from the ashes, time and time again. But I have a feeling that we’re about to go through a time of ashes again.”
[...]
Fear of collapse is also why Russian propaganda is intent on highlighting the bloody aftermath of revolutions the world over. Things may not be great in Russia now—the country has struggled mightily since 2012—but, the country’s news programs suggest, things can always get worse. That’s what Russians are told happened in the 1990s, in the nine frenetic years between the Soviet Union’s collapse and Putin’s ascent to power. “When you have two governmental collapses in 100 years, people are scared of them,” Migranyan told me. Many Russians remember the last one personally.
But the number who do is shrinking. One in four Russian men dies before the age of 55. Putin turned 65 in October, and is surrounded by people who are as old as he is, if not older. Russia is now “in an autumnal autocracy,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist in Moscow, says. “The more it tries to seem young and energetic, the more it obviously fails.” As Aleksey Chesnakov, a former Kremlin insider, told me, in Russia “the most active voters”—the people who buy in most fully to what Putin’s selling—“are the pensioners.”
To Putin’s supporters, his regime isn’t an autocracy, exactly. “It can be described as demophilia,” Migranyan explained. “It is not a democracy, but it is in the name of the people, and for the people. Putin’s main constituency is the people. All of his power comes from his rating with the people, and therefore it’s important that he gives them the fruits of his rule.” The Kremlin calls it “managed democracy.”
[...]
Navalny laughed at the state’s accusations that his supporters—the hundreds of people sweating with him in the room—had been paid by the U.S. State Department to show up. “This is the real political force of the country,” he said. “And we will win. We are destined for victory, because in any culture, in any civilization, people like us win, because they lie and we tell the truth.”
[...]
Putin’s approval rating surged in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea—and, by extension, Russia’s return to imperial grandeur. It was a risky maneuver, the equal, perhaps, of Putin’s later interference in the U.S. election. And it paid off, at least in the short term. Russians rallied behind the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine—and behind Putin, their audacious president. “There was a spike in loyalty” toward “every organ of the state,” Kirill Rogov, a political analyst in Moscow who studies Russian polling, told me—“a conservative shift in all directions. People started paying more attention to the news, they watched more TV, and they became more indoctrinated.” For a decade, a majority of Russians had told pollsters that they would rather be well-off than live in a great power. In 2014, those preferences flipped.
But the rush of patriotism provided by the Crimean annexation proved fleeting.
[...]
Worried about potential terror attacks in nearby Sochi during the 2014 Olympics, the Russian secret services had allowed hundreds, if not thousands, of Islamist rebels, all of them Russian citizens, to go to Syria. According to one report in Novaya Gazeta, the FSB even provided some of them with a passport and transportation to the Russian border.
It was a shortsighted counterterrorism strategy. Two Dagestani men who traveled to isis-controlled territories in Syria in order to bring back their children told me that they heard as much Russian as Arabic on the streets of isis cities. An October report by the Soufan Center, a security-intelligence nonprofit, showed that more foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria came from Russia than from any other country. What will become of these Russian fighters, now better trained and battle-hardened, as isis territory continues to shrink?
[...]
Ironically, one of the Russian institutions to suffer the most blowback for the Russian hack is the FSB, one of the agencies believed to be behind the 2016 interference. “Before 2016, the FSB had a good reputation in Washington,” Andrei Soldatov, the Russian journalist, told me. The head of the FSB “was considered a reliable partner in fighting terrorism.” But “it all ended in 2016, and it ended very badly.” FSB officers were put on the FBI’s most-wanted list for cybercriminals, an unprecedented retaliation. The head of the FSB’s elite cyber unit and his deputy were forced out; two other top officers from the unit ended up in Moscow’s most notorious jail. “They’re now under incredible pressure both from the inside and the outside,” Soldatov said. “Sometimes,” says Michael Hayden, a director of the National Security Agency under George W. Bush, “you have successful covert operations that you wish hadn’t succeeded.”
[...]
Kuznetsov and Stolyarov have an extensive list of American victims. In February, posing as the Ukrainian prime minister, they prank-called Senator John McCain, who confessed that the Trump era was the hardest time of his long political life. “He sounded like he didn’t know what to do—like, at all,” Kuznetsov recalled. That same month, they prank-called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who told them that new sanctions against Russia were unlikely.
The point of Kuznetsov and Stolyarov’s American work is both to uncover important information—like what will happen regarding sanctions—and to troll, distract, confuse, and ridicule people whom American voters might be inclined to respect but who are hostile to Russia.
[...]
Some Americans, including the current president, believe that if only we could identify where our interests align, Russia could be a good partner. But those who have dealt with Putin for decades understand that this is, at best, a fantasy. “Putin defines Russia’s interests in opposition to—and with the objective of thwarting—Western policy,” Ash Carter, Obama’s last defense secretary, told me recently. “It’s very hard to build a bridge to that motivation. It makes it ipso facto impossible” to “work cooperatively with Russia.”
Putin is not a supervillain. He is not invincible, or unstoppable. He pushes only until the moment he meets resistance. His 2014 plans to lop off the eastern third of Ukraine, for instance, broke apart against the surprisingly fierce resistance of the Ukrainian army, and Western sanctions.
[...]
There is one dot on the horizon that particularly worries the Kremlin. In 2024, Putin’s next six-year presidential term will be up. The constitution limits Putin to two consecutive terms, and he will be 71 years old. “All these guys are thinking about 2024,” said the businessman high up in United Russia, Putin’s party. The parliament could change the constitution to allow Putin to serve yet another term. But that’s not ideal. Putin, who trained as a lawyer before he was a KGB agent, has insisted on maintaining a simulacrum of legality. And anyway, he, a mortal man, can serve only so many terms.
So what is Putin to do? Will he hand off his throne to a successor? There are ever fewer candidates. His circle of advisers has shrunk; now it’s made up mostly of old men who, like him, came from Leningrad or served in the KGB. In recent years, he has replaced regional governors with young loyalists and even former bodyguards—most of whom have no significant governing experience but owe everything to him. More and more, he appears to be a man without an exit strategy.
[...]
In 2014, Vyacheslav Volodin, now the speaker of the Russian Parliament, said, “If there is Putin, there is Russia. If there is no Putin, there is no Russia.” Putin has personalized the institutions of the state—the courts, the army, the security forces, the parliament, even the opposition parties—and the economy, too. As the economic pie gets smaller, the elites are cannibalizing one another in the struggle over whatever resources remain, and can be squeezed out of the population. The people now filling Russia’s most notorious jails are elite government officials: countless bureaucrats, at least four governors, and numerous mayors. A minister is under house arrest. They are the losers in an increasingly savage fight. The winners are typically those who spin in the orbit closest to Putin’s dying star.
[...]
Putin has been kicking the can down the road for a long time, and this has generally worked for him. He is still popular and still in good shape, as his shows of bare-chested masculinity are meant to remind us. But there is less road left every day, and one day, it will run out. Everyone in Moscow knows that day is coming, but no one knows what happens the day after. “If he suddenly leaves in 2024, we will be orphaned,” says Konstantin Malofeev, an oligarch who was sanctioned by the West for supporting pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine (which he has denied doing). He believes that Putin was chosen by God to lead Russia. The next person, he fears, won’t have the same sense of duty. “The next person,” he says, “will be worse.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/
"Michael Flynn's Text Shows Donald Trump WH Was All About Money | Morning Joe | MSNBC"
Published on Dec 11, 2017
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is examining the period before Flynn's firing, according to NBC News, focusing on what the president knew and when.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzBPvI_32E4
The article mentioned in the video.
What Putin Really Wants
Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.
Julia Ioffe January/February 2018 Issue
[...]
Putin governs with the twin collapses of 1917 and 1991 at the forefront of his thinking. He fears for himself when another collapse comes—because collapse always comes, because it has already come twice in 100 years. He is constantly trying to avoid it. The exiled oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky has publicly spoken of deposing Putin, and until recently did not eschew violent means. People like Alexey Navalny, the opposition leader, openly talk about putting Putin and his closest associates on trial. The Russian opposition gleefully waits for Putin to fall, to resign, to die. Every misstep, every dip in oil prices, is to them just another sign of his coming personal apocalypse. The hungry anticipation is mirrored in the West, especially in the United States.
Alexey Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption crusader and presidential candidate, meeting with staff (Max Avdeev)
For the most part, the Kremlin is focused not on any positive development program, but on staving off that fate—and on taking full advantage of its power before the state’s inevitable demise. That’s one reason corruption among the ruling elite is so breathtakingly brazen: A Russian businessman who works with government clients describes the approach as the “last day of Pompeii,” repeated over and over. Another businessman, who had just left the highest echelons of a big state-run bank out of frustration at its corruption and mismanagement, told me, “Russia always rises from the ashes, time and time again. But I have a feeling that we’re about to go through a time of ashes again.”
[...]
Fear of collapse is also why Russian propaganda is intent on highlighting the bloody aftermath of revolutions the world over. Things may not be great in Russia now—the country has struggled mightily since 2012—but, the country’s news programs suggest, things can always get worse. That’s what Russians are told happened in the 1990s, in the nine frenetic years between the Soviet Union’s collapse and Putin’s ascent to power. “When you have two governmental collapses in 100 years, people are scared of them,” Migranyan told me. Many Russians remember the last one personally.
But the number who do is shrinking. One in four Russian men dies before the age of 55. Putin turned 65 in October, and is surrounded by people who are as old as he is, if not older. Russia is now “in an autumnal autocracy,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist in Moscow, says. “The more it tries to seem young and energetic, the more it obviously fails.” As Aleksey Chesnakov, a former Kremlin insider, told me, in Russia “the most active voters”—the people who buy in most fully to what Putin’s selling—“are the pensioners.”
To Putin’s supporters, his regime isn’t an autocracy, exactly. “It can be described as demophilia,” Migranyan explained. “It is not a democracy, but it is in the name of the people, and for the people. Putin’s main constituency is the people. All of his power comes from his rating with the people, and therefore it’s important that he gives them the fruits of his rule.” The Kremlin calls it “managed democracy.”
[...]
Navalny laughed at the state’s accusations that his supporters—the hundreds of people sweating with him in the room—had been paid by the U.S. State Department to show up. “This is the real political force of the country,” he said. “And we will win. We are destined for victory, because in any culture, in any civilization, people like us win, because they lie and we tell the truth.”
[...]
Putin’s approval rating surged in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea—and, by extension, Russia’s return to imperial grandeur. It was a risky maneuver, the equal, perhaps, of Putin’s later interference in the U.S. election. And it paid off, at least in the short term. Russians rallied behind the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine—and behind Putin, their audacious president. “There was a spike in loyalty” toward “every organ of the state,” Kirill Rogov, a political analyst in Moscow who studies Russian polling, told me—“a conservative shift in all directions. People started paying more attention to the news, they watched more TV, and they became more indoctrinated.” For a decade, a majority of Russians had told pollsters that they would rather be well-off than live in a great power. In 2014, those preferences flipped.
But the rush of patriotism provided by the Crimean annexation proved fleeting.
[...]
Worried about potential terror attacks in nearby Sochi during the 2014 Olympics, the Russian secret services had allowed hundreds, if not thousands, of Islamist rebels, all of them Russian citizens, to go to Syria. According to one report in Novaya Gazeta, the FSB even provided some of them with a passport and transportation to the Russian border.
It was a shortsighted counterterrorism strategy. Two Dagestani men who traveled to isis-controlled territories in Syria in order to bring back their children told me that they heard as much Russian as Arabic on the streets of isis cities. An October report by the Soufan Center, a security-intelligence nonprofit, showed that more foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria came from Russia than from any other country. What will become of these Russian fighters, now better trained and battle-hardened, as isis territory continues to shrink?
[...]
Ironically, one of the Russian institutions to suffer the most blowback for the Russian hack is the FSB, one of the agencies believed to be behind the 2016 interference. “Before 2016, the FSB had a good reputation in Washington,” Andrei Soldatov, the Russian journalist, told me. The head of the FSB “was considered a reliable partner in fighting terrorism.” But “it all ended in 2016, and it ended very badly.” FSB officers were put on the FBI’s most-wanted list for cybercriminals, an unprecedented retaliation. The head of the FSB’s elite cyber unit and his deputy were forced out; two other top officers from the unit ended up in Moscow’s most notorious jail. “They’re now under incredible pressure both from the inside and the outside,” Soldatov said. “Sometimes,” says Michael Hayden, a director of the National Security Agency under George W. Bush, “you have successful covert operations that you wish hadn’t succeeded.”
[...]
Kuznetsov and Stolyarov have an extensive list of American victims. In February, posing as the Ukrainian prime minister, they prank-called Senator John McCain, who confessed that the Trump era was the hardest time of his long political life. “He sounded like he didn’t know what to do—like, at all,” Kuznetsov recalled. That same month, they prank-called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who told them that new sanctions against Russia were unlikely.
The point of Kuznetsov and Stolyarov’s American work is both to uncover important information—like what will happen regarding sanctions—and to troll, distract, confuse, and ridicule people whom American voters might be inclined to respect but who are hostile to Russia.
[...]
Some Americans, including the current president, believe that if only we could identify where our interests align, Russia could be a good partner. But those who have dealt with Putin for decades understand that this is, at best, a fantasy. “Putin defines Russia’s interests in opposition to—and with the objective of thwarting—Western policy,” Ash Carter, Obama’s last defense secretary, told me recently. “It’s very hard to build a bridge to that motivation. It makes it ipso facto impossible” to “work cooperatively with Russia.”
Putin is not a supervillain. He is not invincible, or unstoppable. He pushes only until the moment he meets resistance. His 2014 plans to lop off the eastern third of Ukraine, for instance, broke apart against the surprisingly fierce resistance of the Ukrainian army, and Western sanctions.
[...]
There is one dot on the horizon that particularly worries the Kremlin. In 2024, Putin’s next six-year presidential term will be up. The constitution limits Putin to two consecutive terms, and he will be 71 years old. “All these guys are thinking about 2024,” said the businessman high up in United Russia, Putin’s party. The parliament could change the constitution to allow Putin to serve yet another term. But that’s not ideal. Putin, who trained as a lawyer before he was a KGB agent, has insisted on maintaining a simulacrum of legality. And anyway, he, a mortal man, can serve only so many terms.
So what is Putin to do? Will he hand off his throne to a successor? There are ever fewer candidates. His circle of advisers has shrunk; now it’s made up mostly of old men who, like him, came from Leningrad or served in the KGB. In recent years, he has replaced regional governors with young loyalists and even former bodyguards—most of whom have no significant governing experience but owe everything to him. More and more, he appears to be a man without an exit strategy.
[...]
In 2014, Vyacheslav Volodin, now the speaker of the Russian Parliament, said, “If there is Putin, there is Russia. If there is no Putin, there is no Russia.” Putin has personalized the institutions of the state—the courts, the army, the security forces, the parliament, even the opposition parties—and the economy, too. As the economic pie gets smaller, the elites are cannibalizing one another in the struggle over whatever resources remain, and can be squeezed out of the population. The people now filling Russia’s most notorious jails are elite government officials: countless bureaucrats, at least four governors, and numerous mayors. A minister is under house arrest. They are the losers in an increasingly savage fight. The winners are typically those who spin in the orbit closest to Putin’s dying star.
[...]
Putin has been kicking the can down the road for a long time, and this has generally worked for him. He is still popular and still in good shape, as his shows of bare-chested masculinity are meant to remind us. But there is less road left every day, and one day, it will run out. Everyone in Moscow knows that day is coming, but no one knows what happens the day after. “If he suddenly leaves in 2024, we will be orphaned,” says Konstantin Malofeev, an oligarch who was sanctioned by the West for supporting pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine (which he has denied doing). He believes that Putin was chosen by God to lead Russia. The next person, he fears, won’t have the same sense of duty. “The next person,” he says, “will be worse.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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