#U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 11, 2024 (Monday)

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 12, 2024

Authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary visited former president Trump in Florida on Friday, and on Sunday, Orbán assured Hungarian state media that Trump “will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” Russian state media gloated at the news, and that Trump’s MAGA allies in Congress are already helping him end support for Ukraine. 

President Joe Biden and a strong majority of lawmakers in both chambers of Congress, as well as defense officials, support appropriating more aid to Ukraine, believing its defense is crucial to America’s national security. Today, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once again called such aid “critical.” 

The Senate passed a national security supplemental bill early in the morning on February 13, by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29. The bill would be expected to pass the House, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, refuses to bring it up for a vote. 

Trump loyalists have been obstructing aid to Ukraine since President Joe Biden asked for it in October 2023. Their insistence that they would not address the national security needs of the U.S. in Ukraine until they were addressed at the border now sure looks like a smokescreen to help Russian president Vladimir Putin take Ukraine, a plan that would explain why Trump urged Republicans to kill the national security supplemental bill even when it included a strong border component that favored Republican positions. 

It appears as though Trump is deliberately undermining the national security of the United States.

In excerpts from his forthcoming book that appeared on the CNN website today, journalist Jim Sciutto reported conversations with Trump’s second chief of staff, General John Kelly, and Trump’s third national security advisor, John Bolton, in which the men recounted Trump’s fondness for dictators. “He views himself as a big guy,” Bolton told Sciutto. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.” “He’s not a tough guy by any means, but in fact quite the opposite,” Kelly said. “But that’s how he envisions himself.”

Kelly noted that Trump praised Hitler and what he thought was the loyalty of Hitler’s generals (some of whom actually tried to assassinate him), but both Kelly and Bolton noted that he “most consistently lavished praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Certainly, Trump prizes loyalty to himself: today Alex Isenstadt of Politico reported a “bloodbath” at the Republican National Committee as the incoming Trump loyalists are pushing out more than 60 RNC officials and staffers to make sure everyone is “aligned” with Trump. 

An exclusive interview today by Katelyn Polantz, Kaitlan Collins, and Jeremy Herb of CNN revealed that Brian Butler, who worked at Mar-a-Lago for twenty years, has come forward to give the public the same information he told to investigators looking into Trump’s theft of classified documents. On June 3, 2022, the day Trump and his family were scheduled to fly to New Jersey for the summer, Trump’s aide Walt Nauta asked Butler if he could borrow a car from the Mar-a-Lago car service, although Butler and his valets usually handled getting the Trump family luggage onto the plane. June 3 was the same day Trump and his lawyer were meeting with officials from the Department of Justice at Mar-a-Lago to arrange for Trump to turn over national security documents. 

Butler loaded a vehicle with the luggage, then met Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira—at the time a close friend of Butler—driving a vehicle loaded with bankers boxes, at the West Palm Beach airport. Butler says he didn’t know the bankers boxes contained anything unusual, and he helped Nauta load the plane with the boxes as well as the luggage. “They were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes. That’s what I remember loading,” Butler added.

Butler was also present during conversations about hiding evidence from federal authorities. 

While Trump opposes aid to Ukraine, President Joe Biden pushed for it once again when he released his fiscal year 2025 budget today. (There is overlap this year between funding fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025 because House Republicans have been unable to agree to last year’s appropriations bills. Those are supposed to be done before October 1, when the new fiscal year starts.)

In addition to funding for Ukraine, the president’s $7.3 trillion budget covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits, all of which are mandatory, and expands investment in health care, child care, and housing. Biden would pay for all this—and reduce the deficit by $3 trillion over the next ten years—with higher taxes on those making more than $400,000 a year and on corporations. 

In his defense of the middle class as the engine of economic growth and his declaration that the days of trickle-down economics are over, Biden sounds much like Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he ushered in the New Deal in the 1930s. In that era, Roosevelt and his Democratic allies replaced a government that worked for men of property with one that worked for ordinary Americans.

There were other echoes of the FDR administration today as Trump’s undermining of aid to Ukraine has become clear. Ukraine stands between an aggressive Russian dictator and a democratic Europe.  

In the 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. had to decide whether to turn away from those standing against dictators like Hitler, or to stand behind them. There was a strong isolationist impulse in the United States. Some people resented that war industries had made fortunes supplying the devastating weaponry of World War I. Others believed that Hitler’s advance in Europe was a distraction from Asia, where their business interests were entwined. Congress passed laws to keep the U.S. from entanglement in Europe until Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Then Congress allowed other nations to buy munitions from the U.S. so long as they carried them away in their own ships.  

The following year, FDR promised the American people he would not send troops into “any foreign wars.” But in July 1940, newly-appointed British prime minister Winston Churchill asked the U.S. for direct help after Britain lost eleven destroyers in ten days to the German Navy. Roosevelt exchanged 50 destroyers for 99-year leases on certain British bases, but that would not be enough. He asked Congress to provide military aid.

On this date in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States.” The new law gave the president wide-ranging authority to sell, give, lease, or lend war supplies to “any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”

The law defined “war supplies” generously: they ranged from aircraft and boats to guns and tools, to information and technical designs, to food and supplies. The law also gave the president authority to authorize U.S. companies to manufacture such war supplies for other countries whose defense was important to the United States.

This law is the one we know as the Lend-Lease Act, and it was central to the ability of the Allied Powers—those standing against Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito—to fight off the Axis Powers who were trying to take over the globe in the 1940s. By the time the law ended on September 20, 1945, supplies worth more than $50 billion in 1940 dollars—equivalent to more than $770 billion today—had gone to the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, China, and other allies. 

Four days after he signed the Lend-Lease Act into law, on March 15, 1941, FDR told journalists at the White House Correspondents’ Association, “The big news story of this week is this: The world has been told that we, as a united Nation, realize the danger that confronts us—and that to meet that danger, our democracy has gone into action.”

FDR noted the “superb morale” of the British, who he said were “completely clear in their minds about the one essential fact—that they would rather die…free…than live as slaves.” He continued: “The British people and their Grecian allies need ships. From America, they will get ships. They need planes. From America, they will get planes. From America they need food. From America, they will get food. They need tanks and guns and ammunition and supplies of all kinds. From America, they will get tanks and guns and ammunition and supplies of all kinds….

“And so our country is going to be what our people have proclaimed it must be—the arsenal of democracy…. Never, in all our history, have Americans faced a job so well worth while.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mariacallous]

For Republican presidential hopefuls, the road to the White House in 2024 goes through Iowa, New Hampshire, and, apparently, the Asia-Pacific.

In the past week, three likely presidential candidates—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton—jetted off to Asia for separate trips that are widely seen as a bid to burnish their foreign-policy credentials and hard-line tack on China ahead of the 2024 election season. 

For China watchers and politicos alike, the trips reflect a new reality in American politics: To get to the top of the pack, you have to be tough on China. It’s a rare bout of concern over foreign-policy issues in political primaries that are nearly always dominated by domestic concerns.

“I think China will play a significant role in 2024, and I think many candidates will be trying to out-hawk each other,” said Carrie Filipetti, executive director of the Vandenberg Coalition, a conservative organization that works with elected officials and political candidates on foreign-policy issues. 

If (most) Democrats and Republicans in Washington agree on one thing these days, it’s that the United States has to take a harder posture on China, boost support for the independently governed island of Taiwan, and prepare for a new era of competition with its top geopolitical competitor in Beijing.

“In part because the American public is so concerned about China, there’s almost a competition underway—at least in Congress—for who can be tougher on China,” said Bonnie Glaser, an expert on the Indo-Pacific region at the German Marshall Fund think tank. “Nobody wants to be seen as soft on China, and so Taiwan is a big part of that.”

That stance is seeping its way into campaign season, with Youngkin’s and Bolton’s separate visits to Taiwan this week and DeSantis’s visit to South Korea and Japan—two of Washington’s most important allies in the Asia-Pacific. Bolton, seen as a long-shot contender for the presidential ticket compared with the front-runners, former President Donald Trump and DeSantis, spent most of his career in the national security space. But DeSantis’s and Youngkin’s jobs as governors are by nature focused much closer to home, giving these trips more political weight if they formally decide to run for president.

Both Republican governors used their visits to deepen ties with Washington’s Asian allies and demonstrate their support for Taiwan, with Youngkin establishing a new Virginia-Taiwan trade office and DeSantis discussing new international trade partnerships for Florida with South Korean and Japanese officials. DeSantis in Tokyo took a hard-line stance on China and underscored the importance of U.S. commitments to Taiwan. 

“[Chinese President] Xi Jinping clearly wants to take Taiwan at some point. He’s got a certain time horizon,” DeSantis told Nikkei Asia, before adding: “Ultimately, what China respects is strength.”

In elections past, presidential front-runners sought to showcase their foreign-policy bona fides with foreign trips but primarily focused on Europe, namely with Barack Obama’s 2008 visit to Germany and Mitt Romney visiting the United Kingdom in 2012. So far, no Republican presidential hopeful has visited Europe in the same context, even with the war raging in Ukraine—perhaps reflecting how Ukraine policy is more controversial among parts of the Republican Party than China.

DeSantis and Youngkin have joined a slew of politicians across the country pushing legislation and executive actions at the state level to counter China’s influence and economic leverage. This includes policies to ban the popular social media app TikTok from state devices, block Chinese companies from buying farmland in their states, and halt joint business ventures between U.S. and Chinese companies. 

“It’s underreported how much governors are responsible for policies that can help improve national security by countering China at the state level,” Filipetti said.

Bolton, meanwhile, is slated to meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and address the annual meeting of the World Taiwanese Congress during his weeklong trip to the region.

Taiwanese officials publicly say they welcome the increased attention from Washington. “We respect all kinds of proposals from our friends to increase the defense capability of Taiwan,” Tsai Ming-yen, the director of Taiwan’s top intelligence agency, told Taiwanese lawmakers ahead of Bolton’s visit. 

But the slew of high-profile visits has incensed Beijing and ratcheted up military tensions in the Taiwan Strait, a fact that at times puts Taiwan in a precarious and diplomatically awkward position. In its latest pressure campaign, Beijing deployed dozens of fighter jets and navy vessels by the island early on Friday. In March, a former Trump national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, said during his own visit to Taiwan that arming Taiwanese citizens with AK-47s could help serve as a deterrent.

“I think that Taiwan did not see that as helpful,” said Glaser, who noted that the island has some of the world’s strictest gun laws. “There is a bit of a problem with people who go to Taiwan who really aren’t well prepared. They want to be helpful, but they are not always.”

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won rare plaudits from her rival Republican lawmakers last year when she became the second House speaker to visit the self-governed island since 1997. Current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met Tsai in California earlier this month, as a separate bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers simultaneously visited Taiwan to showcase U.S. support for the island. The United States adheres to the so-called One China policy of maintaining formal diplomatic relations exclusively with Beijing, which views independently governed Taiwan as its own territory. But Democratic and Republican administrations alike have sought to boost U.S. military and political support for Taiwan in recent years, despite lacking formal diplomatic relations. A small number of progressive U.S. lawmakers have voiced fears that this wave of support for Taiwan and increased military support could serve to undermine the One China policy and increase the risk of a war with China over Taiwan. 

Still, the slew of visits to the Asia-Pacific by presidential hopefuls shows that Washington’s increasingly hawkish stance on China is likely here to stay, even with the roiling tensions in the Taiwan Strait and irrespective of who wins the presidency in the 2024 election. 

DeSantis’s and Youngkin’s Asia tours come as American public opinion takes a sharp turn against China. Just 15 percent of Americans hold a favorable opinion of China, according to Gallup, marking the lowest percentage that the polling organization has recorded since it began tracking this opinion in 1979. Americans have also grown increasingly concerned about the security of Taiwan, with the Pew Research Center estimating that almost half of U.S. adults now view China-Taiwan tensions as a “very serious problem.”

[reddancer1]

Heather Cox Richardson

January 23, 2023 (Monday)

Today a jury found three members of the Oath Keepers gang, along with a fourth defendant associated with them, guilty of seditious conspiracy for their actions surrounding the January 6th insurrection in 2021. In October a different jury also found the founder of the Oath Keepers, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, as well as their Florida leader, Kelly Meggs, guilty of seditious conspiracy. Five members of another extremist gang, the Proud Boys, are currently on trial on that charge and others.

Today’s defendants, Joseph Hackett, 52; Roberto Minuta, 38; David Moerschel, 45; and Edward Vallejo, 64, were found guilty of a rack of other charges, too, but the seditious conspiracy charges are the biggies. Such indictments are rare and indicate a careful plot against our democracy. They are hard to prove. These six convictions—so far—are a big win for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department. 

*THEY ALL SHOULD BE TRIED FOR NO LESS THAN TREASON!!!

At Talking Points Memo, Nicole Lafond notes that defense attorneys for the Oath Keepers argued that the fault for January 6th was not that of their clients. “Responsibility really rests at our politicians’ feet,” attorney Scott Weinberg said. “The president and Stewart Rhodes were claiming that the world is coming to an end even before the election.”

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol recommended that the Department of Justice consider criminal charges against former president Trump, the man behind the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It also called a number of his associates co-conspirators. 

So far, those charges have not materialized, and Trump is running for president in 2024. That campaign is off to a rocky start. Trump is supposed to kick it off next week in Columbia, South Carolina, but Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post report that he’s having trouble lining up politicians to show up. They’re not willing to indicate support for him yet. Scherer and Dawsey note that South Carolina has two homegrown candidates, former governor Nikki Haley and current senator Tim Scott, who might want to run. In addition, Trump has recently alienated evangelicals—his formerly rock-solid base—by blaming them for his 2020 loss. 

It is also possible that his many legal troubles will catch fire, burning up his presidential chances. His secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security advisor John Bolton are apparently testing the waters themselves, publicly needling each other. Bolton recently said Trump’s support is in “terminal decline,” and after Trump called former cabinet members considering a campaign “disloyal,” Pompeo told Fox News radio host Brian Kilmeade, “I never said I wouldn’t run.” 

Another issue dropped today, huge in itself and at least tangentially related to the former president. On Saturday, authorities from the Department of Justice arrested Charles McGonigal, 54, at JFK Airport as he returned from a trip to Sri Lanka. McGonigal worked for the FBI from 1996 to 2018.

On October 4, 2016, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey named McGonigal the head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office. 

As the special agent in charge, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs. Before that, he was the section chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. Charges against McGonigal—who is one of the highest ranking FBI members ever charged with a crime—stem from his connection to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. The United States sanctioned Deripaska in 2018 for working for the Russian state to destabilize Ukraine. Deripaska was also a close associate of political operative Paul Manafort, who ran Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of a number of crimes associated with his ties to Russia. Trump pardoned him.

McGonigal, along with Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who has worked as an interpreter for U.S. courts, is charged with violating sanctions by taking money from Deripaska to investigate one of his rivals, and with money laundering. In a separate indictment, McGonigal is accused of hiding multiple cash payments from a foreign intelligence official and of trying to get the sanctions on Deripaska removed.

As Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel points out, the Department of Justice is pursuing this case so far as about public corruption, not about national security. But it is surely significant that the man who was supposed to be in charge of protecting the U.S. from Russian oligarchs went to work for one as soon as he left the FBI, and perhaps sooner. And that oligarch was connected to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. While there is a lot we still don’t know, we do know that in 2018, Comey told Congress he worried that officials in the FBI’s New York field office had given Trump ally Rudy Giuliani sensitive information in the last days of the 2016 election, after Giuliani had said so in front of television cameras. Giuliani made that claim in October, after McGonigal took over that office. 

We know that Comey told investigators that he released news of the reopened investigation of Clinton’s emails—against Department of Justice policy, right before the election with voting already underway—out of concern that “people in New York” would leak that information. Former acting attorney general Sally Yates was clearer. She told the inspector general that Comey and other FBI officials “felt confident that the New York Field Office would leak it and that it would come out regardless of whether he advised Congress or not.” 

We also know that after McGonigal left the FBI, he went to work for Brookfield Properties, the multibillion-dollar real-estate company in New York that handled the bailout of Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue by a $1.1 billion, 99-year lease—all paid up front—thanks to the Qatar Investment Authority. None of those things is currently on the table in the indictments, and they might not turn out to be significant. But my guess is that this case will continue to develop.

Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York told Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave that they had agreed with McGonigal’s attorney for him to be released on a $500,000 personal recognizance bond, co-signed by two other people.

 Another prominent legal case touching on the Trump years wrapped up today when it took a jury only two hours to find another January 6 defendant guilty of all charges for which he was on trial. Richard “Bigo” Barnett, 62, of Gravette, Arkansas, who was photographed with his feet on then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, was found guilty of civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding, carrying a dangerous weapon into a restricted building—he was the one with a stun gun in a walking stick—and five other counts. Barnett said he ended up in the speaker’s office by accident while he was looking for a bathroom.  

And legal commentator Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse points out that tomorrow, a judge in Fulton County, Georgia, will hold a hearing to decide whether to release the report of the grand jury that investigated Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. You can see why Republicans are nervous about leaping aboard the Trump train for 2024.

[glitterypeanutmugnickel]

January 23, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 24

SAVE

▷ LISTEN

Today a jury found three members of the Oath Keepers gang, along with a fourth defendant associated with them, guilty of seditious conspiracy for their actions surrounding the January 6th insurrection in 2021. In October a different jury also found the founder of the Oath Keepers, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, as well as their Florida leader, Kelly Meggs, guilty of seditious conspiracy. Five members of another extremist gang, the Proud Boys, are currently on trial on that charge and others.

Today’s defendants, Joseph Hackett, 52; Roberto Minuta, 38; David Moerschel, 45; and Edward Vallejo, 64, were found guilty of a rack of other charges, too, but the seditious conspiracy charges are the biggies. Such indictments are rare and indicate a careful plot against our democracy. They are hard to prove. These six convictions—so far—are a big win for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department.

At Talking Points Memo, Nicole Lafond notes that defense attorneys for the Oath Keepers argued that the fault for January 6th was not that of their clients. “Responsibility really rests at our politicians’ feet,” attorney Scott Weinberg said. “The president and Stewart Rhodes were claiming that the world is coming to an end even before the election.”

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol recommended that the Department of Justice consider criminal charges against former president Trump, the man behind the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It also called a number of his associates co-conspirators.

So far, those charges have not materialized, and Trump is running for president in 2024.

That campaign is off to a rocky start. Trump is supposed to kick it off next week in Columbia, South Carolina, but Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post report that he’s having trouble lining up politicians to show up. They’re not willing to indicate support for him yet.

Scherer and Dawsey note that South Carolina has two homegrown candidates, former governor Nikki Haley and current senator Tim Scott, who might want to run. In addition, Trump has recently alienated evangelicals—his formerly rock-solid base—by blaming them for his 2020 loss. It is also possible that his many legal troubles will catch fire, burning up his presidential chances. His secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security advisor John Bolton are apparently testing the waters themselves, publicly needling each other. Bolton recently said Trump’s support is in “terminal decline,” and after Trump called former cabinet members considering a campaign “disloyal,” Pompeo told Fox News radio host Brian Kilmeade, “I never said I wouldn’t run.”

Another issue dropped today, huge in itself and at least tangentially related to the former president.

On Saturday, authorities from the Department of Justice arrested Charles McGonigal, 54, at JFK Airport as he returned from a trip to Sri Lanka. McGonigal worked for the FBI from 1996 to 2018.

On October 4, 2016, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey named McGonigal the head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office. As the special agent in charge, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs. Before that, he was the section chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Charges against McGonigal—who is one of the highest ranking FBI members ever charged with a crime—stem from his connection to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. The United States sanctioned Deripaska in 2018 for working for the Russian state to destabilize Ukraine. Deripaska was also a close associate of political operative Paul Manafort, who ran Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of a number of crimes associated with his ties to Russia. Trump pardoned him.

McGonigal, along with Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who has worked as an interpreter for U.S. courts, is charged with violating sanctions by taking money from Deripaska to investigate one of his rivals, and with money laundering. In a separate indictment, McGonigal is accused of hiding multiple cash payments from a foreign intelligence official and of trying to get the sanctions on Deripaska removed.

As Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel points out, the Department of Justice is pursuing this case so far as about public corruption, not about national security. But it is surely significant that the man who was supposed to be in charge of protecting the U.S. from Russian oligarchs went to work for one as soon as he left the FBI, and perhaps sooner. And that oligarch was connected to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager.

While there is a lot we still don’t know, we do know that in 2018, Comey told Congress he worried that officials in the FBI’s New York field office had given Trump ally Rudy Giuliani sensitive information in the last days of the 2016 election, after Giuliani had said so in front of television cameras. Giuliani made that claim in October, after McGonigal took over that office.

We know that Comey told investigators that he released news of the reopened investigation of Clinton’s emails—against Department of Justice policy, right before the election with voting already underway—out of concern that “people in New York” would leak that information. Former acting attorney general Sally Yates was clearer. She told the inspector general that Comey and other FBI officials “felt confident that the New York Field Office would leak it and that it would come out regardless of whether he advised Congress or not.”

We also know that after McGonigal left the FBI, he went to work for Brookfield Properties, the multibillion-dollar real-estate company in New York that handled the bailout of Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue by a $1.1 billion, 99-year lease—all paid up front—thanks to the Qatar Investment Authority.

None of those things is currently on the table in the indictments, and they might not turn out to be significant. But my guess is that this case will continue to develop.

Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York told Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave that they had agreed with McGonigal’s attorney for him to be released on a $500,000 personal recognizance bond, co-signed by two other people.

Another prominent legal case touching on the Trump years wrapped up today when it took a jury only two hours to find another January 6 defendant guilty of all charges for which he was on trial. Richard “Bigo” Barnett, 62, of Gravette, Arkansas, who was photographed with his feet on then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, was found guilty of civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding, carrying a dangerous weapon into a restricted building—he was the one with a stun gun in a walking stick—and five other counts. Barnett said he ended up in the speaker’s office by accident while he was looking for a bathroom.

And legal commentator Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse points out that tomorrow, a judge in Fulton County, Georgia, will hold a hearing to decide whether to release the report of the grand jury that investigated Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

You can see why Republicans are nervous about leaping aboard the Trump train for 2024.

[lapdropworldwide]

Feds Uncover Revenge-Fueled Iranian Plot to Assassinate John Bolton

Feds Uncover Revenge-Fueled Iranian Plot to Assassinate John Bolton

Getty/FBI Newly unsealed court documents in D.C. federal court allege that a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plotted to assassinate former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton in a $300,000 murder-for-hire scheme. Tehran native Shahram Poursafi, 45, who also went by Mehdi Rezayi, attempted to arrange the murder in late 2021 in retaliation for the Jan. 2020 killing of…

[mi6-rogue]

Iranian charged in plot to murder former National Security Advisor John Bolton

The murder-for-hire was reportedly in response to the U.S. assassination of Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guard's elite Quds Force. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2022/08/10/iranian-charged-in-plot-to-murder-former-national-security-advisor-john-bolton/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[theyoungturks]

Former diplomat and White House national security advisor John Bolton brazenly admitted to CNN’s Jake Tapper that he helped orchestrate multiple coup d'etas during his time in Washington and with the Trump administration directly. Bolton tried to provide cover for Donald Trump by saying that Trump and his lackeys didn’t actually plan a coup attempt since Bolton knows how to plan one himself. Ana Kasparian discusses on The Young Turks. Watch LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live Read more HERE: https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1546955197045415936 "Jake Tapper: "One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.” John Bolton: "I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coup d’etat, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work.”” https://www.reuters.com/world/us/former-senior-us-official-john-bolton-admits-planning-attempted-foreign-coups-2022-07-12/ “John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former White House national security adviser, said on Tuesday that he had helped plan attempted coups in foreign countries." *** The largest online progressive news show in the world. Hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks: ▶ https://www.youtube.com/TheYoungTurks/join SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ http://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks TWITTER: ☞ http://www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM: ☞ http://www.instagram.com/TheYoungTurks TWITCH: ☞ http://www.twitch.com/tyt 👕 Merch: http://shoptyt.com ❤ Donate: http://www.tyt.com/go 🔗 Website: https://www.tyt.com 📱App: http://www.tyt.com/app 📬 Newsletters: https://www.tyt.com/newsletters/ If you want to watch more videos from TYT, consider subscribing to other channels in our network: The Damage Report ▶ https://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport Indisputable with Dr. Rashad Richey ▶ https://www.youtube.com/indisputabletyt Watchlist with Jayar Jackson ▶ https://www.youtube.com/watchlisttyt TYT Sports ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytsports The Conversation ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytconversation Rebel HQ ▶ https://www.youtube.com/rebelhq TYT Investigates ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNJt9PYyN1uyw2XhNIQMMA #TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews by The Young Turks

[parttimereporter]

It’s a coup eat coup world for John Bolton

Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton said rather nonchalantly on CNN that he has “helped plan coups d’état” in the past, during a conversation with Jake Tapper about the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol.

Bolton appeared on The Lead after Tuesday’s hearing and said that the events at the Capitol were terrible and directly inspired by Donald Trump. He added that nothing Trump has done since January 6 is “defensible” either, but told Tapper that he doesn’t believe it was a coup.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

spy balloon remnants: underwhelming without all the hot air

[Ian Bremmer]

* * * *

February 6, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

The Chinese spy balloon shot down off South Carolina on Saturday after spending four days in U.S. airspace will almost certainly make the history books but not because, by itself, it is a hugely significant factor in the changing relationship between the U.S. and China under President Joe Biden. The reason the balloon will be remembered in the future is that the Republican response to it has been so completely unrelated to reality, and has been so magnified by the media, that it has provided a window into the dysfunction of modern politics. The facts are these: On Saturday, January 28, a Chinese airship entered U.S. airspace north of the Aleutian Islands, then crossed Alaska. It left U.S. airspace, then reentered over northern Idaho on Tuesday, January 31. On February 1 it was over Montana. On February 3 it was near St. Louis, Missouri. On Saturday, February 4, the pilot of an Air Force F-22 shot the airship down in shallow water off the coast of South Carolina, where the wreckage could be recovered. The Trump administration had an inconsistent relationship with China. Trump attacked China in a trade war early in his presidency, placing tariffs on a range of products (which induced China to retaliate, prompting Trump to pump $28 billion into the U.S. farming sector to compensate for lost revenue). But by 2019, according to Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton, Trump “pleaded” with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help him get reelected in 2020, and inked a deal for China to buy significant amounts of the farm products it had turned to other countries to provide after the tariffs (that was why Trump downplayed China’s role in hiding Covid in the early months of 2020). According to former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), Trump also asked congressional leaders to “lay off” Xi, because Trump didn’t want to disappoint Xi. In contrast, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked to counter China by building Indo-Pacific cooperation, reinforced U.S. support for Taiwan, established export controls on technology that have hamstrung the Chinese semiconductor industry, worked to counter Chinese investment in Africa, and enhanced security cooperation with South Korea and Japan. But the balloon sparked a frenzy from Republicans insisting that Biden had been weak on China or even was working for China: right-wing talk show host Mark Levin said Biden is “bought and paid for by the Communist Chinese government,” and former president Trump said that Biden “has surrendered American airspace to Communist China.” Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said China was showing “that the United States is once-great superpower that’s hollowed out, it’s in decline.” South Carolina Republican representative Joe Wilson—the man who shouted “You lie” at President Obama—said that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris should resign from office because of the balloon. In fact, U.S. standing in the world has strengthened considerably since Biden took office, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which Trump tried to scuttle, is strong enough that Sweden and Finland want to join. It also turns out that at least three similar balloons crossed into U.S. airspace while Trump was president. Today, General Glen D. VanHerck, who oversees the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, told reporters today that this weekend’s balloon was at least the fifth that had come into U.S. airspace, including at least three during Trump’s presidency, but that NORAD didn’t know about that until the intelligence community—under Biden—notified them. As for the fact that Biden waited to shoot the thing down until it flew over the water, the administration says it did not want to take the risk of downing it over the American people. VanHerck estimated it weighed about 2,000 pounds, carried equipment the size of a regional jet, and was about 200 feet tall. As terrorism expert Malcolm Nance wrote on Twitter: “WHY let spy balloon in our space? 1) It was 18.5 miles up, almost in space. 2) it sends data link to PRC. We can intercept that & learn what China knows. We can jam it so they see nothing new. 3) The collection system is ours & can reconstruct it. They lose asset & we win spy game[.]” Indeed, U.S. officials say they blocked the instruments from gathering intelligence, and turned the tables to gather intelligence from the equipment itself. You would think this balloon marks terrible U.S. weakness and is the most important thing to happen in years. But, in fact, the U.S. is stronger internationally than it has been in a while, and the balloon is just one more piece of a larger story about the changing relationship between China and the United States.

[Letters from an American]

[mariacallous]

John Bolton is worried about a virus but probably not the one you’re thinking of. The former U.S. national security advisor arrives for lunch at Edgar Bar & Kitchen in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington carrying a long umbrella and a 5,000-word printout of an essay he had written over the holiday break for the National Review. The subject of his cri de coeur? The “virus of isolationism” that has gripped the fringes of his beloved Republican Party. 

Like the restaurant’s namesake—J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first director, who dined at the hotel on a daily basis—Bolton is a regular. The seat at the back corner, in front of a shelf of Prohibition-era liquor bottles, is his usual spot, the hostess informs me. There is a frisson of excitement among the servers, who evidently know who he is. Shortly before Bolton’s arrival, a Secret Service agent with a discreet coiled earpiece sweeps by, a reminder of the Iranian bounty on his head. “I was offended that they only offered $300,000,” Bolton says when I ask him about it later, before wondering aloud if the price had gone up now that he has a security detail.

Bolton has long served as the id of the Republican Party, happy to say the quiet part out loud on cable news and in the op-ed pages of national newspapers. He has advocated for the bombing of North Korea and Iran, joked on CNN about plotting coups, and most recently called for Turkey to be ejected from NATO.

He joined the White House in April 2018 as then-President Donald Trump’s third national security advisor, at the point when any illusions that the weight of the office would cause Trump’s better angels to prevail had been long since banished. Seventeen months later, he was out—fired or resigned, as Bolton has claimed—as the relationship soured. While much of the Republican Party continues to turn on the Trump axis, Bolton has broken with his former boss in a dramatic fashion. Many of his peers have contorted themselves to fit the MAGA mold or slunk from the limelight altogether, but Bolton has kept on Boltoning. Now, as the Republicans take the gavel in the House of Representatives and Russia’s war in Ukraine approaches its first-year anniversary, I invited Bolton to lunch to find out what one of the party’s foremost hawks makes of recent calls from Republicans to curb U.S. support to Kyiv. 

We meet in early January as Congress is on its sixth—or maybe seventh or eighth or ninth—vote for House speaker as Kevin McCarthy battles a handful of rebels from within his own party. Bolton dismisses the spectacle unfolding on the House floor with trademark alacrity. “I don’t think it’s an ideological division,” he says, “so much as it is between people who may have diverging views but are serious about governing versus people for whom politics has become performance art.”

It’s not that group’s willingness to buck consensus that seems to bother him the most but the hollowness of their position. “If one of the isolationists would stand up and make the case that assisting Ukraine is not in the strategic interest of the United States, then you could at least have a discussion, but that’s not what they do.”

Bolton refused to testify during Trump’s first impeachment hearing, but it was the former president’s declaration that the U.S. Constitution should be terminated that prompted Bolton to throw his hat into an ever-expanding ring of Republican hopefuls weighing a 2024 bid for the White House. “Donald Trump is unacceptable as a Republican nominee,” he said on NBC’s Meet The Press in December. “I had not intended to [run] until Trump came out with his comment,” Bolton tells me. 

One of the presumed 2024 candidates with whom Bolton seems most comfortable is the one who has most often been described as Trump’s heir apparent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Bolton has known since 2012. “I’ve watched him very carefully. I’d feel very comfortable with his foreign policy.”

Bolton is something of a nerd, and true to form, while we wait to order our salads, he offers a potted history of the restaurant, and we get onto the topic of the Mayflower’s cameo in many a Washington spy scandal. This leads us to one of his latest book acquisitions, Cloak and Gown by Robin Winks, about the secret history between academia and the intelligence agencies during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. 

Whether it’s just his nature or experience born out of years of talking to journalists, Bolton offers compact, to-the-point answers to my questions, distinguishing himself from many a voluble Washington denizen of his tenure. Maybe that’s why he feels the need to justify the length of his essay on isolationism. “My feeling has been that I needed to write all this out. So that’s why it’s 5,000 words long,” he says. 

It’s unclear how many Republicans who have questioned military aid to Ukraine would sit down to read such a treatise on U.S. foreign policy. But Bolton got his start in a different era. During his five decades in Washington, Bolton has served in four Republican administrations, holding positions at the Justice Department, State Department, and U.S. Agency for International Development during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Through those various stints in office, he enjoyed many wrestling matches with the bureaucrats. In an era of spicy tweets, dubious facts, and 30-second cable news sound bites, though, I can’t help but wonder if Bolton is bringing a knife to what is now a gunfight. 

It was during his tenure as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in George W. Bush’s first term that Bolton was dubbed “human scum” and a “bloodsucker” by North Korean state media. That came after he delivered a speech in which he described North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a “tyrannical dictator.” He would later describe the moniker from Pyongyang as the “highest accolade” he had received during his time in the junior Bush’s administration. 

During Senate confirmation hearings for his nomination to serve as Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2005, an altogether more serious series of claims were made—that Bolton had sought to cherry-pick intelligence and bullied analysts who challenged his conclusions. Bolton was a “kiss-up, kick-down” sort of guy, the former head of the State Department’s in-house intelligence bureau, Carl W. Ford Jr., told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bolton denied the allegations, but his nomination stalled, and he was ultimately sent to the United Nations as a recess appointee. 

Bolton does not seem to mind and perhaps even revels in his reputation as the enfant terrible of the Republican Party. I ask him how he would describe his role within the ecosystem of the party, but the man who has been called all sorts of things says he is not a fan of labels. “I don’t like these bumper stickers, this taxonomy of trying to put people in boxes,” he says.

In August 2022, the Justice Department revealed that it had charged an Iranian man with plotting to have Bolton assassinated. This was in apparent retaliation for the U.S. drone strike at the beginning of 2020 that killed Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani. Bolton was first alerted of the plot in early 2021. He was called into FBI Headquarters shortly before Thanksgiving that year to be warned that the threat had become more specific. 

“‘If this threat were because of my op-eds and speeches, I would be flattered, but I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s what I was doing in the government,’” he recalls telling the room of 15 or so investigators, before suggesting that it was perhaps incumbent on the government to therefore to do something about it. “They said, ‘Have you called the Biden White House?’ And I said, ‘Are you crazy? Of course I haven’t called the Biden White House. Why don’t you call the Biden White House?’” Shortly afterward, President Joe Biden signed an order providing Bolton with Secret Service protection. 

Although Bolton’s service in the Trump White House follows him quite literally these days—in the form of a security detail—he is eager to distance himself from the former president. In fact, in diagnosing the resurgence of isolationism within the Republican Party, Bolton points to Trump as patient zero.

Pinning down a coherent way to describe Trump’s foreign policy evaded the Washington commentariat throughout his presidency. His administration cranked the dial on U.S. competition with China, assassinated an influential Iranian general, and brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and a number of Arab states, while also alienating allies in Europe, signing a catastrophic deal with the Taliban, and withdrawing the United States from both the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords. 

It was an approach forged by the president’s own whims and whichever faction of the bureaucracy around him had succeeded in getting his ear. “Donald Trump didn’t have an ideology or a philosophy either, because he couldn’t think coherently enough to have one,” Bolton says flatly. 

Trump’s promises of ending the so-called forever wars tapped an anti-interventionist nerve running through both parties these days. But it is on the question of military aid to Ukraine that the isolationist streak in the Republican Party has been most pronounced. Eleven Republican senators voted against a $40 billion package for Ukraine last May, while Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Chip Roy, and Matt Gaetz are among those who have called U.S. military aid for Ukraine into question, joining Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. (Speaking at an event in Washington on Wednesday, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. … All of these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his perspective.”)

Bolton is convinced that the isolationist sentiment that has welled up around Ukraine has more to do with fealty to Trump than the result of a strategic assessment of U.S. national security priorities. The former president’s personal distaste for Ukraine has been well documented by former White House officials. It emerged during impeachment hearings in 2019 that Trump had become convinced by what his former top Russia advisor Fiona Hill described as a “fictional narrative” that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that sought to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—and not in his favor. 

“It colored his whole attitude toward Ukraine and therefore colored the minds of some people in Congress,” Bolton says.

U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the narrative was likely cooked up by Russian intelligence to undermine U.S. support for Kyiv. If Bolton’s theory is correct, that would mean that elements of the current resistance to sending further military aid to Ukraine may well represent, however unwittingly, the long tail of a Russian disinformation campaign still playing out in Washington.

There is an old saying in Washington that when it comes to choosing their presidential candidates, Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line. In light of McCarthy’s humiliating road to become House speaker, I ask Bolton whether he still recognizes his party as it stands today. “Oh, sure. I still think the isolationist virus is a very small percentage of the party both in Congress and in the public at large,” he replies. 

I tell him I’m inclined to agree, but the skeptic in me is unsure whether the quiet majority will win out against the vocal minority. But Bolton is ready for the fight. 

“I don’t plan to rest on my laurels. Let’s have the debate. That’s how you find out who’s going to win and who’s going to lose. I’m ready for it.”

[chamerionwrites]

John Bolton has welcomed Brazil’s far-right president-elect Jair Bolsonaro as a “positive sign” for Latin America as he hailed a new ally against what Bolton called a “troika of tyranny”: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

In a speech in Miami on Thursday, the US national security adviser announced new sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba, including a ban on US citizens taking part in trade in Venezuelan gold. Bolton also added over two dozen entities owned or controlled by the Cuban military and intelligence services to a sanctions blacklist.

Bolton was speaking a few days before midterm elections in which the diaspora from Cuba and other Latin American states represent an important part of the Florida electorate.

[news24fresh]

Turkish official slams Bolton memoir, says it is ‘misleading’

Turkish official slams Bolton memoir, says it is ‘misleading’

[ad_1]

Turkey has denounced as “misleading, one-sided and manipulative” the explosive book by former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton’s that describes interactions between Turkish and U.S. Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump.

In the book “The Room Where It Happened”, Mr. Bolton contends that the U.S. leader was inclined to offer “personal favours to dictators he liked.”

[artielu]

Read this. Read the whole thing. The TL;DR is a horrifying example of corruption in the Trump administration.

Via Heather Cox Richardson

June 19, 2020 (Friday)

Tonight saw a Friday night news dump that will go into the history books.

Trump tried to fire the US Attorney from the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey S. Berman, who has managed a series of cases against Trump and his allies, including Trump fixer Michael Cohen, Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, and Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were indicted for funneling Russian money to Republican candidates for office. Berman is reported to be investigating Trump’s finances, among many other things.

It happened like this: Attorney General William Barr issued a statement announcing that Berman would be stepping down and that Trump would nominate Jay Clayton to replace him. Clayton has never been a prosecutor. He is currently the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but before he took that position he was a lawyer who, among other things, represented Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank is the only bank that would work with Trump after his bankruptcies. It might have given him loans he did not repay, and the Russian money-laundering that landed the bank in legal trouble might have helped Trump.

Legal analyst and Congressional staffer Daniel Goldman noted that this whole scenario was unusual. Normally, when a US Attorney leaves, that person’s deputy takes over. Bringing in a replacement from elsewhere meant that “Trump/Barr did not want anyone at SDNY running the office—likely because there was a serious disagreement.”

But then things got crazier. Berman issued his own statement, saying “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate. Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption. I cherish every day that I work with the men and women of this Office to pursue justice without fear or favor—and intend to ensure that this Office’s important cases continue unimpeded.”

What’s Berman saying? Well, it might be that Trump’s preference for “acting,” rather than Senate-confirmed, officials has come back to bite him. Berman was not Senate-confirmed; he is an interim U.S. Attorney. By law, the Attorney General can appoint an interim U.S. Attorney for 120 days. At the end of that time, the court can appoint that person indefinitely.

Berman was one of those interim appointees, put in place by Trump’s first Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

Berman’s appointment raised an outcry because he was handpicked by Trump. The U.S. Attorney for the SDNY oversees Manhattan and thus the president’s businesses and at least nine Trump properties. Trump went out of his way to take the unusual step of personally interviewing Berman, who donated $2,700 to the Trump campaign, served on the presidential transition team, and was a partner at the law firm where Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is a member. Democrats vowed to block Berman’s nomination, but never got the chance because Sessions used the workaround so Berman would not come before the Senate.

Now, this means that because Berman was appointed by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, not the president, he apparently cannot be removed except by the court, or, possibly, by the president… but not by Barr. Lawyers are fighting over who, exactly, can remove Berman, but that itself says that any challenge he files will land in the courts for months… likely until after the election.

And that’s another notable thing about Berman’s statement. He suggests he is being fired because the administration wants to delay or interrupt an investigation, and his language suggests that both he and the administration know exactly what that investigation is. There are a number of reasons the SDNY might be examining the finances of the president or his family, but former National Security Advisor John Bolton suggested another reason in his forthcoming book: he apparently claims Trump assured Turkey’s autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan he would fill the SDNY with his own loyalists, which would enable him to do Erdogan a political favor.

As Berman’s predecessor in the job, Preet Bharara tweeted, “Why does a president get rid of his own hand-picked US Attorney in SDNY on a Friday night, less than 5 months before the election?” President of the Center for American Progress Neera Tanden noted: “To attempt a Friday night massacre 5 months before an election means there’s a pretty big investigation they are trying to kill.”

It seems worth noting that the Supreme Court is about to hand down a decision on whether Deutsche Bank and Trump’s accountants have to hand Trump’s financial records over to Congress and to the Manhattan district attorney, which might well spark legal trouble for the president in New York.

Law professor Stephen Vladeck also asked us to keep in mind that Barr “out-and-out * lied * in a written statement—and in a context in which there could have been little question to him that Berman would publicly call him out for doing so… And he did it anyway.” “Something * really * stinks,” Vladeck concluded.

Something else stinks about this crisis, too, and that is the Tulsa rally the president originally scheduled for tonight. Widespread objection to holding a Trump rally on Juneteenth—the historic celebration of Black freedom-- in Tulsa, where a race massacre destroyed the Black community of Greenwood in 1921, forced him to reschedule for tomorrow. But had the rally been held, with media focus on disturbances at it and on the spread of coronavirus there, it seems likely that Berman’s firing would not have gotten much attention.

Indeed, it has seemed all day as if Trump was deliberately stoking trouble in Tulsa. He began today by tweeting a threat: “Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!” (Americans have a constitutional right to protest.)

Then he made sure his supporters would be in the streets. In consultation with the Secret Service, the Tulsa police chief had asked Tulsa’s mayor to declare a curfew around the BOK Center where the rally will be held. He did so. But Trump pressured the mayor to rescind the curfew, which the mayor did. Trump tweeted "I just spoke to the highly respected Mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who informed me there will be no curfew tonight or tomorrow for our many supporters attending the # MAGA Rally…. Enjoy yourselves - thank you to Mayor Bynum!”

This crisis feels big. Trump and Barr know an investigation is out there barreling toward the president, and they are willing to take extraordinary steps, steps that undermine our democracy and threaten our citizenry, to stop it.

[phroyd]

WASHINGTON — Lev Parnas has a story to tell Congress about the time he and President Trump’s attorney went hunting for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine.

And he’s already begun showing House Democrats the hard evidence to back it up.

Parnas’ files, including the contents of his iPhone 11, are being delivered to Congress — perhaps just days before Trump’s impeachment trial kicks off in the Senate. And that could spell trouble for Trump, who’s insisted he doesn’t know the Ukrainian-born businessman now facing criminal charges for allegedly making illegal donations to GOP campaigns on behalf of foreign interests.

Parnas’ iPhone and other files could make things downright awkward for Trump by offering up fresh, documentary evidence that Parnas’ links to Trumpworld were a lot closer than Trump has been willing to admit. Photos of Parnas posing cheerfully with the president and other high-ranking Republicans have already spilled out in public. And there’s no telling what else Parnas has on that iPhone.

Parnas recently began sharing new files with the House Intelligence Committee in response to a Congressional subpoena issued in October, after the judge in his Manhattan criminal case granted him permission last Friday, Parnas’ New York-based attorney, Joe Bondy, told VICE News earlier this week.

Impeachment investigators haven’t yet said whether they’ll ask Parnas, who has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges, to actually show up on Capitol Hill and tell his story. But his documents and iPhone data could buttress his version of events if that happens, Bondy told the judge in a recent court filing.

“Review of these materials is essential to the Committee’s ability to corroborate the strength of Mr. Parnas’s potential testimony,” Bondy wrote.

Videos and photographs of Parnas posing with Trump, Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and top-ranking GOP officials have already caused a stir, and prompted questions about how close Parnas really was to all those major GOP players.

Bondy has suggestively tweeted some of those out himself, while publicly pressing members of Congress to invite his client to appear with the hashtag, #LetLevSpeak.

Parnas already reportedly handed over a batch of videos and photographs that include Trump and Giuliani, along with other documents, to House impeachment investigators back in November.

But the new batch includes materials that were seized by federal investigators at the time of his arrest in October, and have been held tightly by prosecutors as potential evidence until last week.

On Monday, Bondy tweeted a photograph of Parnas posing next to GOP House Minority Leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, adding: “call the witness.”

McCarthy has acknowledged receiving a donation from Parnas, but said this week he doesn’t actually know the guy, and couldn’t remember where they met. And as soon as he realized where the money came from, he passed it on to “charity,” McCarthy said.

The next day, Tuesday, Bondy tweeted out a picture of Parnas with both McCarthy and Vice President Mike Pence.

Parnas left behind a trail of evidence documenting his close relationship with Giuliani, including on a private Instagram account uncovered by The Wall Street Journal in October around the time of his arrest.

On Insta, Parnas lounged on a private jet with Giuliani, flaunted a signed thank-you note from Trump, and posed with Trump’s son Don Jr. and Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

Now, the question becomes what else the new documents and iPhone data might reveal about his ties to high-ranking figures in Trump’s Washington, and about his role assisting in Giuliani’s search for damaging information about Biden in Ukraine — topics of keen interest to Democrats in Congress who support Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.

Prosecutors have accused Parnas of engaging in a scheme with an unnamed Ukrainian official to oust the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, a move Giuliani also advocated. Yovanovitch’s removal last spring became a key moment in House Democrats’ impeachment investigation against Trump.

The House voted in December to impeach Trump for abusing his power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden. The case will next be considered by the Senate, in a trial that’s been delayed amid a dispute over whether to admit new witnesses and fresh evidence. That might include former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has said he would testify if the GOP-controlled Senate actually subpoenas him.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has held up forwarding the impeachment articles to the Senate, saying she wants to see rules established that will ensure Trump gets a fair trial. On Friday, however, she told her House colleagues to get ready to hold a vote that would kickstart the Senate trial “next week.”

Phroyd