At Every Corner, Mueller Finds More Corruption

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

07 March 18

President* Trump is scared. He should be.

“Footprints?”
“Footprints.”
“A man’s or a woman’s?”
Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered.
“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

t was about quarter-to-Frances McDormand on Sunday night when Oscar Twitter was interrupted by what back in the day would have been called a hail of writs from the office of Robert Mueller, Special Counsel. And, as LBJ once put it to a reluctant legislator, it’s like being out on the road in a Texas thunderstorm—can’t run, can’t hide, can’t make it stop. From NBC News:

According to the subpoena, which was sent to a witness by special counsel Robert Mueller, investigators want emails, text messages, work papers, telephone logs and other documents going back to Nov. 1, 2015, 4½ months after Trump launched his campaign. The witness shared details of the subpoena on condition of anonymity. The news site Axios reported Sunday that a subpoena was sent to a witness last month.

In addition to the president, the subpoena seeks documents that have anything to do with these current and former Trump associates:

· Steve Bannon, who left the White House as chief strategist in August.

· Michael Cohen, a personal lawyer for Trump who testified before congressional investigators in October.

· Rick Gates, Trump's former deputy campaign manager, who pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy and lying to the FBI.

· Hope Hicks, who resigned last week as Trump's communications director.

· Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager until June 2016.

· Paul Manafort, a former Trump campaign manager and Gates' business partner, who pleaded not guilty to money laundering, conspiracy and making false statements last week.

· Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide.

· Keith Schiller, a former bodyguard for Trump who left as director of Oval Office operations in September.

· Roger Stone, a longtime Republican political operative and Trump campaign adviser who sources have told NBC News is the focus of investigators interested in his contacts with WikiLeaks during the campaign.

Here’s what all this means. This means that Mueller and his staff have likely concluded now that the entire Trump For President campaign was a corrupt enterprise in one way or another almost since the moment it was first conceived and that the same can be said of the Trump presidency*. It’s the money. It’s the Russians. The whole damn dirty deal is one great writhing ball of poisonous snakes and Mueller seems to be perilously close to untangling it.

The subpoenas go back to 2015 and woe betide anyone, as the nuns used to tell us, who fed any subpoenaed material into the shredder. At least a few of those people on that list have already flipped or likely have announced their intentions privately to do so. All of them except Cohen will have left the White House when Hicks leaves in a few weeks.

The working presumption of the Mueller investigation now is that nobody is clean in all of this. Everybody has something to tell about everybody else. Absent the promise of a presidential* pardon—a promise that is prima facie worthless simply because it comes from this president*—the stampede for the lifeboats is going to be deafening this week.

There is one name curiously absent from the list: that of Vice-President Mike (Choirboy) Pence. It’s not like Pence is untouched by all these scandals. He reportedly already has cooperated with Mueller to an extent. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that Mueller doesn’t want to be tasked with decapitating the entire executive branch and that, for that reason, he’s already got at least some kind of modus vivendi in place with Pence should the worst befall the current president*.

This story has to be read in the context of the Washington Post story depicting the White House as being in the throes of a modern-dress version of King Lear with the president* playing the roles of both the mad king and the fool. From the Post:

Mr. Trump is now a president in transition, at times angry and increasingly isolated. He fumes in private that just about every time he looks up at a television screen, the cable news headlines are trumpeting yet another scandal. He voices frustration that son-in-law Jared Kushner has few on-air defenders. He revives old grudges. And he confides to friends that he is uncertain about whom to trust.

Certainly, this most recent action by Mueller isn’t going to make the president* any less of a furious paranoid. Mueller’s investigation is clearly now going into the deepest, darkest corners of Everywhere. He’s looking into shady money from the United Arab Emirates and he’s questioning whether or not the Saudi blockade of Qatar was in retaliation for the Qatari sheikhs’ understandable reluctance to loan gobs of cash to Jared Kushner.

He is looking at the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency* as one massive three-year money-suck, a fundraising mechanism to enrich its inside players and to monetize the political system, and then the presidency, for every last dollar, riyal, or ruble that can be squeezed out of both of those institutions. Mueller is finding corruption everywhere he looks. He is now a fireman in hell.

"The Death of Stalin" and the Terrifying Absurdity of a Tyrant

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

07 March 18

ohn Cheyne and William Stokes were nineteenth-century doctors who described a sort of labored, interrupted respiration sometimes seen among the dying. Their names have been part of everyday Russian language for sixty-five years, ever since the Soviet press announced that Joseph Stalin was ill and had “Cheyne-Stokes respiration.” The following day, March 5, 1953, came the announcement of Stalin’s death. Millions of people grieved in public (an unknown number died in a stampede, on the way to see Stalin’s body, marking a final act of senseless violence associated with the tyrant), and a small number celebrated in private. This year, as some Russians commemorated “Cheyne-Stokes Day” with Facebook posts, others laid four thousand red flowers at Stalin’s grave, on Kremlin grounds, in the center of Moscow. This was the sixteenth time that Moscow activists have held what they call “two carnations for Stalin,” an action honoring the memory of a dictator whom a growing number of Russians appear to view as a great leader and national hero.

In late January, Russia decided to ban the Scottish director Armando Iannucci’s film “The Death of Stalin,” which opens in New York on March 9th. This may have been the first time in post-Soviet history that a movie that had already been granted permission to screen was pulled from theatres by order of the government. What made the film so dangerous? A number of films about Stalin have been made in the past sixty-five years—including one in which Robert Duvall portrayed him as a creepy monster, and one entirely devoted to the tyrant’s bloody funeral—but this is the first movie that makes Stalin and his circle look absurd. In the first fifteen minutes, even before the generalissimus suffers his brain hemorrhage, Iannucci paints perhaps the most accurate picture of life under Soviet terror that anyone has ever committed to film.

In “The Death of Stalin,” everyone (with one possible exception) is afraid of being killed, all the time. As a result, a famous man wearing a bathrobe ecstatically conducts a Mozart concerto, as a literally captive audience sits in the hall, indifferent. Another man faints out of fear, after letting it slip that Comrade Stalin may not be the greatest classical-music expert in the world. At the very same time, Nikita Khrushchev, played by Steve Buscemi, drunkenly recounts to his wife everything he said or heard during a late-night party at Stalin’s dacha—and she writes it down, so that he may examine it in the morning in order to prepare himself for whatever punishment is coming. It all makes sense, because nothing makes any sense. Throughout the rest of the movie, after Stalin collapses in a puddle of his own piss and his inner circle immediately commences its struggle for power, no one says a word that he or she means—or, at least, not a word that he or she is not willing to retract immediately.

Iannucci shows something that few people understand about Stalin’s reign and its aftermath: that it was both terrifying and ridiculous, and terrifying in its ridiculousness. In a chilling scene, seven men, each of whom is hoping to succeed Stalin, debate a motion to “pause” arrests and executions and release some prisoners. They have no better reasons for sparing people’s lives than they had for condemning them, and they know this; their discussion is a tense ritual, the meaning of which remains obscure to everyone, including the participants. It’s easy to see how this would have offended the sensibilities of the Putin-era élite, which earnestly traces its lineage to Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Stalin—the bloodiest rulers in Russia’s bloody history. Putin’s Russia embraces its terrifying past but never its ridiculous past.

For the conspiratorially minded, another possible explanation for the ban comes halfway through the film. The pianist Maria Yudina (Olga Kurylenko), who has been engaged to play while Stalin lies in state, walks in, sees the body, and says, “Small. He looks so small.” This is the exact sentiment that the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky claimed Russian President Boris Yeltsin expressed upon being introduced to Vladimir Putin, in 1999.

A final possible explanation lies in the fact that the film shows Stalin to be mortal, and messily so. He seemed to think that he was immune from death; not only did he fail to put in place a succession plan but he also jailed all of the country’s best doctors. One might infer from the film that Putin is mortal, too—and that, like Stalin, he will die without a succession plan, and that his inner circle, like Stalin’s, will start fighting over his seat while he is still breathing.

A 2016 book by Joshua Rubenstein, “The Last Days of Stalin”—which is meticulously researched and not at all fictionalized or intentionally funny—portrays a Moscow in utter disarray for several years following Stalin’s sudden demise. The atmosphere of absurd unpredictability that emerges is comparable to the mood of Iannucci’s film. Given the similarity to the present day—a similarity apparent even to the Putin government, it seems—the book also offers some lessons for the present day. With Putin apparently intent on being the President for life, it is instructive to know that, as evinced by Stalin’s sudden death, the country can change quickly and unpredictably, in no small part because there are no beliefs or principles driving the behavior of any of the actors. Sixty-five years ago, the American foreign-policy establishment failed to understand this. Conventional wisdom in the United States also overestimated the cohesion and order of the Soviet system, and underestimated the importance of Stalin in shaping it and holding it together. Some American pundits even expressed the fear that, after Stalin’s death, hard-liners would come to power in the Soviet Union. Some of the same ideas pass for wisdom today, too: there is the idea that Putin’s role in shaping Putinism has been exaggerated, and the fear that, when Putin is gone, someone worse—more aggressive, more repressive, and more anti-American—will come to power. Putin might be right to both trace his heritage back to Stalin and fear the association. Meanwhile, many of the Russians celebrating “Cheyne-Stokes Day” this week were expressing hope for the doctors’ happy return.