Title : Syria and the great Michael Cohen raid
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Syria and the great Michael Cohen raid
Allow me to offer a brief bit of heresy on the question of Syria.I have always challenged the official wisdom that Assad bore responsibility for the original chemical attack on Ghouta. Yes, I've read the Human Rights Watch report; in previous posts, I have offered my reasons for dissent. Similarly, I have expressed doubt about Assad's culpability in the case of the Idlib attack of April, 2017.
As for the current outrage: Although we don't have a full picture yet, this nation may well regret the rush to judgment. Weren't Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles destroyed while Kerry was Secretary of State?
Other players in the war could have deployed chemical weapons -- the Russians, for example. Moreover, it would not be terribly difficult to spoof the electronic intelligence which has apparently convinced world leaders of Assad's responsibility. For what it is worth, Syrian Girl claims -- with some interesting video evidence -- that the victims were civilians from a pro-Assad town kidnapped and held hostage by an allegedly "moderate" Islamist force.
Our first and best question is always "Cui bono?" -- who benefits?
Assad has nothing to gain from staging an attack on civilians. How could he possibly benefit by filling television screens with images of dying children? With victory nearer than ever, why would he incur the wrath of the international community?
Russia, by contrast, has much to gain from staging a false flag attack. In order to insure that the Republicans do not lose control of the House later this year, Russia and Trump must stage a spectacle -- a bit of theater in which Trump seemingly confronts Putin and "wins." If Putin loses face, fine -- as long as a brief humiliation serves a greater end. A staged mano-y-mano showdown with Putin will cause a dramatic rise in Trump's poll numbers. Even better, this coup de theatre will do enormous damage to the 2016 collusion narrative.
What of Russia's ally, Assad? He is expendable. In chess, one may be required to sacrifice a bishop in order to gain a checkmate. From the Russian point of view, keeping Trump in power is more important than keeping Assad in power.
Assad is allied not just with Russia but with Iran, which has done much of the heavy lifting in the civil war. The Trump administration has tied itself to Saudi Arabia, which considered Iran the Great Satan.
Unnoticed by most Americans -- and to be honest, unnoticed by me until yesterday -- Russia has recently decided to cozy up to the Saudis. In essence, Putin has decided to switch sides in the grand competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
King Salman visited Russia in October. He is, in fact, the very first ruler of that country to do so.
Moscow and Riyadh worked together to secure a deal between OPEC and other oil producers to cut output until the end of March 2018, helping support prices.Raising oil prices is key to sustaining the Saudi royal family, which cannot stay in power if oil remains cheap. Raising the price requires help from Putin. Last month, they reached a new deal.
Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said Saudi Arabia was “flexible” regarding Moscow’s suggestion to extend the pact until the end of next year.
The message of further joint Saudi-Russia action on output helped push up oil prices on Thursday.
Georgetown University Professor Angela Stent said it may be that Saudi Arabia believes Russia could help it with Iran, which it fears will develop nuclear weapons and is on the opposite side from Saudi in a proxy war in Yemen.
Croft said the United States has left a vacuum with its shifting Middle East policies. "I think our Iran policy, what happened in Syria, they did not think America was a stalwart. Then you have the Russians. They were willing to be more transactional with them," Croft said.In sum: Russia's new BFF is Saudi Arabia, which means that Putin now sympathizes with the goal of rolling back Iranian influence throughout the region, particularly in Syria and Lebanon. Assad, as I said, is expendable. His dismissal or death will serve Russia's larger purposes, especially if the world thinks that Trump engineered his downfall over Russian objections. Putin doesn't like to look bad, but he also understands the larger picture: If he temporarily receives an egg facial, Trump will be able to secure power.
"Right now Russia and Saudi Arabia's relationship is becoming thicker than oil," Croft said. As for the Saudis, "I think they see themselves as trying to show the Russians they have a better friend in the Middle East (than Iran)."
Needless to say, I have just outlined a scenario which both the right and the left will consider Thoughtcrime Most Foul.
Did you see the war propaganda flooding MSNBC yesterday? Disgusting! Throughout they day, they repeated a skewed and ridiculous version of the Syrian Civil War. This mythicized history ignored a key fact: If Assad had fallen, a combination of ISIS and Al Qaeda would have risen to power. The "Free Syrian Army" was never anything more than a grand fiction constructed to please an American audience; only the jihadis possessed sufficient muscle to challenge Assad.
Must I once again state for the record something which should go without saying? Perhaps I must. Assad is no angel; we need not shed a single tear if he goes down. Nevertheless, the choice has been clear since 2013r: The civil war would end with a victory for either Assad or ISIS/Al Qaeda; there never was a viable third option. I have long agreed with the Christian and minority religious communities in Syria that Assad was the lesser of those two evils.
John Bolton will spend the next little while pretending to excoriate Putin, but it's all a sham. The Russia/Saudi oil deal tells the real story. After a brief period of sham and spectacle, there will be complete harmony between Putin and the neocons.
Raid! Trump has often repulsed and frightened me, but never moreso than yesterday, when he ranted about the FBI raid conducted against his attorney (and fixer) Michael Cohen. Absurdly, Trump blamed a Democratic plot, even though Democrats had nothing to do with this affair.
Mueller -- not a Democrat, although the right likes to pretend otherwise -- did not order the raid. The gentleman who had that honor was the United States Attorney for Southern District o New York, Geoffrey S. Berman.
He's a Trump appointee and a Rudy Giuliani law partner. Let me repeat that: He's a Trump appointee and a Rudy Giuliani law partner.
Berman was assigned this position temporarily. Until yesterday, he expected Trump to give him the job on a permanent basis. Thus, when Berman approved this raid, he did so knowing what he was sacrificing.
Conclusion: The evidence which prompted this raid must have been explosive. Only a major threat to our democracy and/or the rule of law would have compelled Berman to injure his career.
It should also be noted that this nearly-unprecedented act received approval from a judge. A raid on a lawyer is not a decision to be made lightly.
What prompted so extraordinary an action? I don't know. The Washington Post suggests bank fraud and campaign finance violations; many people believe that these possibilities arose from the Stormy Daniels affair. But...
Investigators took Cohen’s computer, phone and personal financial records, including tax returns, as part of the search of his office at Rockefeller Center, that person said.Berman obviously did not go to such lengths just to please Michael Avenatti. So far, the contretemps between Stormy Daniels and Trump is a purely civil affair. How could such a civil lawsuit give rise to all of this?
In a dramatic and broad seizure, federal prosecutors collected communications between Cohen and his clients — including those between the lawyer and Trump, according to both people.
The Justice Department has extensive rules about seizing records of lawyers that could typically fall under attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors are required to consult with the the Criminal Division at Main Justice, and to get the sign off of the U.S. attorney overseeing the investigation or the relevant assistant attorney general. It’s also recommended that a special team of attorneys who are walled off from the prosecutors overseeing the inquiry be set up to review the potentially privileged documents.But how would they know that Cohen would hide or destroy evidence?
“It’s procedurally cumbersome, it’s sensitive, it raises the hackles of the bar,” Sam Buell, a former prosecutor who worked on the Enron investigation, told TPM. “It’s not done on a fishing expedition. It’s only done when you’re reasonably confident that you’re going to find evidence of criminality and you need to do it with a search warrant.”
Investigators’ willingness to go the route of a high-profile raid, instead of a less intrusive subpoena or even a voluntary request for documents, suggested to outside experts that there’s at least some concern that Cohen could be withholding evidence.
I smell a rat. That is: I think that someone formerly on Team Trump is functioning as an inside source. Someone told investigators: "A subpoena will simply tell Cohen which documents to hide."
For what it's worth, Bill Palmer speculates that Giuliani is the rat.
Unless you think Giuliani was fully exonerated in the Trump-Russia scandal by Robert Mueller prior to January, which seems incredibly unlikely that early on in the overall investigation, the other explanation would be that Giuliani cut a plea deal prior to January. Back in February, Palmer Report pointed out that Giuliani sounded very wary of what the FBI can do a criminal target, suggesting he’d already been through the ringer by then.I've given Palmer a fair amount of gas over the past few months -- his rah-rah optimism just annoys the living hell out of a natural-born cynic like yours truly -- but this particular theory may have merit.
Let's get back to Trump's reaction. His rant was beyond bizarre. He used the raid as an opportunity to excoriate Mueller, even though Mueller did not order the raid. He insisted that Mueller should be looking into Hillary Clinton's imaginary "crimes," even though Mueller was not tasked with investigating Hillary Clinton (even though Q-anon seems to think otherwise).
Trump then both slammed and praised Rod Rosenstein. I'll deal with both the attack and the praise.
The attack concerned Rosenstein's approval of a FISA warrant against Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump. In 2013, FBI eavesdroppers learned that the FSB intended to recruit Page. In 2016, Page made the bizarre decision to absent himelf from the Trump campaign in order to visit Russia and meet with an important official in Putin's government. Of course a FISA warrant was granted to eavesdrop on Page! Not approving that warrant would have been utterly irresponsible -- and I say that as someone who has written many posts on our right to privacy.
Trump's words of praise for Rosenstein were even more bizarre. The president gave Rosenstein a thumb's up for writing a report critical of James Comey. What Trump refuses to divulge is that this report chided Comey for being unfair to Hillary Clinton. Rosenstein was bothered because Comey's public discussion of the Weiner laptop essentially handed the presidency to Trump.
The Trump team opportunistically used Rosenstein's report as "cover" for firing Comey. At first, Trump's pal Roger Stone went with this cover story and decried Comey for being unfair to Clinton. Stone's actual tweet: "What Comey did to Hillary was disgraceful. I'm glad Trump fired him over it." (I can't link to the original tweet because Stone's account has been suspended.) Within a very short while, Trump himself blew this cover story during his interview with Lester Holt, on which occasion Trump admitted that he fired Comey in order to deep six the Russia investigation. On cue, Roger changed his tune and derided Comey as a Clinton co-conspirator.
Trump both praised and condemned Rod Rosenstein -- and neither the praise nor the condemnation bore much resemblance to the world of fact.
Nevertheless, I predict that he will soon fire Rosenstein, probably using the FISA approval business as his grand excuse.
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