What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[CountDeMoney]

Trump Tells First Lady of France: 'You're in Such Good Shape'



DADDY PLEASE MAKE THE BAD MAN STOP

[11B4V]

 

Ahh fuck. You can't script this shit.

[Barrister]

Well at least he's hitting on an age-appropriate woman for a change.  I mean - baby steps.

[alfred russel]

Well at least he's hitting on an age-appropriate woman for a change.  I mean - baby steps.

It is almost tragic in its own way. The one age appropriate woman he hits on, and she isn't into men who are age appropriate for her.

[Syt]

So, now the now the wall is going to be transparent so you don't get hit in the head by bags of drugs.  I'm really questioning my doctor's decision to take me off anti-psychotics. The world just gets weirder and weirder.

I read it this morning. At this point I expect Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester the Cat to oversee construction of the wall.

[jimmy olsen]

 I'm not sure what it is, but this meeting seems shady...

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/russian-lawyer-brought-ex-soviet-counter-intelligence-officer-trump-team-n782851

WASHINGTON — The Russian lawyer who met with the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counter intelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned.

[derspiess]

So, now the now the wall is going to be transparent so you don't get hit in the head by bags of drugs.  I'm really questioning my doctor's decision to take me off anti-psychotics. The world just gets weirder and weirder.

I read it this morning. At this point I expect Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester the Cat to oversee construction of the wall.

[The Larch]

Trump and Macron were serenaded to a Daft Punk medley by the French army band during the Bastille Day parade. Macron's smile must be because it reminds him of his times in the club or something, while Trump must be thinking where the hell has he landed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhQkku7jLfo

[Crazy_Ivan80]

trump needs to learn how to laugh.

[Razgovory]

Apparently Trump showed up so he could see the military parade.

[Valmy]

Well who could blame him?

[CountDeMoney]

Well who could blame him?

Problem is, you think he annoyed the shit out of the DoD back before the inauguration, imagine how bad it's going to be now.

[Ed Anger]

Wait until Trump finds out about Roman Triumphs.

PAINT MY FACE RED? DRAG MY ENEMIES BEHIND MY LIMO? I WANT ONE

[jimmy olsen]

We are so fucked

https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/7/14/15971498/donald-trump-jr-russia-collusion-cia-kgb

An ex-CIA officer: the Trump Jr. meeting shows how the Russians exploit intelligence targets

"This is how it's done." —Glenn Carle

Updated by Sean [email protected]@vox.com  Jul 14, 2017, 1:45pm EDT

The past 72 hours have been a whirlwind of revelations about the Trump campaign's possible collusion with the Russian government.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr. posted an email chain from last June in which he agreed to a meeting with a "Russian government lawyer" named Natalia Veselnitskaya who claimed to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Then on Friday morning, NBC News reported that Trump Jr.'s meeting with the Russian lawyer was also attended by a dual US-Russian citizen named Rinat Akhmetshin, a longtime Washington lobbyist believed to be a former Soviet military intelligence officer (though he denies the latter).

So what the hell is going on? If the Russians were indeed working with the Trump campaign to influence the election, why do it so brazenly? Why send a former Soviet intelligence officer into a meeting at Trump Tower?

I reached out by phone to Glenn Carle, a 23-year veteran of the CIA and former deputy officer on the National Intelligence Council. I asked him to walk me through the week's revelations and to explain Russia's actions from the perspective of an intelligence officer.

He told me that the meeting with Trump Jr., while unusually brazen, fits a broader pattern of Russian intelligence attempting to engage with the Trump family over the years. "This is how it's done," he said.

Carle explains why in our lightly edited conversation below.

Sean Illing
Walk me through what you think we've learned in the last 48 to 72 hours.

Glenn Carle
Since the Trump Jr. meeting became public knowledge, the standard assessment is that this is the smoking gun. Now, I suppose that's true, because now we have documents about direct meetings concerning the Russian government's interactions with members of Trump's entourage.

For me, this may be a smoking gun for a prosecutor, but I think there have been not just smoking guns but explosions going off all over the place for years [that] show exactly what this latest meeting showed: collusion between the Russians and Trump. So this meeting didn't really show us anything we didn't already know.

Sean Illing
Well, what, exactly, did it show us?

Glenn Carle
It's a clear report of how the Russians are seeking to communicate with, manipulate, funnel, and extract information from the Trump entourage and campaign.

Sean Illing
You say of the Trump Jr. meeting, "This is how it's done." What do you mean by that? I assume you mean this is how the Russian government works behind the scenes to compromise a source or push its agenda.

Glenn Carle
If you're an intelligence agency or officer, you never walk up to somebody that you want to recruit or influence and tell them directly that you want to recruit or influence them. You act upon them indirectly, whether they're witting or unwitting or complicit — and all of those things are slightly different. But in any case, you always have a cover story — always. And you always act in a way that can be masked.

So in this case, the meeting is allegedly to discuss the Magnitsky Act. One, that is a specific objective that the Russians are seeking to effect both overtly and covertly, and through influence operations by shaping perceptions, by buying people off, by providing information that leads toward their objectives, and by developing sources.

So back to Trump Jr. What do you do here if you're the Russians? Well, you send someone who is a private lawyer into what might theoretically be a legitimate, aboveboard meeting, and you inject an intelligence officer or intelligence objectives into that meeting. That appears to be what happened in this case.

It's a perfectly plausible cover for a meeting that is ostensibly about one thing but in reality about something entirely different.

Sean Illing
But here's the thing I don't get: We just learned today that there was another person present in the meeting, a former Soviet counterintelligence officer. That seems to blow the cover off the meeting. If you're Russia, why be so audacious, so naked in your ambitions?

Glenn Carle
Well, you might want to send a counterintelligence officer into a meeting like this with a cover story, understanding the risks of exposure involved, because you need someone there who can ensure the objectives are met.

Secondly, however juicy a target Trump and his crowd may be (and it's shocking how attractive a target Trump is from an intelligence perspective), he is nevertheless extremely uncontrollable. He's just not reliable in any way. And an intelligence officer wants more than anything else to control his or her assets. The incompetence and unpredictability of Trump is overwhelming, and so the Russians would likely want as many handlers in the room as possible.

Sean Illing
Why is Trump Jr. a target here? What makes him a valuable asset?

Glenn Carle
That's a good question. To me, this is part of a broad but clear pattern with multiple bits of information about a multilayered series of approaches by Russian intelligence to the Trump entourage that consist of human meetings, financial associations, information placements, and various technical operations. And all of this is going on simultaneously. So it's not as though the Russians have a single source who is Donald Trump Jr.

We have this entire multilayered campaign with all sorts of data points and pressure points. If you're a Russian intelligence officer, you're thinking, "How can we get to this guy without compromising ourselves or without being too careful and sacrificing effectiveness for security?" which is always the balancing act in the intelligence world.

The Russians have been super aggressive and, in a lot of ways, arrogantly open about their multiple layers of contacts. Now, this is just me editorializing, but I think the Russians decided they could engineer a meeting with Trump Jr. and the campaign director relatively quickly because he's not a controlled asset who will service a dead drop or something more covert like that. But they had all these relationships with people in and around the campaign, and so it makes sense that they would set something like this up.

From their perspective, it was clearly worth the risks.

Sean Illing
I assume the Russians would not feel so confident about these measures if they didn't have considerable leverage over the Trump family. Is that fair?

Glenn Carle
Absolutely. Of course they have leverage. We know that the Trump family has taken on numerous debts from Russian creditors and banks and who knows what other sorts of leverage they might have over Trump. Hell, we have Trump Jr. on record in 2008 saying that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia." It's quite obvious that there are deep financial ties lurking beneath all of this.

Sean Illing
When you pile up all the evidence, even before this week's revelations about Trump Jr., it seems impossible to deny that something is afoot here.

Glenn Carle
To me, it's clear that Russian intelligence has been involved with Donald Trump for years. I also believe it's clear, though it's harder to establish, that Donald Trump actively sought that involvement and has consented to it at some point.

It also seems certain that Trump is uncontrollable and would not ever consider himself a spy, but many spies don't consider themselves spies and often don't even know that they're spies. And intelligence services couldn't care less about that.

What matters to them is exploiting people, and that is what is happening here.

[jimmy olsen]

Bio of that soviet spy

https://www.axios.com/rinat-akhmetshin-trump-tower-2459179549.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic

Meet the ex-Soviet intel officer at Don Jr.'s Trump Tower meeting

Lazaro Gamio / Axios

Rinat Akhmetshin, the former Soviet intelligence officer who attended a June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, is a superlative Washington political operator who over the last two decades has repeatedly been at the center of cases involving corruption, dictators and sometimes war.

Akhmetshin was apparently hired to work with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met with Trump on June 9, 2016, in a lobbying effort against the Magnitsky Act, a congressional measure that sanctions Russia and Russian figures. He confirmed to the AP on Friday morning that he was in that meeting, saying: "I never thought this would be such a big deal to be honest."

I met Akhmetshin in 1998 in the Kazakhstan city of Almaty, where I was writing for The New York Times and he was representing the country's opposition leader in a quixotic effort to oust President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Over the subsequent months, Akhmetshin leaked me a trove of documents that linked Nazarbayev to millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts — payments from international oil companies working in the Central Asian republic. The result was a scoop in the paper, a high-profile investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, and, later, a thick section of a book I wrote about those years on the Caspian Sea.

How he made his mark: At that time and over the subsequent years, Akhmetshin proved again and again to be surprisingly adept at influencing politics in Washington, DC, not his homeland. A profane and fast talker who likes to dress well, a quick study who understands the world of geopolitics, local politics and technology, he managed to ingratiate himself with important members of Congress, and through them and his contacts with reporters single-handedly tarnished Nazarbayev's and Kazakhstan's reputation. If today the Kazakh leader and his country have reputations for chronic corruption, a primary reason is Akhmetshin.

Akhmetshin openly described his years as an officer in the Soviet GRU, the military intelligence arm, serving in Afghanistan. He ultimately took American citizenship. As we met again and again over the years, he represented opposition figures in Ukraine and Afghanistan, too. I never found him having cultivated the man in power anywhere. In a world in which no one is clean, Akhmetshin was someone you could trust.

The original NBC News reports suggested that Akhmetshin's intelligence past somehow has rolled forward until now, putting Russian spies in the same room with Donald Trump, Jr. Nothing I picked up in numerous intense reporting experiences with Akhmetshin over the years — in the former U.S.S.R. and the U.S. — suggested any current such relationships.

Last year, Akhmetshin took on clients attempting to tarnish Bill Browder, the former high-rolling American investor in Moscow and defender of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who only turned on the Russian president when he kicked him out of the country. Browder has since become one of Putin's fiercest critics, driven by the murder of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Moscow prison.

Four days after the Trump Tower meeting, Akhmetshin was responsible for arranging the high-profile showing of a revisionist anti-Magnitsky film at Washington, DC's Newseum.

Akhmetshin, reached by cell phone in Europe where he said he is surfing with family, said "there was nothing really" to the meeting. He said he was just going to dinner and preferred not to talk further about the incident. I asked how it was that he was yet again at the center of events. "Just lucky, I guess," he said.