It’s all starting to make sense now.
The Russians have gotten inside the Treasury department and the NSA:
The scale of the Russian espionage operation appears to be large, said several individuals familiar with the matter. “This is looking very, very bad,” said one person. SolarWinds products are used by more than 300,000 organizations across the world. They include all five branches of the U.S. military, the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department, NASA, the Executive Office of the President and the National Security Agency, the world’s top electronic spy agency, according to the firm’s website.
Isn’t that ironic, considering the Trump administration won’t even let the incoming president’s transition team into the buildings. But it’s all ticketyboo letting hostile foreign actors run around with scissors, potentially causing global havoc.
Do you know how many countries around the world rely on the stability of the US dollar? It’s because we always pay our debts, ala Tyrion Lannister. But what if that’s in doubt?
The Russians have been dicking around in the telecoms too. Isn’t that special?
I think we can now understand why the intelligence agencies don’t want Biden’s people in the buildings. The damage is probably extensive and they don’t want anyone to know.
And what did Adam Schiff of the Intelligence committee say last January during one of his arguments at Trump’s impeachment trial?
Let’s reroll the video, shall we?
I’m going to bet that even Trumpers are going to be sorry Mitch McConnell prevented the Senate from impeaching him.
He’s a national security threat – to us.
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Trumpers are always accusing us of personal bias against the president. And there’s some truth to that. He’s been so offensive and crass and careless and stupid in the last four years that those of us who proudly and legally voted against him loathe him to the point of nausea whenever we see his Orangeness on TV. It started out as rational concern for his incompetence and immorality and has blossomed into something bordering on impatient fury to get him the f}#% out of the White House as soon as possible. I am not ashamed of my feelings about Trump. He’s proven them right every single time.
The following exchange between Rep. Katie Porter and Treasury Secretary Steve “birth control glasses” Mnuchin is illustrative of our growing concern, annoyance and anger at the outgoing Trump administration.
Earlier this year, a trillion or so dollars were allocated by Congress in the CARES act to help workers who were laid off due to Covid. For some strange reason that defies explanation, Mnuchin intends to withhold over $400 billion dollars from reaching its intended recipients and has decided that the money remaining in the CARES act should be returned to the Treasury unspent. That’s right, without even a “by your leave”, Mnuchin is creating even more hardship for unemployed persons and state and local governments that have been hit hard by the pandemic.
Porter calls him on it. The CARES act says the money doesn’t go back into the Treasury until 2026. So why is Mnuchin starving the desperate populace and state and local governments? Maybe Mnuchin knew something that we don’t. Well, we didn’t know it until today.
Two things to note about this exchange that took place 10 days ago. First, Mnuchin is disrespectful and stonewalls a member of Congress who happens to be one of the smartest, most intuitive financial minds in Congress. She just happens to be a Democrat but I’m betting she’s be an invaluable asset to any team.
Second, Trump himself says that he is personally involved in every decision. He’s a one man show. So if Mnuchin went to him with a problem concerning a security breach at Treasury, you can bet that Trump directed the actions to be taken. One of them might have involved keeping the CARES act money in the Treasury, for whatever reason that we don’t understand now, even at the risk of breaking the law. Because rules and laws, and the rule of law, don’t apply to Trump and his associates. Why start acting like he cares what happens to this country now?
Now, let’s look at that exchange where Porter calls Mnuchin out for breaking the law for illegally withholding the unspent CARES money:
Mnuchin owes us an explanation. And, yes, she is a lawyer.
How much you wanna bet that Barr is going to resign this week?
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
The national security threats increase the longer that Trump gets to stay via the absurd rule that the elected president has to wait over two months to take the office. And there is a chance that Trump has allowed Russia to hack these departments, and steal all sorts of important things. The Hillary email story was in some sense a cover, an inversion of what was going to happen if Trump took office. All those Republicans and media talking about what an awful thing it was that she had a private email server, even though there was not one iota of evidence that any single bit of important information was hacked, lost, or seen by anyone not intended to. But here, we have Russia basically seeing everything, and maybe able to plant or alter crucial information, which would at the least, throw the world markets into chaos. And Trump would do it for spite, for revenge, for money, and for Russia. This should be wall to wall news coverage, but of course there are other matters which Trump also caused, to cover. And the Republicans, who are obsessed with the markets, don’t seem to care, I guess because their portfolios are going up for a while, and then they can dump them.
Stuart Stevens, a political operative whom I always respected, even though he worked for the wrong candidates, has recently written a book called, “It Was All a Lie,” about how all the things that Republicans said over the years in order to get elected, were just a cover, a means toward the end of winning, but they obviously didn’t mean or believe any of them. We always knew that, decades ago, but they still do it, and it still mostly works; because if anyone who was not a billionaire or a total crook actually voted for the Republicans, it would be because they were very ignorant of what that party actually stands for, and what their actual agenda is.