Civil Commotion

The Associated Press is reporting that the White House knew in 2019 that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban for the death of American soldiers.

Top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported, according to U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence.

The Trump Administration will lie about it, and the GOP will protect them; it’s just another bad headline that will be overtaken by some other of Trump’s serial indecencies.

#AnnihilateTheGOP.

Church: Bad for your health.

Seriously: You’ve got to think first, and believe later.

By even the squalid standards of the Trump Administration, and the Deplorable One-third who are his base, the past few days have been shocking.

Trump approvingly retweeted a video of a couple of creaky old guys in a golf cart shouting “White Power!”, and the New York Times reported that Trump has known for at least 3-months that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban for the death of American soldiers.

What does the First Felon have to say about all this? Why, he never heard those shouts and, Nope, the intelligence reports never reached him.

Uh-huh.

Meantime, the Administration hawks the cheerful lie that Covid-19 is under control.

Seriously: Rehearsing Trump’s endless offenses against common decency, and his flirts with treason, are tiresome. It is time to be done with him, the GOP, and his lunatic base. Put his supporters out of your life; they are not part of the decent, educated world. Put Trump out of office next November — and put the GOP out of business forever by putting all his enablers out of office, too.

It grows harder and harder to satirize the Trump Administration.

Putin struck me as totally in control, calm, self-confident, whatever Russia’s domestic and political challenges might have been. He was totally knowledgeable on Moscow’s national-security priorities. I was not looking forward to leaving him alone in a room with Trump.

John Bolton, The Room Where it Happened

I’m reading the book now and — Oh, boy! — all the stories that made the newspapers are in there. But more striking, at least to me, is the casual contempt of passages like the one above; even people philosophically aligned with Trump, and within his own administration, think that he’s a fool.

Today, of course, we have the news that Russia offered the Taliban a bounty for killing American soldiers, that Trump knew months ago — and that Trump did nothing.

The crucial information that led the spies and commandos to focus on the bounties included the recovery of a large amount of American cash from a raid on a Taliban outpost that prompted suspicions. Interrogations of captured militants and criminals played a central role in making the intelligence community confident in its assessment that the Russians had offered and paid bounties in 2019, another official has said.

Putin has enjoyed an unhindered romp against the West during the Trump Administration — reason enough to get rid of Trump.