Maverick's World

The Daily Donald 5/12/2017

With the FBI raid on a Roger Stone/Paul Manafort company the Strategic Campaign Group, the entire curtains have begun to draw on the Trump regime. The #TrumpRussia affair will be the dominant story for the foreseeable future.

Some people are assuming this to mean Trump will not survive the full term. That may be correct but I suspect that the opposite is likely and here is why..

1) The intelligence community (IC) typically cares only about being able to gather actionable intelligence. If they can't do that - they cannot protect the nation. Their main problem with Trump was that he was making their job impossible. When they looked at the secret data they had on him, the IC felt Trump was most likely a Russian spy. This made the IC as a whole deeply uncomfortable with the Trump regime. The USIC has been around for a very long time and they kind of know a rat when they seen one - and while large numbers of Americans fell under Trump's spell, the IC prepared itself for a War-with-Trump that it knew was to come. Since Trump was neck deep in the pool with Russia, he knew the USIC would come after him and he carefully laid the groundwork to discredit it as a "Deep State" that was in the pay of "foreigners like Soros" (that where your dad/uncle/whoever  learned to talk like that  from).

2) The IC could not simply release the evidence it had its disposal. Doing so would have compromised the sources and methods the IC uses. This is very very bad. If methods are revealed, then the enemy can devise countermeasures. If sources are revealed, then a critical trust is lost and in the future people become reluctant to share information with you. So the IC simply sat on the information it had and let Trump's growing discomfort over "what they might know" take its toll, By carefully planting deniable stories and dropping cookie crumbs to the dreadful truth of their secret data in the media -the IC amplified Trump's discomfort. The IC didn't have to do very much, they simply had to remind people what they already knew about Donald Trump - i.e. he is not to a trustworthy person - and Trump did the rest by being himself.

3) From a strategic perspective the IC had two handicaps. Firstly GOPers & Trumpers put a lot of faith in Wikileaks+Infowars+Breitbart+alt-Right media and secondly there was no specific conduct they could hang on to Trump directly. Everything Trump & RIS had done, it was handled by disposable proxies like lawyer Micheal Cohen, Carter Page, Manafort, Roger Stone, Bannon etc...  In l'affaire Flynn, the IC found the perfect solution to its handicaps. Here was a foreign agent protected by sources like the alt-Right media, and directly appointed by Trump over objections from the IC. This tore the veil off the Trump/RIS operations.

4) Given Trump's huge business ties to Russia, and Flynn's knowledge of those details, Trump was fantastically sensitive to any exposures via Flynn. Given that situation, it was only natural that Trump would do whatever he could think of to protect Flynn. With D/FBI Comey ratcheting up the legal probes against Flynn and the alt-Right machinery that protected him. As this same alt-Right machinery also visibly links to RIS and supported Donald Trump's election with direct orders from Trump himself - the exposure of these people is potentially fatal to Trump and highly embarrassing to the RIS.

5) Faced with the prospect of being totally exposed, Putin forced Trump's hand. Trump fired Comey and publicly admitted to doing it to stall the FBI probe into #TrumpRussia. Trump did this extremely stupid thing in part believing that it would resonate with the mistrust of the FBI among aging white boomers who voted Trump to power and in part believing that his lawyers would be able to protect him as they always had. Trump is a reality TV star who thinks only in terms of approval ratings, he genuinely believes that people that were dumb enough to vote for him will buy into his claims even today. What he didn't think through is that the open admission of derailing the FBI inquiry had unintended effect of exposing him to an obstruction of justice charge. That charge is more than sufficient for anyone to impeach him and convict him in a court of law. Unlike the corporate lawyers Trump faces in his daily reality TV routine, federal criminal prosecutors will not back down and will attack relentlessly. Trump didn't realize this crucial difference.

6) Whether or not he is actually impeached depends on the GOP itself. The USIC knows that the GOP is compromised by the RIS hacking of the RNC and the tapes that Donald Trump has made of GOPers partying at his hotels. So it is unlikely that the GOP will willingly move against Donald Trump unless they feel that they will completely lose in the 2018 elections. However as the USIC has the same data that the RIS does or Trump does (legally obtained ofcourse in the process of investigating #TrumpRussia - LOL!!) it can gently remind the GOPers to do its f**king job!

7) So will the IC "ask" the GOPers to impeach Trump? - I think it unlikely because firstly as the number of cases against him rise Trump will offer to sell out Putin to appease the USIC. And secondly it is too much work to go after several hundred GOPer targets at once. It is much more  expedient to simply let this situation continue naturally with the GOP entering self-cannibalization mode in the next few weeks. There is a caveat though - the USIC wants to see the economic event we are all waiting for to happen in a way it moderates (as opposed to the way in which RIS wants its moderated). If Trump doesn't play along with the USIC - then it is likely that they will be forced to "ask" the GOP to do something about it.

If you are a Trump/Stein/Johnson voter reading this - I am sorry to have to bring this to you notice - but you voted for the wrong person. Your fantastic stupidity is why all this is happening. You may not have realized it but we are on the verge of a major debt deleveraging and competent management was critical at this time. But thanks to you inability to take your head out of your asses, we have this shitshow to face.

If you are a HRC voter - thank you for reading this far - please don't get weird ideas about what is likely in the near future. Its bad enough that one group of people in the nation have collectively lost their minds - don't you go off into fantasy world too. The nation needs level headed people in the extremely trying time to come.

And everyone please take note that the value of BTC has shot up over the last month. My guess is that the RIS is getting ready to place its short on the stock market.  When I saw Lavrov and Kislyak's smiles in the Oval Office - the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I could almost see the "Mission Accomplished" sign behind their heads. The "TASS photographer" (was that really an X directorate agent?) was supposed to keep the images secret but instead brazenly released them on Twitter. Those two developments taken  together tell me that Putin/RIS are confident that the sanctions are now effectively relaxed.

And it seems the Saudis are laying out quite a show for Donald Trump. The only thing I can say to HMSG - well played Sir! well played...

posted by maverick @ 5:35 AM