Republicans may be successful at subverting the possibility of getting to the bottom of the scandal — which they are now clearly trying to do, by creating a distraction aimed at diverting public attention away from story and instead towards conspiracy theories involving the Obama administration.
.. The aim is to cast the Russia investigation as another Benghazi — by turning former National Security Advisor Susan Rice into the villain of the story, and fixing the focus of the hearings on her.
.. All of Trump’s efforts to smear his predecessor, including accusing former President Obama of ordering surveillance of Trump Tower, and claiming that Rice had committed a crime, have been proven false — something Trump and his allies refuse to even acknowledge.
.. rather than retract his baseless tweet, Trump and his allies latched onto it, spinning implausible theories in an effort to drum up even a sliver of evidence for it after the fact.
.. the White House “put out an all-points bulletin” to “find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower.”
.. Nunes appeared to collaborate with the White House to review cherry-picked classified intelligence and leak it to the media to craft a false narrative that the Obama administration had somehow surveilled the Trump team.
.. One thing to watch for now is the role the conservative media — allied with Trump — will likely play in shifting the focus to Rice. Primed by another spurious, politicized GOP investigation involving Rice (Benghazi), conservative pundits are eager to portray Rice as a devious figure in this new narrative.
.. But it now looks as if the House Intelligence Committee will try to embroil Rice in the Russia hearings, anyway. If so, it will show just how far the Committee’s Republicans are willing to go to prop up Trump’s lies — and to distract from efforts to get to the bottom of Russian meddling, as well as any possible Trump campaign collusion with it.
Why Americans Vote ‘Against Their Interest’: Partisanship
Working-class Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump continue to approve of him as president, even though he supported a health care bill that would disproportionately hurt them.
Highly educated professionals tend to lean Democratic, even though Republican tax policies would probably leave more money in their pockets.
Why do people vote against their economic interests?
.. “Partisan identification is bigger than anything the party does,”
.. it stems from something much more fundamental: people’s idea of who they are.
.. “It more or less boils down to how you see the conflicts in American society, and which groups you see as representing you,”
.. “That often means race, and religion, and ethnicity — those are the social groups that underlie party identification.”
.. That often leads people to say that they are independent, she said, but in fact most voters consistently lean toward one of the parties.
.. “Older voters who scored high on racial resentment were much more likely to switch from Obama to Trump,”
.. She believes that he successfully made a pitch to what she calls “white male identity politics,” convincing older, less-educated white voters that he would represent their interests.
.. Economic status, it turns out, is not so important in partisanship.
.. Mr. Trump was able to win the G.O.P. nomination even though he broke with Republican ideology on economic matters like trade protectionism. His arguments played to white working-class voter identity
.. while those multiple identities might once have pushed people in different partisan directions .. today it’s more common to line up behind one party.
.. people now feel that they are fighting for many elements of who they are: their racial identity, professional identity, religious identity, even geographical identity.
.. he as a politician, kind of for the first time, said ‘we’re losers.’ ” Social psychology research has shown that the best way to get people to defend their identity is to threaten it. By saying “we don’t win anymore — we’re losers — and I’m going to make us win again,”
.. Mr. Trump’s pitch to voters both created the sense of threat and promised a defense: a winning political strategy for the age of identity politics.
.. people responded much more strongly to threats or support to their party than to particular issues.
.. He has been careful to recast every potential scandal and policy struggle as a battle against the Democrats and other outside groups.
.. Mr. Trump has insisted, for instance, that the F.B.I. investigation into his campaign staffers’ contacts with Russia is meaningless “fake news,” and that the real issue is whether President Obama wiretapped him before the election.
.. Abandoning him would mean betraying tribal allegiance, and all of the identities that underlie it.
After Campaign Exit, Manafort Borrowed From Businesses With Trump Ties
Papers were recorded that same day creating a shell company controlled by Mr. Manafort that soon received $13 million in loans from two businesses with ties to Mr. Trump, including one that partners with a Ukrainian-born billionaire and another led by a Trump economic adviser. They were among $20 million in loans secured by properties belonging to Mr. Manafort and his wife.
.. Mr. Manafort never filed lobbying registrations for his work in Ukraine that would have disclosed his compensation. Such registrations are necesssary for activities that involve influencing policy and public opinion in the United States, and some of Mr. Manafort’s Ukraine work appeared to fall into that category. Anti-corruption officials in Ukraine say $12.7 million in “off the books” cash payments were earmarked for him
.. Mr. Manafort has previously claimed the ledger is a fake. On Wednesday, he issued a statement that did not dispute the ledger entries, but suggested that any payments he received were legal because they were not made in cash.
.. In one text written in 2015, Ms. Manafort, a lawyer, called her father’s activities in Ukraine “legally questionable,”
.. “Don’t fool yourself,” Ms. Manafort wrote. “That money we have is blood money.”
.. The New York Times reported in February that Mr. Artemenko worked behind the scenes with Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, and Felix H. Sater, a former business associate of Mr. Trump’s, to relay a proposed Ukrainian-Russian peace plan to the White House.
Obama Lied About Removing All Chemical Weapons from Syria
I mean, the way they did this story was Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction. We went to war and people died!
.. There are people who think that this attack in Syria using chemical weapons on Syrian citizens is a setup designed to draw President Trump into military action in Syria, just as Bush was drawn into action in Iraq.
.. But the upshot is that there are people now thinking that these intelligence people…
There were many Clinton holdovers just like there are now Obama holdovers, and that many people ran a scam on Bush. They knew that there were not mass quantities of weapons of mass destruction, and they let Bush go in there on purpose to embarrass himself. And there are people who think, “Look, that happened once, it can happen again. Mr. President,” they’re saying to Trump, “please being very careful before you make a move on Syria, ’cause you could be in the process of being entrapped again, just like Bush was.”
.. the British media think got sucked into a trick. There weren’t weapons of mass destruction and he was lied to and he bought the lie, and so people are afraid. People who support Trump are afraid that he may be falling prey to the same kind of trick
.. The Democrats want you to believe that Putin helped Trump win the election by somehow screwing Hillary and the whole Democrat effort. They colluded. They don’t have any evidence for it, but they’re convinced it happened, right? So Trump and Putin are buddy-buddy. Trump doesn’t ever criticize Putin.
What in the world, then, would Trump be talking about going into Syria for?
.. Trump attacking Syria undercuts the entire narrative that Trump and Putin are buddies