Yes, Trump Is Being Held Accountable

James B. Comey (a former colleague of mine at the Justice Department), has proved to be an independent actor

.. Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Comey on a whim, but that would not kill the F.B.I. investigation. Rather, just as President Richard Nixon hastened his impeachment with the Watergate-related firings known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” canning Mr. Comey would only heighten the public’s and Congress’s suspicions about Mr. Trump’s guilt and increase pressure on the F.B.I. and others to get to the bottom of the Russia matter.

.. Those investigations will now be supervised by Rod J. Rosenstein, soon to be the deputy attorney general, who is a career prosecutor of undoubted independence and an expert on national security and public corruption.

.. Another reason to think the existing process is working to keep the president in check are the plentiful leaks from the executive branch that have revealed a great deal about the Russian imbroglio. Leaks of this sort are a predicable response to a perception of illegitimacy or overreach inside the executive branch.

.. one should not overlook what is truly remarkable here: In the second month of a new presidency, several bodies in a Congress controlled by the president’s party are conducting high-profile, politically fraught and hard-to-control investigations that potentially implicate current and former administration officials and former campaign officials.

.. All of these actors and institutions are holding the Trump presidency to account.

FBI gets Lititz firm’s help in probe of Russian bank’s ‘odd’ interest in Trump Hotels marketing emails

But marketing emails that Listrak sent last year for Trump Hotels have led to Listrak inadvertently drawing curiosity about itself.

Why? The computer server of a Russian bank repeatedly looked up the unique internet address of the server sending out the Trump Hotel emails — Listrak’s server.

 .. Why? The computer server of a Russian bank repeatedly looked up the unique internet address of the server sending out the Trump Hotel emails — Listrak’s server.

.. Alfa Bank “executives like to stay at Trump hotels all the time (like in Vegas and New York), and there was a company function one of Trump’s golf courses. In other words, there’s good reason for the company to get spam from, and need to communicate with, Trump hotels to coordinate events.”

Terry Glavin: Enter the Freeland-Nazi conspiracy — and the amping-up of Russia’s mischief in Canada

Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s ambitious young foreign affairs minister, is secretly itching to draw Canada into a showdown with Russia because of the seething hatreds she inherited from her Ukrainian grandfather, a Nazi collaborator and war profiteer she never told us about. She’s been lying about her family’s sordid past all along, and she’s been lying to Canadians about what’s really going on in Ukraine. She’s dangerous.

.. The Monday announcement was overshadowed by the gathering pace of the Freeland conspiracy theory, however, and by Freeland’s own chilling caution that Canada should expect to be targeted by the same mischief of Russian disinformation that the Kremlin has used to target the United States and Europe.

.. You see how it works? Instead of headlines about Canada’s response to Russia’s brutal violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and the 10,000 lives lost to Vladimir Putin’s thuggish belligerence, we’re being entertained by salacious innuendo about Chrystia Freeland and encouraged to question whether it is only because of that scheming harridan’s Russophobic impetuousness that we’re being so beastly to the Russians in the first place.

.. Kremlin-friendly smear campaigns

.. a Moscow-based freelancer, John Helmer. Back in the 1980s, in Washington, D.C., Helmer found himself at the centre of a maelstrom of allegations that he was a KGB asset. He left for Russia almost immediately thereafter, and has worked in Moscow ever since.

The other man is the notorious far-right Luxembourg-based Polish “analyst” Stanislas Balcerac.