RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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my parisians better not let me down the next few days. 
With Glare on Trump Children, Political Gets Personal for President
By MARK LANDLER and MAGGIE HABERMANJULY 12, 2017
President Trump at the White House on Saturday. Mr. Trump defended his son on Wednesday morning, denouncing reports about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer. Al Drago for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — In private, President Trump sometimes addresses his adult children as “baby,” a term of endearment tinged with a New Yorker’s wisecracking edge. And now that Mr. Trump’s babies have been swept into the vortex of his storm-tossed presidency, he is taking it personally.
The fierce criticism of a meeting between Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and a Kremlin-linked lawyer in June 2016 has left the president by turns angry, defensive and protective but ultimately relieved that for now, the worst appears to be over, people who spoke to him said Wednesday.
For Mr. Trump, who has faced a barrage of questions about his own dealings with Russia, watching his closest family members come under harsh scrutiny for things they are accused of doing to help his presidential campaign has marked an uncomfortable turn in the foreign entanglement that has shadowed him since he took office in January.
The latest disclosures also focused renewed attention on Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, who attended Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting last June with the Russian, Natalia Veselnitskaya. And they came on the heels of a much-criticized decision by his daughter Ivanka to sit in her father’s vacated chair at a summit meeting in Germany.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump discarded pleas from advisers to avoid wading into the tempest over Donald Trump Jr., and posted a fusillade of tweets defending him. He denounced reports of the meeting — to collect incriminating information about Hillary Clinton — as part of “the greatest Witch Hunt in political history” and even embraced the theory that his son might have been “the victim” in the case.
“He was great,” Mr. Trump told people about his son’s appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program the previous evening.
How The Times Connected the Dots
A New York Times investigative reporter takes you through the twists and turns of uncovering the details of a secretive meeting.
By midday Wednesday, the mercurial president was telling friends and advisers that he believed the situation had improved. “I think this is getting better,” he said to one group of aides, hours before he was set to take off for a trip to France to mark Bastille Day.
The Trump family, friends said, always draws closer under intense pressure. But Mr. Trump bridles at the idea that his children, who have not spent years in the public spotlight like him, are now facing unrelenting scrutiny over what he believes to be a manufactured scandal by the news media.
While Donald Trump Jr. has been on the firing line, the meeting with Ms. Veselnitskaya could arguably be a bigger distraction for Mr. Kushner. As a senior adviser to the president, he is involved in several of the administration’s most sensitive foreign-policy issues, from China to the Middle East peace process. His involvement in the meeting led reporters to ask the White House whether he still held his security clearance.
Also under scrutiny is how forthcoming Mr. Kushner was with his father-in-law about the nature of the June meeting. He met with Mr. Trump to discuss the issue, according to advisers to the White House, around the time he updated his federal disclosure form to include Ms. Veselnitskaya’s name on a list of foreign contacts that Mr. Kushner was required to submit to the F.B.I. to obtain a security clearance.
Mr. Kushner supplemented the list of foreign contacts three times, adding more than 100 names, people close to him said.
Mr. Kushner played down the significance of the meeting and omitted significant details, according to two people who were briefed on the exchange. They said Mr. Kushner informed the president that he had met with a Russian foreign national, and that while he had to report the name, it would not cause a problem for the administration.
Another official said Mr. Kushner’s assurance to the president was based on the fact that nothing came of the June meeting.
Donald Trump Jr. received an email on June 3, 2016, promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. The information was described as being part of Russia's support for his father’s presidential bid. His reply? “I love it.”
By Drew Jordan on July 11, 2017. Photo by Sam Hodgson for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
In an interview with Reuters, Mr. Trump said he had not been told last summer that his son was meeting with a Russian lawyer. “No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this,” he said.
Mr. Kushner, colleagues say, has kept up a regular work schedule, meeting on Wednesday with Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, to discuss the administration’s impending moves on trade. He is also in touch with Jason D. Greenblatt, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, who is in Israel for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. And next week, he plans to take part in a high-level economic dialogue with China.
Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, are not accompanying Mr. Trump to Paris. Instead they plan to attend the annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, sponsored by the investment firm Allen & Company. An official said the couple would pay for their own travel and lodgings.
Mr. Kushner is expected to cooperate in the next several weeks with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees that are looking into Russia’s intervention in the American election and any possible collusion with the Trump campaign. He will have to devote some time to preparing for those appearances with his team of lawyers.
Colleagues of Mr. Kushner said he had remained focused and upbeat despite the drumbeat of negative headlines — a trait they ascribe to his experience dealing with the legal troubles of his father, Charles Kushner, who was convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering.
But even as the White House labors to present a business-as-usual facade, there is evidence that Mr. Trump’s family will be drawn deeper into the investigation. Two officials familiar with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation said the panel was now planning to expand its inquiry to include Donald Trump Jr.
The officials said Mr. Trump’s shifting reasons for the meeting — and his acknowledgment that he was lured by the promise of Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton — had forced the Senate panel to begin examining his role in the campaign, and any contacts he may have had with Russians.
The first step, officials said, would be for Senate investigators to sit down with Mr. Trump. The Senate panel might also request that he turn over emails and financial records from any dealings with Russia, which they have done with other subjects of their investigation.
At the same time, Mr. Kushner now looms larger in the Senate investigation, the officials said. Its investigators concluded as early as March that his meetings during the transition with the Russian ambassador and a Russian banker tied to the Kremlin warranted further scrutiny.
For the president, friends said, the pain of seeing his son ensnared in the Russia scandal was real. In part, that is because, of all his children, he has had the most complicated relationship with Donald Jr., who was a teenager when his parents divorced and did not speak to his father for a year.
Friends who have known the Trump family for many years said they believed Donald Trump Jr., in setting up the meeting, was only focused on trying to help — and even impress — his father with information that could help his campaign.
President Trump has been equally protective of his other children. After Ivanka came under criticism for taking her father’s seat in Germany, he defended her in a tweet and cited Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. “When I left Conference Room for short meetings with Japan and other countries,” he said, “I asked Ivanka to hold seat. Very standard. Angela M agrees!”
Nobody offered a more passionate defense of Ivanka than Donald Trump Jr.
“Look at the attacks on Ivanka,” he told Mr. Hannity on Tuesday night. “If she was anyone else’s daughter, she’d be a feminist icon — this incredible, brilliant, well-spoken woman. And they try to belittle her at every chance. It’s really sad.”
“For me as a family member, as her brother, as her older brother, you know you do take it personally and it does make you want to fight back,” he added. “What we are is we are fighters and they don’t take well to that, either, because most people don’t like being called on their stuff.”
Opinion | National security figures launch project to counter Russian mischief
National security figures launch project to counter Russian mischief
Amid all the controversy over Russian hacking, interference and propaganda efforts in the United States and Europe, there’s a growing concern among national security leaders that not enough is being done to stop the efforts. That’s why a large group of senior figures from both parties is launching a new effort to track and ultimately counter Russian political meddling, cyber-mischief and fake news.
The roster of figures who have signed onto the new project, called the Alliance for Securing Democracy, is a who’s who of former senior national security officials from both parties. The advisory council includes former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff; former acting CIA director Michael Morell; former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers; Adm. James Stavridis, former NATO supreme Allied commander, Europe; Jake Sullivan, former national security adviser to Joe Biden; and former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves.
The project will be housed at the German Marshall Fund (GMF) and will be run day to day by a staff led by Laura Rosenberger, a former senior State Department official in the Obama administration, and Jamie Fly, former national security counselor to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)
“This threat to our democracy is a national security issue. Russia is waging a war on us. They are using different kinds of weapons than we are used to in a war,” Rosenberger said. “We need to do a much better job understanding the tools the Russians are using and that others could use in the future to undermine democratic institutions and we need to work closer with our European allies who also are subjected to this threat.”
Play Video 2:38
What we know about Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia meeting
Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton during his father's presidential campaign, after being told the information was "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump."(Video: Elyse Samuels, Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The idea is to create a platform and repository of information about Russian political influence activities in the United States and Europe that can be the basis for cooperation and a resource for analysts on both sides of the Atlantic to push back against Russian meddling.
The project aims to be able to eventually map out Russian disinformation on social networks, cyber-efforts, financial flows, broader state-level cooperation and even Russian government support for far-left or far-right parties in other countries.
“In a perfect world, we would have a national commission that would be looking into exactly what happened, exactly what did the Russians do and what can we do as a nation to defend ourselves going forward and deter Putin from ever doing this again,” Morell told me. “We all know this is not going to happen, so things like the GMF effort are hugely important to fill the gap.”
One of the first outputs, coming soon, is going to be an online digital dashboard that will allow for tracking of Russian disinformation through fake news stories as well as narratives being pushed by Russian-sponsored social media figures. The project will attempt to map how Russian government-promoted information is spread though the American and European media landscapes.
“The Russians are playing in a broader scope of issues here than just the election,” Morell said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Russians are trying to divide us on issues from gay rights to race.”
The goal of the project is not to re-litigate the 2016 presidential election or to investigate the issue of whether the Trump campaign either colluded or was used by Russia as part of its interference campaign. The premise is that the Russian interference is ongoing and that not enough is being done to understand and ultimately counter it.
“It’s time for people who care about this issue to drop the partisanship and come together on this,” said Chertoff. “The closer we get to 2018 and we don’t see a huge amount of activity to get prepared, the more dire this is.”
The project also doesn’t want to overlap with the various investigations ongoing by the FBI and several congressional committees. But the premise is that more research can actually spur more U.S. government and congressional action to increase awareness, deterrence and resilience in the face of ongoing Russian efforts.
“Part of the problem is the administration hasn’t been presented yet with a set of recommendations about how to confront this problem,” said Fly. “The jury is still out on whether this administration will be willing to do the things necessary to secure our democracy.”
So think about it this way. Back when the constitution was being written, everything was predicated on balance and separation of powers. The framers thought that each branch would be able to keep each branch in power. But even more importantly, because of the fractured philosophies evident in each of the 13 colonies, they never envisioned power consolidating in a 1v1 setting.I hear what you saying and I appreciate you laying it all out for me because I wasn't informed on it but, it still sounds like a major blindspot to me. I doubt the founding fathers thought that 300 years later there would be a corrupt President being protected from being impeached because his party controlled congress and didn't want to give up power. That couldn't have been their objective. They were assuming members of other governmental bodies would behave rationally but, if the entire party is corrupt, then what
Federalist vs anti-federalist consolidated as a result of the constitutional debate, not beforehand. So there was never a reason to think that alllllllllllllll of government, every single political battle in each state, would revolve around this 1 central idea for the next 300+ years.
Everyone knew there were small government types and big government types, agrarian vs business, slave vs non slave, capitalist vs egalitarian, christian vs non denomination, but the prevailing thought has always been that these differences would disallow the situation we are facing right now.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Michelle looking so good
O, I don't want them secret service problemsJust sayin....