Factual Dispatch #35: A Litany of Failures

I couldn’t decide whether to talk about Tik Tok or Loitering Munitions this week, when the dam just up and decided to break. In this case, the Dispatch will also only be up-to-date as of 11am (ish) on 9.27.19. This story is moving so quickly that I assume some additional craziness will have come out by the time you read this, so I’ll try my best to update the post this email is hosted at. And now, look out below!

Media Matters published an excellent timeline on the interactions that the Obama/Biden administration had with Ukraine. Dating all the way back to Feb 2014 as Biden was taking point on attempting to fortify Ukraine’s institutions against Putin’s then-ongoing assault on Ukraine in general & Crimea in particular, so I’ll try to make this summary short.

Even though three months later, Hunter Biden independently joined an energy firm run by a pro-Russian MP from the previous administration, this did not take the heat off of Ukraine. The Obama administration actually supported investigations against the firm, and specifically against its controller, Nikolai Zlochevsky, registering deep concerns that a top prosecutor had seemingly shelved investigations into the firm and Zlochevsky. The only point where Hunter’s name came up was after it was used for background “contrast” in a 2015 NYT piece: “the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.”

Over the next two years, the IMF & Biden would continue to press Ukraine to step up its anti-corruption efforts, earning the removal of the prosecutor that was, again, stonewalling the investigation into the firm that his son worked at. After the probe into the company closed in Jan 2017, most foreign policy wonks thought the story was put to bed. Until Captain Gaffe himself reminded everyone at a campaign event in Jan 2018. And, for clever men acting in bad faith, that was enough.

Grift-writer Peter Schweizer published a book in March 2018 that essentially reverses the story, and of course, Fox News took the fake news and ran with it:

Those of you playing the home game can see where this is going. As the Trump White House actually gets its intelligence from news piped over copper wire instead of, you know, the largest, most invasive and comprehensively terrifying surveillance apparatus that has ever been devised by man, these falsehoods-for-ratings just might have been digested as real. Which means the Hero’s Journey that Trump dispatched our very own Dark Carnival Pokemon, Rudolph William Lewis Giuliani on, that may unravel the entire presidency, might be entirely because they couldn’t stop drinking their own Kool-Aid. By May, Giuliani started calling on the DOJ to investigate Biden’s connections to corruption in Ukraine on Fox News, where astute observers started to notice the slowly growing head-assery:

While May 2019 seems like a thousand years ago to those of us following this, let us not forget that we were in the throes of Manafort-mania. You remember Paul Manafort right? That dude who wore insane suits, went to jail for assorted felonies, and advised the previous president of Ukraine to break ties with the West and get closer to Putin’s orbit? Guess who he was also talking to? 

The best thing about this motley crew is that they never let the facts on the ground get in the way of winning. Which has led us in its own, stumbling, antediluvian way, to where we are now. Foreign Exchanges has a neat summary of what happened once the seed of Ukranian corruption & Biden was incepted into the sack of overcooked mashed potatoes where many people people are saying Trump’s brain used to be:

For a supremely detailed/citation-rich discussion of the call, u/PoppinKREAM on Reddit has you covered.

And in response to that, Trump pivoted, released a heavily edited not-transcript of the call with the Ukranian President, and the Democrats in Congress somehow found their pants and have begun maybe kind of hopefully getting the ball rolling on impeachment hearings. To which, Trump pissed his pants and sent his squires out to talk about how he and his administration were actually supporting anti-corruption actions in Ukraine, and a giant pile of bothsiders have entirely bought the bilge. While Hunter Biden getting a corporate counsel job at a Ukranian gas company isn’t exactly going to work for the Peace Corps, Trump & his coterie of lunatics seem to believe some semi-bonkers stuff about this story. Up to and including that the Ukranian government somehow had access to the DNC hacked server and could produce it? 

So, as of this morning, here’s where we’re at:

• We’ve moved past the “So, what if I did?” phase of Trump’s arc of denial to “Off With His Head!” and thanks to Bloomberg, it’s apparently on video. Also, here’s the Boston Globe outlining why “So?” is less effective of a strategy for 45 in this case.

• Trump confused an apostrophe and a hyphen so blatantly, Merriam-Webster’s social media team has already dunked on him for it.

• The wait to cancel your New York Times subscription was up to 300 minutes last night, after Dean Baquet and the NYT literally tried to tweet through their attempt to identify the whistleblower. Coming from the paper that purposefully sat on the Egypt reporter story while WaPo desperately tried to find its murdered journalist, and the paper that was terrified about the prospect of journalists releasing the (publicly available) names of high-spend donors in affluent areas, I’m going to do my best to only link to them when absolutely necessary in the future. Between this and their outrage-based NYT Opinion page, they’ve moved from a fact-lite doltish bourgeois paper, to an active abettor of the administration. Can’t wait for the NYT “But Her Emails” expose on Trump’s improper use of a server used only for state secrets, to hide evidence of the faffing about.

• The release of the not-transcript may have violated Ukrainian constitutional privacy law, as it’s not actually confirmed that Mike Pompeo got permission from the Ukrainian government to release the details of the call.

• Fox News is apparently in open civil war over how best to cover the Impeachment of their Last Scion. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group.

• Rudy 9/11 has performed his Quixotic duties to a T, consistently admitting that he was supported by the White House and State Department in his efforts to solicit foreign interference and opposition research on a rival political candidate and party, which tethers Pompeo and the WH even more tightly to the articles-of-impeachment-worthy foolishness. To the point where a few clever comics people have just started posting comic images of Lex Luthor telling everyone he’s their protector, not Superman.

• Senator Feinstein has demanded a word-for-word copy of the phone call’s transcript, as it’s pretty obvious the summary that was provided, while damning, does not paint the entire picture, especially given the whistleblower’s complaint mentions Trump asking for assistance “eight” times.

• While this list may be updated over the coming weeks, as of this morning, the best most Senate Republicans can do is “haven’t done the homework.”

For everyone honestly interested in learning more, or just stuck arguing on the internet about it all day, WaPo’s got your talking point debunk, NYT is finally realizing the White House, Fox, and Friends are projecting so hard that when you point them at walls you can give Powerpoint presentations, GQ has a junior varsity breakdown of everything the Democrats should do so as to not fuck up their impeachment inquiry, with Lawfare Blog producing the policy wonk/lawyer tier breakdown. 

Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: The Perception Gap, or how Fake News is pulling America apart.

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: 70 countries now use “computational propaganda” to influence public opinion.

Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: America’s Mayor was never good, and I say this as someone who was so disappointed he dropped out of the race against Hillary in 2000, I phone banked for his replacement, an baby otter named Rick Lazio. If you don’t believe me, just ask the families of the people his cops brutalized, or the emergency personnel who died because he chose to put the Unified Command & Control Center for Fire, Police, and others, on the 23rd floor of the towers instead of on the ground in Brooklyn after the 1993 terrorist attacks.

“Huh, Interesting” Read of the Week: Bob Gangi of PROP, on how to close Rikers Island without building any new jails.

Royal Sampler

A new database of 600+ overlooked women who created art between the 15 & 19th Century will be online this fall, as per Open Culture. 

In news that must have Tekashi 69 quaking in his rainbow boots, the witness protection program looks to have been penetrated by the Russian Mob.

The Guardian explains why your friends sometimes only have the bandwidth to watch Friends or The Office.

Casper is selling CBD gummies, in the first example of “here, take this drug, it’ll help you use our product” I’ve seen in some time.

Dunk of the Week: Congratulations on your Impeachment Inquiry President Deals!

Next time only put your hand in the cookie jar once.

T

P.S. Rudy is referred to as a Dark Carnival Pokemon because, for a little over a decade, his answer to everything was “noun-verb-9/11.” So I took to imagining him as a twisted mutation of a Pokemon, who was unable to communicate without mentioning 9/11.