More like when Putin told Trump he wanted the sanctions gone, Trump listened.
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His mind wandered after saying “I, Donald Trump”…
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Once again (in this otherwise excellent and valuable precis) TPM has missed a major feature of this narrative that has now been languishing for days even as it offers plenty of traction for follow-up.
“The same day, the Treasury released a list of Russian oligarchs with close ties to Putin, as required by the law. But it didn’t sanction them — Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin suggested he might do so later. Treasury turned out to have cribbed the list from Forbes.”
There was a proper list constructed, apparently, which was rejected and swapped out. How is this still unremarked and not pursued?
Please, for Pete’s sake can somebody at TPM take a look at this? Sorry to sound like a broken record. Emailing “talk@” is apparently useless, and this is a third mention in related comment threads. TPM does at least win a prize for hermetic insularity from readers.
Here, I’ll make it really easy. The entire Guardian piece:
US ‘name-and-shame’ list of Russian oligarchs binned by top Trump official – expert
Julian Borger in Washington
Tue 30 Jan 2018 21.43 GMT First published on Tue 30 Jan 2018 19.25 GMT
A “name-and-shame” list of Russian oligarchs who made their money corruptly from their ties with Vladimir Putin was compiled by the US government agencies but then cancelled last week by a senior administration official, according to a Russia expert who was consulted on the list.
It was replaced by an all-inclusive list of rich Russians apparently copied straight from the Forbes magazine’s ranking of wealthy Russians, together with the names of some top Kremlin officials.
“It makes the whole thing ridiculous. There are no criteria,” said Anders Åslund, a Swedish economist, Russia expert and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, who said he had been consulted to make suggestions on how the “Kremlin list” should be compiled, to comply with congressional legislation in July mandating tougher action on Russia.
Speaking from Kiev, Åslund said that a lot of work had gone into compiling the original list, but he was told on Thursday that someone high up in the administration had ordered for it to be binned and replaced by the Forbes-based list.
That list was put out at midnight on Monday, the deadline set by Congress for the administration to take action.
“It is a serious attempt by someone high up in government to make the US government and Congress look ridiculous,” he said.
Åslund added that he did not know which senior official ordered the change, but argued that by endorsing the list, the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, “took responsibility for it”.
The Trump administration also came under fire for not announcing any new sanctions aimed at Russia as mandated in the July legislation, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. A senior administration official however, said the act and administration efforts to implement it, were acting as a deterrent to third countries thinking of doing defence or security deals with Russia.
“We have ben able to turn off potential deals worth several billion dollars. That’s real money not going to the Kremlin … That is real success,” the official said. However he would not give any details of cancelled contracts or their total value. He insisted there would be sanctions in the future if major violations were spotted.
The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, also told Congress that more sanctions would be forthcoming in the next few months.
“There will be sanctions that come out of this report,” Mnuchin said,
In a commentary on the Atlantic Council website, Åslund accused Mnuchin of “deriding” US sanctions on Russia and legislation signed into law by the president. He wrote that the original aim of the Kremlin list was to identify those who had made their fortune on illicit contacts with the Kremlin.
“The various US government bodies involved clearly carried out conscientious work along these lines,” he said. “At the last minute, however, somebody high up – no one knows who at this point – threw out the experts’ work and instead wrote down the names of the top officials in the Russian presidential administration and government plus the 96 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list.”
“In doing so, this senior official ridiculed the government experts who had prepared another report, rendering [the July congressional legislation] ineffective and mocking US sanctions on Russia overall. By signing this list, the secretary of the treasury took responsibility for it.”
“The main beneficiary of this list is Russia’s president,” Åslund concluded.
A Treasury spokesman confirmed to Buzzfeed on Tuesday that the Kremlin list had been derived from the Forbes ranking of “200 richest businessmen in Russia 2017.
“The way they published this list is not being to be effective,” said Peter Harrell, a former deputy assistant secretary for counter threat finance and sanctions in the state department. “Congress’s goal was to get the administration to focus on the people Putin is dependent on. They came up with a list that includes those people and everyone else.”
“It’s naming, but I’m not sure it’s actually shaming. It’s too inclusive to have any deterrent effect,” Harrell, now a senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Security, said.
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Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, demanded the Trump administration explain a report that Moscow’s foreign intelligence director, Sergey Naryshkin, was allowed to enter the US despite being under sanction by the United States.
The Russian embassy in the US tweeted on Tuesday: “The director of Russia’s foreign intelligence, Sergey Naryshkin, has visited the United States for consultations with US counterparts on the struggle against terrorism.”
“The Trump administration must immediately come clean and answer questions,” Schumer said at a weekly press briefing on Tuesday. Among the questions he wants answered are: “Which US official did he meet with? Did any White House or security council official meet with Naryshkin? What did they discuss?”
“Surely he didn’t come alone,” Schumer added, and asked whether other sanctioned officials also entered the country. He also raised the possibility that Trump’s decision not to impose new sanctions outlined in a measure that Trump signed last year.
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Hey, Doug, I had that in an earlier draft but trimmed it because we decided against including in the piece Browder’s very convincing and interesting explanation for it, which is that when they compiled the list of people to be sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act, the Obama administration did the same thing. The first list was 60 names long, the second one was (at first) 45 names. So the existence of the classified list suggests that there was at one point a plan to actually levy sanctions. But the Trump administration saying “nah” suggests they’ve had second thoughts.
note: edited to correct “Trump campaign” to “Trump administration”
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just wait until they feel the sanctions against them once putin’s puppet is gone, and now that we know the sanctions sting, badly, fuck’em, triple down and squeeze their balls mightily
fuck me? no, fuck you comrade!
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Excellent choice of words to not be blunt. I will echo @irasdad, though in commending Sam for the article. It is well done, and equally as damning of T rump as his other fine work has been.
Back on this article, though, the more i read about the history of T rump’s accolades and accommodations toward Russia, the more i got the sense that it is now the entire Republican Party that in on board with doing whatever Putin tells them to do. If T rump is a Russian asset, which we all know he is, what does that tell us about the entirety of the GOP in Congress? They’re not focused on sanctions so much as absolving the ability of our US government to function at all. That is precisely what Putin is hoping will happen to the United States. Reagan saw the dissolution of the USSR. Putin wants to see the dissolution of the USA. Devin Nunes is right there to help.
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Give John Kelly and the rest of Trump’s generals a few more months and it will.
Unbelievable. I usually don’t tweet much on politics, but this is insane.
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I wish I had your confidence. I think there was plenty already known about Trump’s unfitness for the office and yet the EC turned a blind eye and voted for him anyway. I am not convinced this would have made any difference to them. 
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Both parties want trump to act. They have spoken out, and trump says fuck you in response… But I hear a leading Dem is planning on waterboarding the orange ass. Good enough?
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The “how” and even the “when” of how PP acceded to Russia are well known. The “why” is mostly speculative though I think the guy in the garage meeting with Woodward had the right idea: follow the money
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Follow the money, for sure, but don’t you reckon there is some aspect of blackmail involved in this, too?
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Indeed. It was getting the money which led to trump to hold the pageant which then led to a bedroom which led to a stream of accusations.
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semi OT - not sure what to think of this Friday news dump:
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I tend to agree. I’m not sure if the EC ever was independent, but currently it seems like a rubber stamp. Many of the electors are bound by their state’s laws to vote for their designated electee. This LA Times article says that there have been a total of 164 electors, including 7 from the 2016 election, that broke with their district’s choice. It’s an exceedingly rare occurrence and it’s never happened to a degree to change the outcome of an election. If it ever did, I do not doubt there would be chaos, whatever direction it went.
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Accusations? I thought it would have been a stream of something else.
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Well if they water board him good enough, but for co-equal branches of the government, it doesn’t look that way.
Between Trump and Putin, only one of them knows they’re at war with the other. Who do you work for again, Donnie?
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No, they were trying too hard to win for him. They could easily have pulled up short, but did not.
Start? May be? It’s been obvious for a year, at least. And Malcolm Nance has had his hair on fire about it for longer than that.
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