The US President having to get permission from the Russian President?
The 2020 campaign billboards just write themselves…
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Maybe. But surely Putin must be aware of the optics of openly telling Trump what he must do. If Trump says he can’t do this because Putin won’t let him, that is not going to be a political winner for Trump.
I must consider the possibility that Putin is throwing Trump under the bus here.
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“To be more specific, perhaps, diplomatic practice in general does not envisage their publication,” he added.
To which Chiselin’ Trump responded, “Huh?!?”
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I think it’s more likely Trump stated something outright, because he’s not smart enough not to do that obviously, and Putin either reacted or said something to hush Trump up. Putin knows how this works, he wouldn’t have said anything on a phone call, but Trump would have…even just being too chummy might be enough to raise suspicions.
And, that’s assuming that they really did do things that way…imagine if they just agreed to hide all the Putin calls, and everyone on the phone was a Trump person so they figured it was safe to speak openly because they could hide the transcript away safely. If that happened, well, it’s going to come out now…whatever is in there has Putin worried enough to make a statement, he wouldn’t do that unless he wanted to protect something of his.
We need the server contents to understand all this…we can hope that someone has a copy of the server secured somewhere or that it’s locked down and files haven’t already been deleted.
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Putin envi-asage?
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In other words, Putin recognizes that these people are fucking imbeciles and will glibly release the transcripts to damning phone calls…like they just did with the Ukraine transcript…so they’re sending a little reminder to Donny Dunning-Kruger about who he really answers to…whose interests must be protected above all.
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As do the ICBMs and invasions. Nobody should be in the position to be putting demands on us, unless it’s a plea for mercy.
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Fuck you sideways, Vlad. Once FYES and NATO are done dealing with the traitor in the WH, the western intelligence agencies are going to shut down your internet and kill your economy. And the oligarchs won’t even remember your name.
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He was always playing a very weak hand, however expertly. If he truly wants Russia to be great again, he needs to look inward, to its pathetic economy and national infrastructure and try to rebuild it instead of raiding it and messing with the west. But he won’t, which will be his downfall. I give him less than 5 years. The next (Dem) president and congress will find a way to make that happen.
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Completely agree. It would have been easier to do all those things you state, but Putin could not stay away from the quick fix of skulduggery.
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I tend to agree. Trump – and other populists Russia overtly or covertly supports, like Orban in Hungary or Salvini in Italy – aren’t people Putin necessarily agrees with in any meaningful way. I mean, what does Russia care if Hungary restricts immigration or whatever. It’s enough that these politicians are chaos agents within the Western world order. Anything else – actual favors returned to Russia, like a lifting of Ukraine-centric sanctions – is a bonus, and not one Russia particularly expects to see (or at least I doubt they’re quite that optimistic; obviously they’d love it if it happened and will ask for it). To use a baseball analogy, when Russia stepped to the plate they were trying to hit a single, in the form of keeping Hillary out of office. They ended up with a double or triple, with Trump being a huge agent of chaos within NATO and other alliances. I don’t think they’re too fussed they didn’t hit a home run. And now that Trump has been caught stealing and looks like he’ll be thrown out, they’ll go back to their dugout with a smirk on their face and count it all a win.
If Trump has come to the end of his usefulness, they won’t lift a finger to prop him up.
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I suspect that Putin has moved on to Phase Two of his evil plan… now comes the chaos part. He’s weighing in on this just to increase the pressure on the Trumpster-fire in the White House. The more he can distract the United States, the more he can disrupt our government, our economy, our politics, the happier he is. He’s just throwing gasoline on the fire.
(It can’t give Trump “cover” for refusing… there’s no mention in the Constitution of Congressional oversight being nullified by the wishes, concerns or demands of foreign dictators.)
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Trump is afraid of Putin.
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I’m no expert, but I imagine that most of his and his cronies’ ill-gotten wealth is tied up in overseas, mostly western assets, that could be legally frozen or seized with the coordination of the US, NATO, EU and Hague. That, plus issuing an arrest warrant for him or some of them, targeted sanctions that make life painful (but not harmful) for everyday Ruskies, and perhaps some strategically leaked dirt on Ole’ Vladdy, and he can probably be taken down within a few years. I’m generally against such interference in other countries’ affairs, but this is different. We’d be doing us, the west AND Russia a favor.
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So, connecting the dots… who listened in on those calls and said nothing?
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We’ve been doing that since Crimea…Lot of financial locks on them, that’s why Putin brought Trump in, he was expecting relief from that. Instead, because Trump’s not the dictator that he thinks he is, he’s been largely hamstrung from providing that relief that Putin wanted.
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Lotta folks, so far. Basically, the entire topline of the administration is compromised by this.
Would be unfair to extend liability to the rank-and-file workers on it, they’re just transcribing and writing reports, and absent explicit violations, aren’t necessarily in the position to realize that they were involuntary parts of a conspiracy.
Even the leaker, for example, only made his conclusions on getting together multiple reports from multiple sources.
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Pootie has his own set of problems at home, where the people are not amused.
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And the Illuminati at the Vatican haven’t greenlighted a good distracting war between the US and Russia to distract both populations. Odd, really.
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One of my daughters started grad school in Austin, TX this year. The other is in France for a semester as a teaching assistant. Our conversations on all things political -98% in agreement- inspired me to look for patterns so I could reassure them from afar. (I’m in St. Louis for now.)
Both the U.K. and America have been going through the same sort of nationalistic ‘seizures’. That’s not a coincidence. We are still very much connected to Europe, and they are to us. Rarely does either collective do something that has no consequences to the other, or is not ‘inspired’ by the other.
But now Boris Johnson is about to face a serious comeuppance at the same time that Trump is about to get what’s coming to him. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a ‘back-draft’ of what’s been building on both continents for a long time. As goes one, so goes the other. We are both about to throw a good number of liars and cheats out of the temple.
The times are changing.
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