Chelsea Manning was released from a Kansas prison early this morning after serving seven years for her role in whistleblowing about the US government’s wrongful actions in Iraq and elsewhere. She had originally been sentenced to 35-years in prison but president Obama, perhaps seeking some forgiveness for the atrocious way that he and his administration vindictively went after her, commuted her sentence in one of his last acts before leaving office. Her punishment was the largest ever given to a whistleblower
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I use a newsreader that collects feeds from various news sites that I follow so that I see only the ones that are new since I last checked. I check the newsreader periodically to see what has happened, starting in the morning. There used to be a fairly standard number of new posts, that is until Donald Trump became president. Now there are periodic spikes in the number of posts so that whenever I check first thing in the morning and see that there are many more updates than usual, my first thought is “Oh, hell, what has Trump said/done now?”
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Trump’s Achilles heel has always been his business dealings. He has demonstrated that he is extremely greedy, selfish, and has no ethical standards. Such a combination makes it extremely likely that he has indulged in all manner of unsavory business dealings with other people like him and also with outright crime figures. Although these people are skilled at covering up the money trail, financial transactions involving large sums going all over the globe are difficult to completely hide and skilled journalists should be able to track down the paper trail and connect the dots.
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There has been a great deal of speculation that Donald Trump is Russian president Vladimir Putin’s puppet. But the evidence for a direct connection has been weak. It has always seemed to me to be more likely that Trump has financial dealings with shady Russian oligarchs and mobsters and organized crime figures, and that his deference to Putin is indirect, that Putin has connections to those same shady interests and thus has knowledge that he can reveal about Trump’s dealing that can be very damaging.
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There is a well-established pattern in American journalism. There is first a bandwagon effect where almost everyone piles on to a single narrative structure about some event. At that point, someone decides to stand out from the crowd by taking a contrarian view and argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. So at various points in the past we had stories that suggested that Dick Cheney was not the evil mastermind of the Bush administration, that Sarah Palin was not as dumb as rocks, and so on. While these contrarian authors risk ridicule, they also get short-term notoriety and attention, which is what seems to matter more than actual credibility. I decided to be that contrarian today. This is not just for the sheer hell of it but because I heard a couple of interviews yesterday that made me realize that maybe many of the analysts of the Trump administration, and that includes me, may have been played for chumps by him.
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Donald Trump’s performance in the The Economist magazine interview was widely ridiculed because his responses to questions were “unimaginative and incoherent” and “riddled with falsehoods and confusion”. Who would have thought the day would come when George W. Bush with his malapropisms and Sarah Palin with her word salads would be seen as exemplars of lucidity by comparison? The magazine published its own scathing review of the interview.
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There has been considerable distancing by the FBI from Donald Trump in the wake of the firing of its head James Comey, with the new acting head already contradicting the White House version of events that the rank and file had lost confidence in Comey.

When confronted with the Trump administration’s claim of Comey’s unpopularity, Andrew McCabe – who has been the FBI’s acting director since the sacking – told the Senate intelligence committee: “That is not accurate.”

“I can tell you he and I worked very, very closely from the time we started at the Washington field office,” McCabe said on Thursday. “I hold Director Comey in the highest regard for his considerable abilities and his integrity. It is the greatest honour of my professional life to have worked with him. He enjoyed broad support in the FBI and he still does to this day … The vast majority of FBI staff enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey.”
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McCabe’s testament to the high esteem Comey was held in within the FBI came a day after the White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “The rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.”

McCabe also contradicted the White House on the scale of the Russia investigation. Huckabee Sanders had said it was “probably one of the smallest things” on the FBI’s plate. McCabe denied that, calling it a “highly significant investigation”.

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