Yes, the president may very well try to fire the special counsel. He may try to force out the attorney general. He may grant mass pardons to family members and close aides. While I think it's unlikely, he may even try to pardon himself.If he does any one of these things -- much less several in combination -- the GOP will have to decide, once and for all, if it is an American political party or a craven, fearful instrument of Donald Trump's personal brand.There are very few true-believer Trump allies on Capitol Hill. Sure, there are many folks who are genuinely impressed with the man's electoral victory and admire his intense connection with his base, but even most of them would admit that he was their last choice in the primaries, that they voted for him because they considered the alternative to be worse, and that the main attraction of his presidency is the chance to pass conservative policies and confirm conservative nominees. They don't trust him and they don't like him. But -- and this is important -- at some level many of them fear him, or at least fear what he could do to their careers.Fear is a powerful motivator. Here we are, six months into his first term, and aside from the Judge Gorsuch nomination, meaningful conservative victories have been few and far between. Scandals and self-inflicted wounds abound. Planned Parenthood is still funded, Obamacare is still alive, and tax reform is still mainly a pipe dream. Trump has proven that he can and will blow up any and all news cycles at will. He's proven that he sees loyalty as a one-way street: "You're for me, and I'm for me." No matter your record of previous support or friendship, you must do what he wants or face his public wrath. Yet still the GOP wall holds.Already Republicans have proven their capacity to defend conduct they'd howl about if the president were a Democrat. Trump has lost a campaign chair, national-security adviser, and foreign-policy adviser as a result of deceptions or problematic ties to Russia and its allies. His campaign chair, son, and son-in law took a meeting with Kremlin-linked Russian officials in furtherance of a professed Russian-government plan to help him win. He impulsively shared classified information with the Russian ambassador to Washington. He fired FBI director James Comey, unquestionably misled America about his reason for doing so, and trashed Comey's reputation in front of our Russian foes. He and his team have made so many false statements about Russia that an entire cottage industry of YouTube videos exists to chronicle them.
Every GOP figure I've spoken to at #AspenSecurity assumes Trump leaked this to force Sessions out. "Certainly not a Mueller leak," one said. https://t.co/5WjsCLkQks
— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) July 21, 2017
In the end, Trump will force conservatives to decide if they love rule of law more than they hate liberals. I'm not confident in outcome.
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) July 22, 2017
Liberals & conservatives both agree. Civil asset forfeiture is a violation of due process https://t.co/Y1WjdswQZL
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) July 20, 2017
(deep, deep sigh) https://t.co/16c2G2j8fQ
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) July 21, 2017
As if being called out by your boss, who also happens to be the President of the United States, isn't bad enough for a week, Sessions took another gut punch on Friday night.The Washington Post reported that Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak told Russian officials that he and Sessions discussed matters related not only to the 2016 presidential campaign but also US policy toward Russia in their meetings last year.Sessions initially didn't disclose those meetings at all during his confirmation hearings to be attorney general and then, once he did disclose them, said the conversations had nothing to do with the Trump campaign."Obviously I cannot comment on the reliability of what anonymous sources describe in a wholly uncorroborated intelligence intercept that the Washington Post has not seen and that has not been provided to me," a Justice Department spokeswoman told the Post.As a sort of rancid cherry on the top of Sessions' week came this tweet on Saturday morning from Trump himself: "So many people are asking why isn't the A.G. or Special Council looking at the many Hillary Clinton or Comey crimes. 33,000 e-mails deleted?"The "A.G.", of course, is Sessions. (Sidebar: It's spelled "Special Counsel.")
Since the completion of the interstate highway system, we have paid for transportation--and paid a lot: 40,200 deaths last year, up 6 percent from the 37,757 automotive fatalities of the year before. By a huge margin, car wrecks are the leading accidental cause of death in America. Year after year, we hurtle down the road in multi-ton machines and smear our blood across the asphalt. [...]All that will change over the next 20 or 30 years, as driverless, computerized transportation settles into a mature technology. From the initial stages of allowing driverless vehicles on our roads, we will eventually begin passing laws that only driverless vehicles should be allowed on the road. The fatality rate will fall, and our cars will take us from place to place in joyless safety--carefully recording everywhere we've gone for the databases of the businesses that want to sell us stuff and the governments that may want to investigate us. The system of driverless cars will be safer and duller, a more controlled, constrained, and constricted world.Along the way, it will also be a world that will have lost a few million of the blue-collar, immigrant, and entry-level jobs we currently have. Once the technology reaches a sufficient level, the driverless taxi, the driverless delivery van, and the driverless semi-trailer truck will overtake the old chauffeured system of transportation, putting enormous pressure on state governments to outlaw human-driven professional vehicles.And then, all too soon, the culture of driving will fade from the experience of all but a few anachronistic hobbyists. As alien as the whaling in Moby-Dick now seems--as alien as the sailing ships in Two Years Before the Mast--so will seem the central narrative feature of On the Road.
Between 2006 and 2013, Manafort bought three New York properties, including one in Trump Tower in Manhattan. He paid for them in full and later took out mortgages against them. A former senior U.S. law enforcement official said that tactic is often used as a means to hide the origin of funds gained illegally.
Long before Trump brought the Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013, Agalarov was adept at charming foreign clients.Gijrath came to Moscow in 2005 to pitch a Millionaire Fair, which Agalarov hosted at his then brand-new Crocus City complex, a luxury shopping center playground for Moscow's rich and famous.Gijrath gave an example of Agalarov's hospitality: the fair was ground zero for Russia's flourishing culture of conspicuous consumption, with diamond-encrusted cellphones, yachts, Turkmen stallions and entire islands for sale.But even for a blowout dedicated to luxury, Gijrath found he had booked too much space. Over vodka shots at a posh Italian restaurant, Agalarov forgave him a more than $1 million obligation from the contract and offered to kick in on electricity costs.The fair went forward, at an expo center Agalarov had built at Crocus City. In 2009, he opened a concert hall and the country's only privately owned metro station nearby.The huge complex is located just outside Moscow's city limits, close to the offices of the Moscow regional government, where Agalarov forged a close alliance with Boris Gromov, the powerful regional governor until 2012."The mere possibility of a huge construction project in the Moscow region; construction of a private metro station -- no one else has a private metro station -- this all shows the level of his connections," said Ilya Shumanov, the deputy director of Transparency International's Russian office.Now the region, which encompasses the towns and cities surrounding Moscow proper, is the seat of power of Gov. Andrei Vorobyov, who previously served as an aide to Sergei Shoigu, his predecessor as governor and currently Russia's defense minister. Along with Yuri Chaika, Russia's prosecutor general since 2006, the officials are seen as an important interest group within Russian politics, Shumanov said.They regularly cross paths with Agalarov. Vorobyov cut the ribbon at the opening of Agalarov's Vegas concert hall in the city of Krasnogorsk last year, and Agalarov wrote a sharply worded defense of Chaika in the newspaper Kommersant after a 2015 corruption allegation by the opposition leader Alexei Navalny."A lie told a thousand times becomes truth," Agalarov wrote acidly, noting that he was quoting Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. "I don't want to draw any parallels. But let's think about that."Despite having strong regional connections, Agalarov was still seen as a minor player in the Kremlin compared with the heavyweights who dominate Putin's inner circle. "We're talking about someone several steps lower than them," Shumanov said.A breakthrough came in 2009, when the Kremlin had a particularly thorny problem to solve: construction of a sprawling, 70-building university campus on the all-but-abandoned Russky Island on Russia's Pacific Coast, where Putin was to hold a summit for 21 countries at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.Igor Shuvalov, then first deputy to Putin as prime minister, summoned Agalarov to discuss the project."It wasn't like I said no and then they forced me to do it, but it was a very difficult decision," Agalarov said in a 2013 radio interview on Ekho Moskvy. "If I take this project on and don't deliver, I would have let down first of all myself, but also the country, the president, the prime minister, and so forth."The Kremlin expects the country's wealthiest business executives to take on, when asked, large-scale infrastructure projects, sometimes at a loss, to supplement the budget and promote Russia's national interests. The fortunes of Russia's rich can rise and fall precipitously based on the outcome of these prestige projects.Agalarov's work in the Far East earned him an Order of Honor at a Kremlin ceremony, bestowed by Putin himself in 2012. That year, Shuvalov and Vladimir Kozhin, a senior Kremlin official, attended a 10th anniversary party held at Crocus City.Soon there were more requests. In 2014, Agalarov signed on to save two troubled football stadiums, in Kaliningrad and the southern Russian city of Rostov, for the 2018 World Cup, as well as a 30-mile stretch of a new Moscow beltway.
"At the very top level, these kinds of relationships can be give and take," said a Moscow investment manager involved in the real estate market who asked not to be identified to protect his professional relationships. "But even with the added risk and possible losses, you can make up for it in influence and connections."One example of the give was a "strategic cooperation agreement" announced in 2013 with the state-run Sberbank to finance a $3 billion Crocus Group development, possibly including a Trump Tower.Agalarov also sought to bring Trump and Putin together. In last year's interview, Agalarov told The Post that he secured a preliminary agreement to organize a Kremlin meeting with Trump when he visited in 2013. When Putin canceled at the last minute, Agalarov took his case to the head of the Kremlin protocol department."You know what? I'm in a very complicated situation. Could you tell him that yourself?" Agalarov asked the bureaucrat, he recounted in his 2016 interview. His efforts produced a handwritten note from Putin and a traditional lacquered box, gifts that Trump happily accepted.Those contacts put Agalarov in a privileged position after Trump's unexpected, and apparently Russian-backed, rise to the presidency of the United States.
"Here Comes a Regular" on the organ at Fenway ht @mplsgilyard https://t.co/NGWMxdJ5uu
— Jack Shafer (@jackshafer) July 22, 2017
In the heart is the desert, and as Cardinal Sarah says,"The desert teaches us to fight against evil and all our evil inclinations so as to regain our dignity as children of God. It is impossible to enter into the mystery of God without entering into the solitude and silence of our interior desert... The desert leads to silence, and silence draws a person into the most profound intimacy with God."A new Catholic culture begins in this silence--at first, perhaps, with hope alone, as in the corrupt society of the late Roman Empire. "The remaking of an old culture by the birth of a new hope was not the conscious aim of the Christians themselves," writes Christopher Dawson. "They tended, like St. Cyprian, to believe that the world was growing old, that the empire was irremediably pagan and that some world catastrophe was imminent. Nevertheless they lived in a spiritual atmosphere of hope, and this atmosphere gradually spread until the climate of the world was changed."What we do at Wyoming Catholic College begins in the silence of the wilderness and grows in the atmosphere of hope. The more silence can become a way of life in this noisy age, the more a new culture will radiate from its blessings.
US special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday sent a document preservation request to the White House, saying that a meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was relevant to an investigation into possible links between his father's campaign team and Russia. [...]Russian court documents seen by the Reuters and AP news agencies show that Veselnitskaya successfully represented Russia's FSB security service over a property ownership dispute in Moscow between 2005 and 2013. [...]If proven, Veselnitskaya's contacts with the FSB - the successor to the Soviet-era KGB - could add to concerns the Trump 2016 campaign team may have colluded with the Kremlin in its apparent bid to help tip last year's US presidential election in Trump's favor.A US-based employee of a Russian real estate company - Ike Kaveladze - was named last week as the eighth participant in the June 2016 meeting. He reportedly attended as a representative of Aras and Emin Agalarov, Russian developers who hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013.In another development on Friday, the Washington Post reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions did discuss campaign-related and policy matters with Russia's ambassador in Washington. If confirmed, this would be contrary to his prior testimony.