Donald Trump is increasingly frustrated with Dan Coats, his Director of National Intelligence.
Coats served Indiana as a Republican senator, and he was our Ambassador to Germany under Bush Two. Coats, 75, came out of retirement to become DNI, and the buzz in Washington is that he’s ready to leave Trumpdom. Maybe he’ll quit after the midterms if he’s not fired first, along with Rod Rosenstein.
When Coats says that the warning lights of continuing Russian interference with our elections are flashing hot red, he knows what he’s talking about, but Trump doesn’t have the faintest, because he willfully failed to tell Coats, his top intel guy, that he’s inviting his close personal and political friend Putin to the White House just ahead of the mid-terms; https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/20/trump-coats-putin-summit-fallout-russia-735089.
On Friday, longtime conservative columnist George Will opined that there are very few “Helsinki Republicans.” Will also added these choice words about Trump: “He speaks English as though it is a second language that he learned from someone who learned English last week…in Helsinki he was [however] crystal clear about feeling no allegiance to the intelligence institutions that work at his direction and under leaders he chose."
Trump infamously distrusts everybody in our sprawling IC (Intelligence Community. He has more faith in Russia’s intelligence gathering than in ours. More than likely, Putin has the goods on Trump — after all, what’s in Trump’s tax returns? Indications that he was financially bailed out from his misdirected investments in Russia, in debt as deep as the Marianas Trench, and bailed out by Russian oligarchs?
Associate solitary reporters Johanna Jones and Susanna Sherman were with Trump and his beleaguered Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, as they discussed what to do with Maria Butina, the 29-year old Russian operative about whom we have previously made some comments (https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2018/07/19/stormy-daniels-visits-maria-butina-at-undisclosed-location/).
Putin has now asked Trump to send Butina home so she can avoid long-term imprisonment here.
A ridiculously smiling Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser who has cozied up to the Russians, was capably grilled by CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday, after the Justice Department did something it’s never done before: it released its application for a FISA warrant to tap Page’s phone. The application, as released to the public, was heavily redacted. The application was approved by anonymous Republican-appointed judges.
The Russians tried their best to recruit Page, an adviser to the Kremlin, to their cause. That type of recruitment is the same thing that Butina was here to do, as she hobnobbed with the NRA’s leaders, offered her body for intelligence, and did other stuff against our laws (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/22/carter-page-acknowledges-working-as-informal-adviser-to-russia-735559.
Very early this morning, Jones and Sherman watched with intense interest as Kelly escorted Butina and Page into the Oval Office. Trump blessed them both and sent them on their way to Andrews Air Force Base in nearby Maryland. There, they boarded an Aeroflot flight that took them directly to Sheremetyevo International airport in Moscow.
Associate solitary reporter Foma Kheroshonsky, our Moscow Bureau Chief, was at the Kremlin later in the afternoon as Putin greeted Butina as a “true heroine for Our Great Motherland” and as he welcomed Page as a just-minted Russian citizen.
It is unclear at this point whether Butina and Page, 47, have a romantic relationship, but we hear he’s single, so Putin will, whenever requested, arrange for the two to be married at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior — the same cathedral that Putin cleansed of the Pussy Riot Conspiracy in 2012. The officiant at their wedding will be Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow all Rus’. Kirill is the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Butina told Kheroshonsky that while in the United States, in her fervent quest to help Putin take over the land of the free and the home of the brave, she was completely orthodox and compliant in folioing her handlers’ instructions. For his part, Page told Kheroshonsky that he is an orthodox Putinite, and that Trump is welcome to attend his wedding.