[Special] Washington Post Russia Round-Up From December and January

Follow along with these Washington Post excerpts as we begin to see, more and more, that Russia has Trump by the balls. "No puppet, no puppet," indeed. 

Secret CIA Assessment Says Russia Was Trying to Help Trump Win White House by Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller (December 9, 2016):

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

Trump, CIA on Collision Course Over Russia’s Role in U.S. Election by David Nakamura and Greg Miller (December 10, 2016):

“Given his proclivity for revenge combined with his notorious thin skin, this threatens to result in a lasting relationship of distrust and ill will between the president and the intelligence community,” said Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

U.S. intelligence officials described mounting concern and confusion about how to proceed in an administration so openly hostile to their function and role. “I don’t know what the end game is here,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said. “After Jan. 20,” the official said, referring to Inauguration Day, “we’re in uncharted territory.”

Pillar added: “Everything Trump has indicated with regard to his character and tendencies for vindictiveness might be worse” than former president Richard Nixon, who also had a dysfunctional relationship with the intelligence community.

[Special] The Guardian: Trump Press Conference: 'Sick People' Leaked 'Fake News' Russia Dossier (Live Coverage)

Various employees of The Guardian had live coverage of Trump's first press conference in months, where he railed against everyone and failed to take any personal responsibility, as usual. He said the reports about his piss fetish was a fabrication, and he also said he would not put his interests into a blind trust, thus ensuring massive ethics concerns for however long the country has to deal with this man.

This entire structure is engineered around avoiding "unreasonable losses" as opposed to meeting ethical requirements.

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 11, 2017

[Special] Donald Trump, Watersports Champ

CNN: Intel Chiefs Presented Trump with Claims of Russian Efforts to Compromise Him by Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein (January 10, 2017) -

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

The classified briefings last week were presented by four of the senior-most US intelligence chiefs -- Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.

One reason the nation's intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN.

These senior intelligence officials also included the synopsis to demonstrate that Russia had compiled information potentially harmful to both political parties, but only released information damaging to Hillary Clinton and Democrats. This synopsis was not an official part of the report from the intelligence community case about Russian hacks, but some officials said it augmented the evidence that Moscow intended to harm Clinton's candidacy and help Trump's, several officials with knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

[Special] Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State Nominee

Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, has been chosen by President-Elect Donald Trump to be his Secretary of State. Like Trump, Tillerson has no government or military experience. Like most of the people surrounding Trump, including the Trump clan, Tillerson has interesting ties to Russia, although not urine related.

Tillerson's confirmation hearing begins today, January 11, 2017, and you can follow live updates over at Talking Points Memo (via journalist Caitlin MacNeal). To get up to speed on Tillerson, here are some links:

• Washington Post: Trump Expected to Pick Rex Tillerson as His Secretary of State by Steven Mufson and Philip Rucker (December 10, 2016)
  
• New Yorker: Rex Tillerson, From A Corporate Oil Sovereign to the State Department by Steve Coll (December 11, 2016)
  
• Washington Post: Rex Tillerson is an Able Executive. But What About His Ties to Russia? by the WaPo Editorial Board (December 12, 2016)
  
• New York Times: Rex Tillerson, Exxon C.E.O., Chosen as Secretary of State by Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman (December 12, 2016)
  
• Talking Points Memo: ExxonMobil CEO Has Cozy Relationship With Russia, Complicated Climate Record by Matt Shuman (December 12, 2016)
  
• Washington Post: Trump Picks ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State by Steven Mufson, Philip Rucker and Karoun Demirjian (December 13, 2016)
  
• L.A. Times: Rex Tillerson Could be a Good Secretary of State — but not in a Trump Administration by Max Boot (December 15, 2016)

Talking Points Memo: Into the Obamacare Repeal Charnel House

By Josh Marshall:

Today I want to show you some hard, granular numbers on the human toll of what Republicans plan to prepare for President Trump's signature right out of the gate next month. Depending on how they go about it, we are talking about tens of millions of Americans who are about to lose their health insurance coverage. Some people might think that's a big deal. For the moment the main policy debate within the GOP is how to accomplish this and evade as much blame as possible.

* * *

Let's start with some toplines. The total number set to lose their coverage is a bit over 23 million Americans (23,134,000). Of those, 12,311,000 lose their Medicaid expansion-based coverage; 8,963,000 are exchange purchasers who benefit from significant federal subsidies; 1,390,000 are young adults under the age of 26 who are allowed to remain on their parents plans; a final 470,000 are basic health care plan enrollees in Minnesota and New York.

* * *
And here's something even more interesting, partial repeal turns out to be worse than full repeal. The Urban Institute has a new study showing something that seems paradoxical, but actually makes sense if you know the way the health insurance industry has integrated with and remade itself to operate with the ACA. Urban Institute's numbers of people who lose insurance is slightly lower than Gaba's numbers. They project 22.5 million as opposed to Gaba's 23.124. But if repeal is partial, they project an additional 7.3 million would lose their coverage. That brings the total to 29.8 million, close to 10 percent of the people in the entire country.

Why would partial repeal hurt more people than full repeal? Well, in this case partial repeal means repealing the money (the incentives) without the regulatory structure. In the words of the Urban Institute study: "The additional 7.3 million people become uninsured because of the near collapse of the nongroup insurance market." Basically you're leaving the regulations intact but removing the money that makes them possible. So everything goes haywire and you get a lot of collateral damage. Why would you do that? Simple. The rules of the Senate allow you to do that with 50 votes. It's politically easier to destroy care for an additional 7 million people.

The Full Story (December 7, 2016)

Think Progress: Trump to Tap Vocal EPA Opponent to Head the EPA

By Samantha Page:

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has been tapped to run the Environmental Protection Agency in the Trump administration, multiple sources reported Wednesday.

Pruitt’s selection, while not a surprise, signifies a complete rethinking of the EPA. Environmental groups were appalled by the selection, saying it was a win for polluters and a loss for the American public.

As with so many of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet and transition staff, Pruitt does not accept the scientific consensus on climate change. As attorney general, Pruitt has routinely backed fossil fuel interests over those of environmental regulators and has rejected the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide, the leading contributor to human-caused climate change.

Pruitt’s ties to fossil fuel companies run deep. He received some $300,000 in fossil fuel money to support his campaign for attorney general.

In one instance, Pruitt used talking points from an energy company in a letter to the EPA, opposing air pollution standards for natural gas production. According to reporting from the New York Times, Devon Energy, an Oklahoma-based oil and gas company actually wrote the 2011 letter, which Pruitt submitted on state letterhead.
The Full Story (December 7, 2016)

[Special] Marshall Project: A Primer on Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Pick for Attorney General

By Andrew Cohen:

For example, we know that he is an old-fashioned drug warrior who is almost certain to be more hostile to sentencing reform than his immediate predecessors. Even though he was a proponent of a law to ease sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine offenders, he was among a handful of senators this year who helped stop bipartisan sentencing reform legislation from coming to a vote on Capitol Hill. He has repeatedly insisted, despite statistics to the contrary, that rising crime rates are tied to lower sentencing for drug offenders.

He also consistently has criticized the Obama administration for what he considered its weak positions on drug law enforcement. Sessions has made it clear that he opposes legalizing marijuana, which the federal government still classifies as a schedule 1 drug. One question for the confirmation battle ahead: How aggressively will he assert federal authority over those states that have embraced marijuana reform?

“Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” Sessions has said, although it’s unclear how his view would square with Trump, who has expressed favor for medical marijuana but not necessarily recreational pot.

The Full Story (November 18, 2016)