Manafort:

Paul Manafort, the international lobbyist and political operative who Trump retained to run his campaign after Lewandowski was fired,and who agreed not to take a fee, amping up questions of quid pro quo,had spent thirty years representing dictators and corrupt despots, amassing millions of dollars in a money trail that had long caught the eye of U.S. investigators. What's more, when he joined the campaign, he was being pursued, his every financial step documented, by the billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who claimed he stole $17 million from him in a crooked real estate scam.

-Wolff, Michael - Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

The leaks:

Bannon, who styled himself as a kind of black hole of silence, had also become a sort of official black-hole voice, everybody's Deep Throat. He was witty, intense, evocative, and bubbling over, his theoretical discretion ever giving way to a constant semipublic commentary on the pretensions and fatuousness and hopeless lack of seriousness of most everyone else in the White House. By the second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the White House seemed to be maintaining their own list of likely leakers and doing their best to leak before being leaked about.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

WHO CARES??? 

WHO CARES????



Americans who really give a darn. 

Bestie got triggered...lol 

jackass




You sound just like Soup.

LMFAO 

Maybe I am Soup. 

Joe Blow --- 34 min ago - quote - hide comments
WHO CARES????



Americans who really give a darn.?


I'll bet you believe the National Enquirer too!! 

I'll bet you believe the National Enquirer too!!?


The what? That may be your bag but I only read real news not your junkola. I hear you're into Breitbart, Faux, Infowars and the like.

EYEROLL

LMFAO 

WHO CARES???

So far 1199 views on this site.

I'll keep posting snippets for awhile.

This book is superb for describing the peripheral players in the White House zoo. 

Now 1207. 

Media angst:

The media was not only hurting him, he said-he was not looking for any agreement or really even any response-but hurting his negotiating capabilities, which hurt the nation. And that went for Saturday Night Live, too, which might think it was very funny but was actually hurting everybody in the country. And while he understood that SNL was there to be mean to him, they were being very, very mean. It was "fake comedy." He had reviewed the treatment of all other presidents in the media and there was nothing like this ever, even of Nixon who was treated very unfairly. "Kellyanne, who is very fair, has this all documented. You can look at it."

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

yawn. Fiction is fun 

It seems that BB likes fiction. 

Are you going to offer some retort on those excerpts bestie? 

Sally Yates:

Even before there was reason to suspect Sally Yates, they suspected her. The transition report said Trump wouldn't like the fifty-six-year-old Atlanta-born University of Georgia career Justice Department lawyer slated to step up to acting attorney general. There was something about a particular kind of Obama person. Something about the way they walked and held themselves. Superiority. And about a certain kind of woman who would immediately rub Trump the wrong way, Obama women being a good tip-off, Hillary women another. Later this would be extended to "DOJ women."

- Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Or maybe, any woman in a powerful position. 

Kellyanne Conway:

"It's unfair," said Kellyanne Conway, sitting in her yet undecorated second-floor office while representing the president's hurt feelings. "It's obviously unfair. It's very unfair. They lost. They didn't win. This is so unfair. So POTUS just doesn't want to talk about it."

There was nobody in the White House who wanted to talk about, or even anyone who had been officially delegated to talk about, Russia, the story that, evident to most, even before they entered the White House, was certain to overwhelm the first year of the Trump administration at the very least. Nobody was prepared to deal with it.

- Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House 

The official White House response:


 

Again...........

"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.

"Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true."

-Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. 

Russian Tarbaby:

If there was any single piece of proof not just of media bias but of the intention of the media to do anything it could to undermine this president, it was,in the view of the Trump circle,this, the Russia story, what the Washington Post termed "Russia's attack on our political system." ("So terribly, terribly unfair, with no proof of one vote changed," according to Conway.) It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn't put it this way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of - Whitewater, Benghazi, Email-gate. That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies that were about trying to destroy people and careers. 

3 part government and Trump:

The congressional Democrats had everything to gain by insisting, Benghazi-like, that where there was smoke (even if they were desperately working the bellows) there was fire, and by using investigations as a forum to promote their minority opinion (and for members to promote themselves).

For Republicans in Congress, the investigations were a card to play against Trump's vengefulness and unpredictability. Defending him - or something less than defending him and, indeed, possibly pursuing him - offered Republicans a new source of leverage in their dealings with him.

The intelligence community, with its myriad separate fiefdoms as suspicious of Trump as of any incoming president in memory, would, at will, have the threat of drip-drip-drip leaks to protect its own interests.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

Footnote:

I have finished the book. I continue to think that it is, or should be, required reading for every American citizen.

I'll continue to post quotes, as long as I perceive interest (views), or until I tire of the subject. 

Footnote that I forgot:

Reading about the financial direction of Mueller's investigation, I would not be surprised to learn that his team of financial experts have had Trump's tax filings for some time. 

I have checked this several times, but not to read what you have copied. I look to see if anyone has comments. If I wanted to read the book, I would buy it. 

Trump - Putin connection:

Franklin Foer, the Washington-based former editor of the New Republic, made an early case for a Trump-Putin conspiracy on July 4, 2016, in Slate.
....
On January 6, 2017,nearly six months to the day after Foer's piece was published,the CIA, FBI, and NSA announced their joint conclusion that "Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election." From the Steele dossier, to the steady leaks from the U.S. intelligence community, to testimony and statements from the leadership of U.S. intelligence agencies, a firm consensus had emerged. There was a nefarious connection, perhaps an ongoing one, between Trump and his campaign and the Russian government.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

I have finished the book. I continue to think that it is, or should be, required reading for every American citizen.

I prefer to have every citizen read the Constitution rather than a piece of fiction. 

I have finished the book. I continue to think that it is, or should be, required reading for every American citizen.

Why in the world should something be required reading that the actual author even acknowledges contains falsehoods? 

actual author even acknowledges contains falsehoods?

Hey Storyteller,

I think you are referencing a line in the introduction, about page 10, depending on what device is used to read the book. I use a Nook, IPad, laptop, and desktop. It'll be around that page.

Doesn't say what you are alleging. 

Fire and Fury

So aptly named due to all the FIRE-ings at the DC black house and the FURY of Trumpty Dump's tweeting. 

Flynn:

"I like Flynn, he reminds me of my uncles," said Bannon. "But that's the problem: he reminds me of my uncles."

Bannon used the general odor that had more and more attached to Flynn among everybody except the president to help secure a seat for himself on the National Security Council. This was, for many in the national security community, a signal moment in the effort by the nationalist right wing to seize power. But Bannon's presence on the council was just as much driven by the need to babysit the impetuous Flynn, prone to antagonizing almost everyone else in the national security community. (Flynn was "a colonel in a general's uniform," according to one senior intelligence figure.)

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

Post inaugural Oval Office:

The Oval Office itself had been used by prior occupants as the ultimate power symbol, a ceremonial climax. But as soon as Trump arrived, he moved in a collection of battle flags to frame him sitting at his desk, and the Oval immediately became the scene of a daily Trump cluster-f***. It's likely that more people had easy access to this president than any president before. Nearly all meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably surrounded and interrupted by a long list of retainers,indeed, everybody strove to be in every meeting. Furtive people skulked around without clear purpose: Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

He must knw what he's doing:

Still, here was the basic faith, overriding his impetuousness and eccentricities and limited knowledge base: nobody became the president of the United States,that camel-through-the-eye-of-the-needle accomplishment,without unique astuteness and cunning. Right? In the early days of the White House, this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.

But then there was the other aspect of his supposedly superb insight and apprehension, and it was hard to miss: he was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant in these instances than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however silent and confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

Is what he said what he meant:

One of the ways to establish what Trump wanted and where he stood and what his underlying policy intentions were,or at least the intentions that you could convince him were his, came to involve an improbably close textual analysis of his largely off-the-cuff speeches, random remarks, and reflexive tweets during the campaign.

Bannon doggedly went through the Trump oeuvre highlighting possible insights and policy proscriptions. Part of Bannon's authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru, or inscrutable God.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

Bannon's pecking order:

Almost nobody represented what Bannon opposed as well as Paul Ryan. The essence of Bannonism (and Mercerism) was a radical isolationism, a protean protectionism, and a determined Keynesianism. Bannon ascribed these principles to Trumpism, and they ran as counter to Republicanism as it was perhaps possible to get. What's more, Bannon found Ryan, in theory the House's policy whiz, to be slow-witted if not incompetent, and an easy and constant target of Bannon's under-his-breath ridicule. Still, if the president had unaccountably embraced Priebus-Ryan, he also could not do without Bannon.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

Another one roped in to believing fake news. 

Soupy...towin the line. Makin copies...souper douper...soup a rama


 

A twofer tonight:

From their separate corners each man pursued his own strategy. Bannon did all he could to roll over Priebus and Kushner in an effort to prosecute the war for Trumpism/Bannonism as quickly as possible. Priebus, already complaining about "political neophytes and the boss's relatives," subcontracted his agenda out to Ryan and the Hill. And Kushner, on one of the steepest learning curves in the history of politics (not that everyone in the White House wasn't on a steep curve, but Kushner's was perhaps the steepest), and often exhibiting a painful naïveté as he aspired to be one of the world's savviest players, was advocating doing nothing fast and everything in moderation. Each had coteries opposed to the other: Bannonites pursued their goal of breaking everything fast, Priebus's RNC faction focused on the opportunities for the Republican agenda, Kushner and his wife did their best to make their unpredictable relative look temperate and rational.

And in the middle was Trump.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

LOL.......... Nighttime fiction stories from Butters. 

Some afternoon dysfunction:

Bannon concentrated on a succession of EOs that would move the new administration forward without having to wade through Congress. That focus was countermanded by Priebus, who was cultivating the Trump-Ryan romance and the Republican agenda, which in turn was countermanded by Kushner, who was concentrating on presidential bonhomie and CEO roundtables, not least because he knew how much the president liked them (and, as Bannon pointed out, because Kushner himself liked them). And instead of facing the inherent conflicts in each strategy, the three men recognized that the conflicts were largely irresolvable and avoided facing that fact by avoiding each other.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House 

The Chief Leaker:

But most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups, not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon.


The president couldn't stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked.

He was ever uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him. He might be happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel workers or CEOs trooped into the White House, with the president praising his visitors and them praising him, but that good cheer would sour in the evening after several hours of cable television. Then he would get on the phone, and in unguarded ramblings to friends and others, conversations that would routinely last for thirty or forty minutes, and could go much longer, he would vent, largely at the media and his staff. In what was termed by some of the self-appointed Trump experts around him,and everyone was a Trump expert,he seemed intent on "poisoning the well," in which he created a loop of suspicion, disgruntlement, and blame heaped on others.

-Wolff, Michael: Fire and Fury- Inside the Trump White House