The biggest leaker of them all: Jarvanka will throw all kinds of folks under the bus. Jarvanka thinks that because Barr prevented the Mueller report from reaching them, that they won’t at some moment be held accountable in the aftermath of the Trump regime’s attempt to destroy US democracy. They remain a target of opportunity. But before then, all kinds of people like Rudy and Mick Mulvaney will get thrown under buses. De Jure will eventually crush de facto.
Is Individual-1 the “senior official”? Or is it Jarvanka?
Even as Trump felt put upon by Ivanka forcing him to talk to women astronauts, one can see the badly construed attempts to cover the unwinding scandals.
Many aides have said Mr. Trump — a real estate developer for whom the presidency at times seems like his second job instead of his primary one — had an understandable motivation for choosing Doral: He wanted to show off his property to a global audience.
Pushing the Doral site also threatened to hurt the United States’ standing globally, legal experts said, in light of decades worth of efforts by the United States to combat corrupt practices by other foreign governments, according to Jessica Tillipman, a lawyer who specializes in the so-called Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
“This is no different than any other corrupt leader of an oil-rich African country who is taking money from the government and taxpayers,” Ms. Tillipman said.
Scholars who have studied the history of Group of 7 gatherings — dating back to their start in the 1970s — said they could cite no other time when a president effectively attempted to force global political leaders to pay his or her family money at a resort owned by the head of state.
And then there will be all those insecure communications.
And then there’s this bit of nepotistic contradiction.
They will turn on each other as dimwitted narratives keep failing.
Kim undoubtedly viewed Trump’s firing of National Security Advisor John Bolton — whom the regime has called “human scum,” “dim-sighted,” and a “human defect” for his tough approach to the North — as an opportunity to exploit Trump’s perceived willingness to be softer on Pyongyang.
Second, since the Hanoi summit in February 2019 ended without an agreement on how to move forward on denuclearization, Kim has been keeping Washington and Seoul at arm’s length, while busily mending fences with Chinese and Russian leaders to ensure that neither Xi nor Putin has abandoned North Korea. During Xi’s visit to Pyongyang in June — the first by a Chinese head of state in 14 years — the rhetoric from both sides was warm, the banquets were lavish, and the state media coverage was positive in the vaulted language of socialist brotherhood that was forged when Chinese troops aided Pyongyang during the Korean War. The robust exchange of high-level visits since March 2018 and China’s consistent calls for softening sanctions almost certainly reinforces Kim’s assessment that his primary benefactor is still on his side.
Third, the Trump administration has been unable or unwilling to recognize the critical importance of alliance management in confronting the North Korea challenge with any credibility and sustainability. Its inaction has contributed to the dismaying degredation of South Korea-Japan ties, as a trade dispute has metastasized into the security realm. South Korea in August announced that it would pull out of the military intelligence sharing agreement with Japan, but it asked Tokyo to share data on North Korea’s recent sea-based ballistic missile, underscoring the importance of security cooperation against a shared threat. But it is unclear if the Moon administration will retract its decision to annul the agreement, set to expire in November, given Seoul’s focus on engagement with an intransigent, aggressive Pyongyang.