This doesn’t look good. Trump’s cronies have been getting intelligence officials and Republicans in Congress to tell the press to stop reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia.

The Trump administration has enlisted senior members of the intelligence community and Congress in efforts to counter news stories about Trump associates’ ties to Russia, a politically charged issue that has been under investigation by the FBI as well as lawmakers now defending the White House.

Acting at the behest of the White House, the officials made calls to news organizations last week in attempts to challenge stories about alleged contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, U.S. officials said.

The people who are supposed to be investigating the subject have been doing this.

It’s been an ongoing story that Congressional Democrats say there should be an independent investigation, and I haven’t been following it very closely because it seemed too insidery. But sometimes insider stuff just shouts for attention. This story makes it very clear why the Dems wanted an independent investigation as opposed to ones led by Republicans. It’s because “led by Republicans” might turn out to mean “held captive by Republicans.”

The calls were orchestrated by the White House after unsuccessful attempts by the administration to get senior FBI officials to speak with news organizations and dispute the accuracy of stories on the alleged contacts with Russia.

The White House on Friday acknowledged those interactions with the FBI but did not disclose that it then turned to other officials who agreed to do what the FBI would not — participate in White House-arranged calls with news organizations, including The Washington Post.

Two of those officials talked to the Post anonymously, which will make Trump squawk even more.

The decision to involve those officials could be perceived as threatening the independence of U.S. spy agencies that are supposed to remain insulated from partisan issues, as well as undercutting the credibility of ongoing congressional probes. Those officials saw their involvement as an attempt to correct coverage they believed to be erroneous.

During the investigation. Not cool.

The BBC was also excluded from Spicey’s informal press briefing yesterday.

The BBC, CNN, the New York Times and others were excluded from an audience with Press Secretary Sean Spicer, with no reason given.

Hey, dictators don’t have to give reasons.

Shortly after Mr Trump’s speech on Friday, a number of selected media organisations were invited into Mr Spicer’s office for an informal briefing, or “gaggle”.

Those allowed into the room included ABC, Fox News, Breitbart News, Reuters and the Washington Times.

When asked why some were excluded, Mr Spicer said it was his decision to “expand the pool” of reporters.

He also warned the White House was going to “aggressively push back” at “false narratives” in the news.

Which being interpreted means “at news stories they don’t like.”

The Associated Press, USA Today and Time magazine refused to attend as a protest.

The BBC’s bureau chief in Washington, Paul Danahar, said the BBC has a representative at every daily White House briefing and it was not clear why they were barred from Friday’s session.

Also not on the party list? The Guardian:

The “gaggle” with Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, took place in lieu of his daily briefing and was originally scheduled as an on-camera event.

But the White House press office announced later in the day that the Q&A session would take place off camera before only an “expanded pool” of journalists, and in Spicer’s West Wing office as opposed to the James S Brady press briefing room where it is typically held.

Outlets seeking to gain entry whose requests were denied included the Guardian, the New York Times, Politico, CNN, BuzzFeed, the BBC, the Daily Mail and others. Conservative publications such as Breitbart News, the One America News Network and the Washington Times were allowed into the meeting, as well as TV networks CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC. The Associated Press and Time were invited but boycotted the briefing.

The outlier is the Daily Mail. I would expect to see them grouped with Fox News and the Washington Times, not the Guardian and CNN.

While prior administrations have occasionally held background briefings with smaller groups of reporters, it is highly unusual for the White House to cherry-pick which media outlets can participate in what would have otherwise been the press secretary’s televised daily briefing. The briefing has become indispensable viewing for journalists trying to interpret the often contradictory statements coming out of the Trump administration, and Spicer’s aggressive handling of the press and delivery of false or misleading statements have already been memorably mocked on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

“Gaggles” – more informal briefings – with the press secretary are traditionally only limited to the pool when they conflict with the president’s travel, in which case they often take place aboard Air Force One. At times, impromptu gaggles form with reporters who spend their days in the White House, but denying outlets wishing to participate is extremely uncommon.

I think what they mean is it never happens, but they don’t put it that way so as not to have to defend it.

The White House – surprise! – lied about it.

Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the White House, said: “Claims that outlets were excluded are not factual.”

In a statement, she added: “The pool was there, so various media mediums were represented.” The pool is a system by which a small group of reporters take turns covering the president and share their reports of his activities with a larger group.

Contrary to Grisham’s statement, outlets who made requests to attend were told this would not be permitted.

When the Guardian asked to participate, pointing to its possession of a “hard pass” that grants daily entry to the White House, an official declined.

“No, unfortunately a hard pass does not necessarily guarantee entry into the gaggle,” Catherine Hicks, a junior White House press aide, emailed in response.

“The gaggle today is just today’s pool with the addition of a few others here at the White House.”

Some outlets lingered in the West Wing hallway out of frustration but were asked by a Secret Service agent, upon instructions from the White House press office, to leave the area.

So it’s a straight-up lie to say “Claims that outlets were excluded are not factual.”

Earlier on Friday, Trump continued his assault on the press in a speech before the nation’s largest gathering of conservative activists.

He said the press should not be allowed to use anonymous sources, a restriction on free speech he has not suggested before. “You will see stories dry up like you have never seen before,” Trump predicted.

“As you saw throughout the entire campaign, and even now, the fake news doesn’t tell the truth,” Trump said at CPAC.

“I say it doesn’t represent the people, it never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it.”

If they do, it will have to be via a fascist takeover.

Our very own Nazi windbag worked up the crowd at CPAC today by pissing on the news media some more, in his stupidly banal, repetitive, smirking way.

President Trump intensified his slashing attack on the news media during an appearance before the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, reiterating his charge that “fake news” outlets are “the enemy of the people.”

The opening portion of the president’s free-range, campaign-style speech centered on a declaration of war on the news media — a new foil to replace vanquished political opponents like Hillary Clinton.

“They are very smart, they are very cunning, they are very dishonest,” Mr. Trump said to the delight of the crowd packed into the main ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just south of Washington. “It doesn’t represent the people; it never will represent the people.”

What gibberish; it’s not supposed to “represent” the people, it’s supposed to gather and report the news. The people need the news, not least so that they can tell when people like Trump are seizing power.

Mr. Trump, who once posed as his own public relations man to plant news stories in New York tabloids — and spoke frequently with reporters off the record during the campaign — called for an end to the use of “sources,” meaning anonymous sources.

“A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up,” he said. He added that his “enemy of the people” label applied only to “dishonest” reporters and editors.

Mr. Trump, who suggested revisiting First Amendment protections for the news media during the campaign, refined that attack on Friday, urging his supporters to use their free-speech rights to counter hostile press accounts from outlets like CNN, which he called the “Clinton News Network.”

“They always bring up the First Amendment,” Mr. Trump said of journalists. “Nobody loves it better than me.”

After spending 10 minutes listing the shortcomings of the news media, Mr. Trump said criticism “doesn’t bother me.”

He’s a clown but he’s a dangerous clown.

IS is losing the struggle. I heard a news story yesterday or the day before that it has lost the access to the oil that was providing all its funding, so now it’s just resorting to criminal activities, a much less reliable and safe way of operating. And the Atlantic has a piece by a guy who was the head of the Pentagon’s Middle East policy shop under Obama that says the war against them is being won. The only problem is, Trump will take the credit.

When President Obama turned the affairs of state over to President Trump on January 20th, the Islamic State was in full retreat across Iraq and Syria. This was no accident: In the fall of 2015, while I was serving as the head of the Pentagon’s Middle East policy shop, the Obama administration ramped up its campaign against the group—and began to see the effects of that escalation when Iraqi forces retook Ramadi in December of 2015.

Over the course of a very difficult summer of 2015—one in which both Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria had fallen under the black flags of the Islamic State—civilian and military planners noticed an opportunity: For the first time since their campaign began in 2014, the U.S. and coalition forces surrounding the Islamic State were in a position to squeeze it from all directions.

So they did.

Primarily working with Iraqi and Syrian partners, the U.S. military and these local forces cut the main east-west lines of communication between Iraq and Syria. We got more aid to our Lebanese and Jordanian partners to help them defend their borders, and we re-started our initially ill-fated plan to train Syrians to fight the Islamic State, giving them specialized training and equipment. Oh, and we delivered an overwhelming amount of airpower in support of local forces fighting the Islamic State at a time when Iraqi forces trained by U.S. soldiers started re-entering the fight in replacement of previously ineffective units. These newly retrained units performed qualitatively better than the units they replaced, and the results on the ground bore that out.

One by one, cities and towns under the control of the Islamic State started falling. Because we were fighting with local partners, it was messier than if we had done it ourselves. The destruction to Ramadi and Fallujah, in particular, was breathtaking. And it took longer than it would have taken if U.S. forces had been in the lead. But it was also a lot less expensive, and only five U.S. servicemen were killed in the process —compared with almost 5,000 over the course of the earlier war in Iraq.

But perhaps more to the point, it was more of a local operation than a spasm of US imperialism.

But he says that:

And the success of the campaign was going to be more sustainable than that of our earlier efforts, we told ourselves, because Iraqis and Syrians were owning the fight—at tremendous human cost, I must add—and thus owning the victory.

Well yes. That does make a difference, I would think.

And Trump walks in at this late stage and he will say he did all of it.

But the fall of the Islamic State is going to happen, and it’s going to happen on this president’s watch. Like the American jobs he claims to have created that were announced long before he took office, Trump will take credit for the Islamic State’s defeat. It will be in his 2020 campaign speeches, and it will be a cudgel with which he beats the Democrats each time they (or John McCain) point out his incompetence on issues of national security.

And Americans need to be fine with that, because as much as many of us do not want this president to get the credit for the work of others, defeating the Islamic State is a national good that should be bigger than politics.

But it’s not just “politics” – or, defeating the Islamic State is also politics. It’s all “politics” in the sense of choosing between authoritarian bullying misogynist racist shits and the alternative. I don’t like seeing an authoritarian bullying misogynist racist shit take the credit for defeating other authoritarian bullying misogynist racist shits when he didn’t in fact do the work. I don’t like seeing an authoritarian bullying misogynist racist shit gaining credit and perhaps more of a veneer of success by taking credit for work he didn’t do.

Donnie is poking the FBI now. That went super well for Nixon, if you recall. (Remember who Deep Throat turned out to be? Deputy Director of the FBI.)

The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security "leakers" that have permeated our government for a long time. They can't even……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2017

find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. FIND NOW

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2017

Good, Donnie. Keep doing that. Keep poking the bear.

Trump bestowed his magical presence on CPAC yesterday, to tell them how awesome he is and how lucky they are to have him.

The Post gives us an enlightening bit of background:

The speech marked the fifth time Trump has addressed the conference hosted by the American Conservative Union, which is showcasing how he has pushed the Republican Party and the conservative movement toward an “America first” nationalism that has long existed on the fringes.

Trump’s first appearance in 2011 offered clues to his political ambitions.

“America today is missing quality leadership, and foreign countries have quickly realized this,” he said six years ago.

“[The] theory of a very successful person running for office is rarely tested because most successful people don’t want to be scrutinized or abused,” he said. “This is the kind of person that the country needs and we need it now.”

Ah “successful” – he thinks he’s successful. He’s right in a sense, of course – he’s filthy rich and he’s stayed out of jail. But that’s all he’d succeeded at: piling up cash and evading prosecution. It’s a very narrow understanding of “success.” A better word for what he’s talking about would be “self-enriching” – but that sounds quite different in terms of running for office, doesn’t it. “The theory of a very self-enriching person running for office is rarely tested because most self-enriching people don’t want to be scrutinized or abused. This is the kind of person that the country needs and we need it now.” It doesn’t convey the same thing, does it. Self-enriching people don’t want to be scrutinized because they want to stay out of jail. More to the point, self-enriching people seem quite unlikely to have any skills that would transfer to public office. Self-enrichment is rather obviously the opposite of public service, and in tension with it.

Donnie demanded a cover-up from the FBI.

The FBI rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump’s associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign, multiple US officials briefed on the matter tell CNN.

But a White House official said late Thursday that the request was only made after the FBI indicated to the White House it did not believe the reporting to be accurate.

White House officials had sought the help of the bureau and other agencies investigating the Russia matter to say that the reports were wrong and that there had been no contacts, the officials said. The reports of the contacts were first published by The New York Times and CNN on February 14.

The direct communications between the White House and the FBI were unusual because of decade-old restrictions on such contacts. Such a request from the White House is a violation of procedures that limit communications with the FBI on pending investigations.

Yes but Trump thinks the rules don’t apply to him, because he’s just that special.

Comey rejected the request for the FBI to comment on the stories, according to sources, because the alleged communications between Trump associates and Russians known to US intelligence are the subject of an ongoing investigation.

It’s too bad Comey wasn’t that scrupulous about that ridiculous letter to Congress about “emails” – it’s too bad he saddled the country and the world with this enraged baby-man.

Trump is going all “we have to have the most” again.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Trump revisited the issue, declaring that the United States has “fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity.” He placed some of the blame for this on the 2010 New START agreement, a successor to the 1991 START agreement that was signed by President Barack Obama and aimed at further reducing the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States. New START, Trump said, was “another bad deal that the country made.”

“I am the first one that would like to see nobody have nukes,” he said, “but we’re never going to fall behind any country even if it’s a friendly country. We’re never going to fall behind on nuclear power.”

“If countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack,” he added.

But, funnily enough, other countries don’t automatically see it that way, and before you know it there are enough nukes to destroy all life on earth eleventy times over.

While it’s impossible to know exactly how many nuclear weapons each nuclear nation has (such things are generally not public information), the Federation of American Scientists puts together estimates. Per its numbers, the United States has an arsenal of about 6,800 weapons to Russia’s 7,000 — with the next most heavily equipped nation being France at 300.

The goal is for both the US and Russia to have fewer, a lot fewer, and Trump’s deciding we Have To Have Most would scuttle that goal.

It’s not clear where Trump sees a threat to our nuclear position, if not from Russia. It’s not as though North Korea’s nascent nuclear program is going to suddenly challenge our own, necessitating a quick ramp-up in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. If Trump’s concerned about Russia having slightly more nuclear weapons than us, well, it has for some time.

According to the FAS, Russia (then the Soviet Union) had passed the United States in the size of its nuclear arsenal before Ronald Reagan took office.

Trump was busy with other things then.

Oh, huh, it turns out Trump meant what he said, much to the surprise of people who rely on cheap labor to make them rich.

Jeff Marchini and others in the Central Valley here bet their farms on the election of Donald J. Trump. His message of reducing regulations and taxes appealed to this Republican stronghold, one of Mr. Trump’s strongest bases of support in the state.

As for his promises about cracking down on illegal immigrants, many assumed Mr. Trump’s pledges were mostly just talk. But two weeks into his administration, Mr. Trump has signed executive orders that have upended the country’s immigration laws. Now farmers here are deeply alarmed about what the new policies could mean for their workers, most of whom are unauthorized, and the businesses that depend on them.

Oopsy. What happened to the good old days when you could vote for low taxes on rich people and still keep your cheap labor?

“Everything’s coming so quickly,” Mr. Marchini said. “We’re not loading people into buses or deporting them, that’s not happening yet.” As he looked out over a crew of workers bent over as they rifled through muddy leaves to find purple heads of radicchio, he said that as a businessman, Mr. Trump would know that farmers had invested millions of dollars into produce that is growing right now, and that not being able to pick and sell those crops would represent huge losses for the state economy. “I’m confident that he can grasp the magnitude and the anxiety of what’s happening now.”

Oh that’s not Trump. Trump cares about Trump, not other business bros and certainly not the state economy, especially when that state is filthy Clinton-voting coastal elite Hollywood fake news California.

Mr. Trump’s immigration policies could transform California’s Central Valley, a stretch of lowlands that extends from Redding to Bakersfield. Approximately 70 percent of all farmworkers here are living in the United States illegally, according to researchers at University of California, Davis. The impact could reverberate throughout the valley’s precarious economy, where agriculture is by far the largest industry. With 6.5 million people living in the valley, the fields in this state bring in $35 billion a year and provide more of the nation’s food than any other state.

If they’re deported they can’t be replaced with a snap of the fingers.

Farmers here have faced a persistent labor shortage for years, in part because of increased policing at the border and the rising prices charged by smugglers who help people sneak across. The once-steady stream of people coming from rural towns in southern Mexico has nearly stopped entirely. The existing field workers are aging, and many of their children find higher-paying jobs outside agriculture.

Higher-paying and less back-breaking and pesticide-exposing.

MAGA.