China’s Visible Hand Starts to Squeeze - Wall Street Journal

China’s Visible Hand Starts to Squeeze 

Macau looks likely to be another target of China’s efforts to contain leverage and capital outflows

By Jacky Wong

July 18, 2017 7:57

The problem with a command economy is policies tend to create unintended consequences, which inevitably lead to heavy-handed crackdowns. China apparently is in the crackdown phase now.

After years of encouraging companies to “go global,” Beijing is getting uncomfortable with the capital outflows and leverage that have resulted from some companies’ headlong expansion. In an expression of that discomfort, regulators have blocked China’s big banks from lending to Dalian Wanda Group for several of its overseas deals, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Wanda, controlled by billionaire Wang Jianlin, has built a global media empire by splashing billions on companies like AMC Entertainmentand Legendary Entertainment, the studio behind “The Dark Knight.” Beijing, seeking to expand its soft power overseas, had been supporting such efforts to create rivals to Hollywood.

Another example: China’s support for the housing markets in smaller cities has created many nouveau riche who are betting their newfound wealth in Macau’s casinos.

According to Deutsche Bank , VIP gambling revenue in Macau and third-tier city property prices have a correlation of 0.74, where a correlation of one indicates they move in lockstep. And high rollers have been a big driver in Macau’s recovery this year: VIP revenue was up 35% last quarter, versus 8% for mass-market revenue. That has most benefited Wynn Resorts ’ Macau operations, which caters to the high end more than others.

That undercuts Beijing’s goal of developing Macau into a tourist spot for casual gamblers, rather than a place for China’s rich to contribute to capital outflows. Tightening policies have already appeared. Banks have to report cross-border transfers above 200,000 yuan ($30,000) and ATMs with facial recognition are popping up in the city. The city’s biggest junket operator, Suncity, which brings big-stakes gamblers to Macau and lends them money, sent messages to its customers last week warning about the risks of moving money across the border.

The more the high rollers keep coming, the more likely Macau is to become the next part of the economy to be squeezed.

Write to Jacky Wong at Jacky.Wong@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 19, 2017, print edition as 'China’s Visible Hand Begins to Squeeze.'

President Trump Unveils Goals for a New NAFTA Deal With Canada and Mexico -TIME

President Trump Unveils Goals for a New NAFTA Deal With Canada and Mexico Posted: 17 Jul 2017 04:31 PM PDT (WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump vowed Monday to boost U.S. manufacturing by cutting the $64 billion trade deficit with Mexico as he showcased products made in all 50 states — everything from a fire truck to a baseball bat. “No longer are we going to allow other countries to break the rules, to steal our jobs and drain our wealth,” Trump said at a White House event that spilled from the East Room to the South Lawn. Shortly after Trump’s remarks, the U.S. trade representative released an 18-page report about its goals for updating the decades-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. In addition to reducing the trade deficit, the administration wants to insert a chapter on the digital economy into the deal. It also wants to strengthen labor and environmental obligations, as well as amending the rules of origin so that more of the products traded come from the United States and North America. Facing an investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia and a tax and health care agenda struggling to make headway as quickly as promised, Trump is turning his focus to trade this week. Administration officials are to meet Wednesday with economic officials from China, a nation the president has accused of dumping steel on the global market to hurt U.S. steelmakers. The White House emphasis on trade follows a string of other recent theme weeks on energy, job-training and infrastructure that mostly failed to draw much attention away from the Russia inquiry. The president took his time checking out products from all over the country: Trump donned a cowboy hat from Texas. He swung a baseball bat from Louisiana. And he even climbed into the cab of a Wisconsin-built fire truck and pretended to be a firefighter, saying, “Where’s the fire? Where’s the fire? Put it out fast!” The new NAFTA objectives, a requirement to begin talks on updating the agreement in the next 30 days, contain the first specifics for a Trump administration that has made bold promises on trade. Trump has pledged to recover factory jobs and boost wages by crafting new trade deals. Supporters note that NAFTA enabled companies to charge cheaper prices for products that range from cars to vacuum cleaners, helping many U.S. consumers. The president said he only seeks a level playing field for U.S. companies and workers, but “if the playing field was slanted a little bit toward us, I would accept that, also.” But the president has a conflicted relationship with global trade. His namesake clothing business depended on the work of low-wage workers living overseas, as does the fashion line of his daughter and White House aide, Ivanka Trump. As of now, Ivanka Trump’s firm continues to have its products made overseas. Her lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said in a statement Monday that the president’s daughter “has resigned from the company, does not control its operations, and has been advised that she cannot ask the government to act in an issue involving the brand in any way, constraining her ability to intervene personally.” Trump has blasted trade deficits as hampering the economy by sending money abroad. But the trade deficit has actually improved from $762 billion in 2006 to $505 billion last year, a change brought about largely because U.S. consumers cut back spending during the Great Recession. His administration already is pursuing multiple trade cases on individual products and is weighing whether to impose tariffs and quotas on foreign steel in hopes of curbing production in China, even though that country represents a fraction of U.S. steel imports. Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the administration’s NAFTA objectives “will be further developed as the negotiations proceed.” The senator said he wants stronger protections for intellectual property rights as part of an amended agreement with Canada and Mexico. Democratic lawmakers said Monday that Trump should move away from trade agreements that favor multinational companies to focus on workers. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-MI, said that any new agreements must provide for more jobs and higher wages that he has pledged to generate. “He’s got to deliver on those promises he made to my constituents and the working men and women across the country,” Dingell said in a phone call with reporters. When NAFTA went into effect in 1994, the United States ran a small trade surplus in goods with Mexico and a slight deficit with Canada. But the size of the deficits steadily began to increase afterward. By last year, the United States ran a $64 billion trade deficit with Mexico and a nearly $11 billion gap with Canada. Neither trade deficit is near its peak level. The trade deficit with Canada hit a high in 2008, while the trade gap with Mexico nearly reached $75 billion in 2007.

Six months in, Trump has given just one solo press conference - CNN

Six months in, Trump has given just one solo press conference

President Trump is well behind his predecessors when it comes to solo press conferences in his first year in office.

The last time President Donald Trump gave a solo press conference, Michael Flynn's resignation as national security adviser was only three days old. James Comey was still in charge of the FBI, the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare had just been unveiled in the House of Representatives, and Donald Trump Jr. was in the spotlight -- after getting pranked on Twitter by the actor Seth Rogen.

The Trump presidency has brought a dizzying pace to the news cycle. But despite all the stunning developments of his first six months in office, Trump has largely avoided tough questions from the news media.

Trump has given only one solo press conference thus far, putting him well behind the rate of his predecessors. According to The American Presidency Project, Barack Obama gave 11 solo press conferences in his first year, George W. Bush gave five and Bill Clinton held 12.

There is one type of press conference in which Trump appears to be keeping pace, however. Presidents often hold joint press conferences with foreign leaders visiting the White House, or when they are visiting that leader's country. All three of Trump's immediate predecessors participated in at least a dozen joint press conferences in their first year; Trump has been part of 10. But those joint press conferences typically only include two questions to each leader, making them potentially less informative than longer, more free-wheeling solo press conferences.

Trump's only solo press conference came on February 16, nearly four weeks after he took office. For more than an hour, the president took shots at the media while answering questions about Flynn, who had submitted his resignation only days earlier. Trump also discussed health care, among other issues, and briefly mentioned Comey, who would be fired as FBI director three months later.

The president's press-aversion in the White House is a far cry from how he spent much of his campaign. Trump used to relish the back and forth with reporters, and would even celebrate his GOP primary wins with press conferences at his victory rallies. But as the 2016 campaign hit the home stretch in the fall, Trump steered clear of press conferences and spoke largely to Fox News.

That's continued since he took office. Days after he fired Comey in May, Trump sat down with NBC News' Lester Holt for a highly anticipated interview. But since then, Trump's only televised interviews have been with sympathetic anchors on Fox News and the televangelist Pat Robertson, another media booster. The president did, however, give an interview to Reuters last week.

CNN

Trump’s puffery squanders an opportunity for US growth - Financial Times

Trump’s puffery squanders an opportunity for US growth

by: Martin Sandbu

When the Trump administration released its budget proposal this year, Free Lunch warned that “serious people should hesitate before commenting” because of its habit of putting style before substance in all policy announcements. The US Congressional Budget Office does not have the choice, however, and last week it released its analysis of the plan. 

Free Lunch focused on the composition of the tax and spending choices and the worldview they revealed (military good, diplomacy and economic development in poorer US regions bad). The impartial CBO emphasises the drier macroeconomic aggregates, in particular its estimate of the budget deficit over the 10-year horizon of the plans. And on this, it is poles apart from the administration. The Trump budget projects the deficit will be fully closed in 10 years. The CBO sees it stabilising in absolute terms at $700bn, in a range of about 3 per cent of the economy. That is admittedly less than the CBO’s baseline comparison of no policy change.

This is a big difference, although not one that makes material difference to fiscal sustainability. On the CBO projection, the public debt burden stabilises at about its current level. The more interesting contrast lies in why the CBO projects a different deficit path. By its own account, this is almost entirely because “the Administration projects higher revenue collections — stemming mainly from a projection of faster economic growth. CBO and the Administration use different economic forecasts, reflecting differences in projections of economic activity under current law and also economic effects that the Administration attributes to its proposals.”

The CBO, in other words, has refused to go along with the White House and the Treasury’s breezy claim that growth will increase because of its policies. That means it has been one of few institutions to stick to reason. “Because the details on many of the proposed policies are not available at this time,” the CBO says, it “cannot provide an analysis of all their macroeconomic effects or of the budgetary feedback that would result from those effects.” It sees nothing in the president’s policy plans, in other words, to make a higher growth rate likely.

That much is unsurprising. The US executive branch is led by a person who over a lifetime has placed puffery above truth. But it returns us to the interesting question of whether the US economy could grow at a faster rate if serious policies were put in place to make that happen. Could an administration that applied itself more to proper policymaking lift the growth rate from the 2 per cent or so the CBO and many other observers project to the 3 per cent on which it now premises its budget?

There are plenty of reasons to think that is the case — at least for the medium run, if not permanently.

One such reason is that there are signs the economy is still below its potential rate of economic activity at the moment — in which case simply adding more monetary and fiscal stimulus would boost the growth rate until it catches up. Gavyn Davies’s latest analysis of the US inflation slowdown is important in this regard. If price growth is, as he argues, still not picking up but rather moving away from the Federal Reserve’s target, it stands to reason that a stronger stimulus of aggregate demand would show up in real output growth and not runaway inflation.

Another is that even at full capacity, we may be too pessimistic about the potential for a higher growth rate. I have explained why there is much more hidden slack in the labour force participation than most people think. Put differently, there is significant scope for pulling more of the US population into the labour force (especially the elderly), which would produce stronger growth in the transition even if productivity growth doesn’t pick up. 

And then there is productivity growth. The slowdown, not just in the US but across the industrial world, has occasioned widespread pessimism about the growth potential of these economies. But new research by Nicholas Crafts and Terence Mills shows that recent performance is a poor guide to future productivity growth: “Indeed, forecasting on this basis would have missed the productivity slowdown of the 1970s, the acceleration of the mid-1990s, and the slowdown of recent years — in other words, all the major episodes during the period!”

The upshot is that it may be natural for human observers to expect the recent lacklustre growth performance to continue, but there is little rational justification to privilege this prediction over others. We simply know very little. All the more reason to try out policies that can sensibly be thought to accelerate economic growth.

This admonition not to be too fatalistic does not, however, redeem the Trump administration. The CBO’s implication holds: Trump and his team have done little to make higher growth happen than to claim, for no reason, that it will happen. That adds another basis on which to criticise this administration: its economic policy is so far one of wasted opportunity.

Former US prosecutor on Trump-Russia investigation: 'People will be going to jail' - Independent

Former US prosecutor on Trump-Russia investigation: 'People will be going to jail'

'There may already be people cooperating' in the investigation

• Clark Mindock New York  
• @ClarkMindock 
• Sunday 16 July 2017 14:47 BST

A former federal prosecutor says that he believes the investigation into the Donald Trump campaign’s ties to Russia is going to land some people in jail.

The various Congressional and FBI investigations into the apparent Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to help Mr Trump, and any possible ties to Mr Trump's campaign team, have been rumbling for months. But they have been thrown back into sharp focus by the release of emails showing Mr Trump's oldest son, Donald Jr, agreeing to a meeting with a Kremlin-connected attorney who claimed to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

“It’s a really serious investigation, and there are people that are going to go to jail,” Harry Litman, who used to work at the Department of Justice in the 1990s, told The Independent. “The whole atmosphere in the White House has to be paranoid.”

Mr Trump Jr was joined at the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya and a Russian-American lobbyist named Rinat Akhmetshin, by President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort during that meeting. Mr Akhmetshin is said to have possible to Russian military intelligence, something he denies.

Mr Trump Jr says the meeting was “a nothing,” while Ms Veselnitskaya has denied that she was at the meeting working for the Russian government and says she had no information on Ms Clinton to give Mr Trump Jr. The White House has repeatedly denied allegations of collusion with Russia.

Mr Litman said that even without the drip-drip of information over members of his team's contact with Russia, the President’s relationship with the Department of Justice and FBI — and the Washington apparatus that has granted members of those institutions power to push back against the White House historically — is unique. And, he’s already shown that he’s unconcerned with the sorts of norms that his predecessors were sensitive to in his firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

That firing led to the establishment of a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration, headed by the widely respected and diligent former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Of course, Mr Trump could decide to instruct Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — who has authority on that matter after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from matters related to investigation — to fire Mr Mueller. That instruction could likely result in Mr Rosenstein’s refusal to do so and, Mr Litman said, either a firing or a resignation if the President insisted on moving forward to have Mr Mueller removed.

There are a couple potential problems for Mr Trump should he decide to take this route - and it's not at all certain that he would attempt to do so anyway.

First is that firing Mr Comey itself sparked cries that the President had obstructed justice, an allegation that was fanned by Mr Trump himself when he said on live television that he had made the decision to fire him in part because he thought the Russia investigation was bogus. Mr Comey, in the weeks that followed, also released memos detailing private conversations with the President in which Mr Trump had asked him to “let go” of investigations into a former member of the White House staff caught up in the Russia scandal.

There’s also the concern with historical precedent. Back during the Nixon administration, as the Watergate scandal was gaining steam, former President Richard Nixon instructed his Justice Department to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, leading to the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Mr Nixon then ordered then Solicitor General of the United States Robert Bork — who became the acting attorney general — to fire Mr Cox, which he did.

Independent 

Bilateral talks aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China have yielded some initial deals - Reuters

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) - Bilateral talks aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China have yielded some initial deals, but U.S. firms say much more needs to be done as a deadline for a 100-day action plan expires on Sunday.

The negotiations, which began in April, have reopened China's market to U.S. beef after 14 years and prompted Chinese pledges to buy U.S. liquefied natural gas. American firms have also been given access to some parts of China's financial services sector.

More details on the 100-day plan are expected to be announced in the coming week as senior U.S. and Chinese officials gather in Washington for annual bilateral economic talks, rebranded this year as the "U.S.-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue."

"We hope to report further progress on the 100-day deliverables next week," a U.S. Commerce Department spokesman said on Saturday. "That will be the basis for judging the extent of progress."

The spokesman declined to discuss potential areas for new agreements since a May 11 announcement on beef, chicken, financial services and LNG.

Earlier in April, when Chinese President Xi Jinping met U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time at his Florida resort, Xi agreed to a 100-day plan for trade talks aimed at boosting U.S. exports and trimming the U.S. trade deficit with China.

The U.S. goods trade deficit with China reached $347 billion last year. The gap in the first five months of 2017 widened about 5.3 percent from a year earlier, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

"It is an excellent momentum builder, but much more needs to be done for U.S.-China commercial negotiations to be considered a success," said Jacob Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC) in Beijing.

There has been little sign of progress in soothing the biggest trade irritants, such as U.S. demands that China cut excess capacity in steel and aluminum production, lack of access for U.S. firms to China's services market, and U.S. national security curbs on high-tech exports to China.

The Trump administration is considering broad tariffs or quotas on steel and aluminum on national security grounds, partly in response to what it views as a glut of Chinese production that is flooding international markets and driving down prices.

North Korea has cast a long shadow over the relationship, after Pyongyang tested what some experts have described as an intercontinental ballistic missile on July 4.

Trump has linked progress in trade to China's ability to rein in North Korea, which counts on Beijing as its chief friend and ally.

"Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40 percent in the first quarter. So much for China working with us - but we had to give it a try!" Trump said on Twitter after the North Korean missile test.

Trading Meat

American beef is now available in Chinese shops for the first time since a 2003 U.S. case of "mad cow" disease, giving U.S. ranchers access to a rapidly growing market worth around $2.6 billion last year.

More beef deals were signed during an overseas buying mission by the Chinese last week.

"There are hopes there will be even more concrete results," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily news briefing in Beijing on Friday. He did not elaborate.

Critics of the 100-day process said China had already agreed to lift its ban on U.S. beef last September, with officials just needing to finalize details on quarantine requirements.

China, meanwhile, has delivered its first batch of cooked chicken to U.S. ports after years of negotiating for access to the market.

But unlike the rush by Chinese consumers for a first taste of American beef, Chinese poultry processors have not had a flurry of orders for cooked chicken.

Demand should improve once China is allowed to ship Chinese grown, processed and cooked chicken to the United States, said Li Wei, export manager at Qingdao Nine Alliance Group, China's top exporter of processed poultry.

Biotech Crops

Other sectors in China under U.S. pressure to open up have moved more slowly.

Beijing had only approved two of the eight biotech crops waiting for import approval, despite gathering experts to review the crops on two occasions in a six-week period.

U.S. industry officials had signalled they were expecting more approvals. U.S. executives say the review process still lacks transparency.

Financial services is another area where little progress has been made, U.S. officials say.

USCBC's Parker said it is unclear how long it will take for foreign credit rating agencies to be approved, or whether U.S.-owned suppliers of electronic payment services will be able to secure licenses.

The bilateral talks have also not addressed restrictions on foreign investment in life insurance and securities trading, or "the many challenges foreign companies face in China's cybersecurity enforcement environment," Parker said.

In an annual report released Thursday, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said China remained a "difficult market".

Additional reporting by David Lawder in WASHINGTON, Ben Blanchard in BEIJING and Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Ryan Woo and Bill Tarrant

Details revealed about Jared Kushner's security clearance forms - CBS News

By CBS NEWS CBS NEWS July 14, 2017

Details revealed about Jared Kushner's security clearance forms

President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner updated a federal disclosure form needed to obtain a security clearance three times and added more than 100 names of foreign contacts through the updates after initially providing none at all, reports CBS News' Major Garrett.

The first form had no foreign names on it even though people applying for a security clearance need to list any contact with foreign governments. Kushner's team said it was prematurely sent.

Then the team submitted the second one after they updated it with all of the names except for one -- the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who met with Donald Trump Jr., Kushner and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's campaign chairman in June 2016.

After omitting her name in the second form, that meeting was then conveyed to the FBI in the third revamping of the form before July.

This comes as some Democrats call for Kushner's security clearance to be revoked. On Thursday, House Republicans reportedly in the Appropriations Committee blocked a Democratic amendment to a spending bill that targeted Kushner. It would have prevented the government from issuing or maintaining a security clearance for a White House employee under criminal investigation by a federal law enforcement agency for aiding a foreign government.

Jamie Dimon: "Almost an embarrassment being an American" - CBS Money

Jamie Dimon: "Almost an embarrassment being an American"

By IRINA IVANOVA

July 14, 2017, 11:12 AM

Jamie Dimon: "Almost an embarrassment being an American"

Last Updated Jul 14, 2017 5:00 PM EDT

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon lashed out at U.S. government policy during the company's quarterly earnings conference call on Friday.

"It's almost an embarrassment being an American citizen ... and listening to the stupid s--- we have to deal with in this country," Dimon said.

Dimon was answering a question from UBS analyst Saul Martinez about whether political gridlock seemed likely to stunt the nation's economic growth. The CEO, regarded by many as the country's foremost banking executive, took it as a chance to deride U.S. policies, which he said are hindering faster expansion.

"I was just in France. I recently in Argentina, was in Israel, was in Ireland. We met with the prime minister of India and China," Dimon said. "It's amazing to me that every single one of these countries understands that practical policies that promote business and growth is good for the average citizens of this countries, for jobs and wages, and that somehow, this great American free enterprise system, we no longer get it."

"The American business sector is powerful and strong, and it's going to grow regardless," he went on. "What I'm saying is, it will be much stronger growth had we made intelligent decisions and we were not gridlocked."

Specifically, Dimon cited U.S. corporate tax rates and a lack of progress in modernizing the nation's roads, bridges, airports and other transportation infrastructure.

Some corporate chiefs have been pushing for a so-called tax holiday, something President Donald Trump has floated as a way to encourage companies with large overseas holdings to bring profits back into the U.S.

Many experts say letting U.S. multinationals repatriate their foreign profits is unlikely to spur economic growth. The last such holiday, in 2004, coincided with a large outflow of employment as corporations moved jobs to low-wage countries, federal data have shown.

JPMorgan Chase reported better-than-expected earnings last quarter, at $1.71 per share. UBS' Martinez rated the stock a "buy."

As Donald Trump Jr's story begins to unravel, are we witnessing a very modern conspiracy – or a very old one? - Independent

As Donald Trump Jr's story begins to unravel, are we witnessing a very modern conspiracy – or a very old one?

This week’s astonishing Trump Jr/Russia revelations continue a conspiratorial trope stretching back through 9/11, JFK, Thomas Becket, Judas... In fact, argues Andy Martin, isn’t all history a conspiracy? All religion? Are even conspiracy theories a conspiracy?

ANDY MARTIN

There is a classic scene in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones is explaining to Will Smith about all the aliens who are passing themselves off as Earthlings. “Everyone said I was crazy, but I knew our teacher was from Venus or something like that,” says Will Smith. “Ms Edelson. Jupiter, actually,” Tommy Lee Jones replies. “One of the moons.” Sometimes your feeling that someone comes from a different planet might be true.

Same with conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories – as David Aaronovitch, for one, has argued in Voodoo Histories – are generally a lot of hogwash. They are essentially stupid. There is a whole research group at Cambridge (“Conspiracy and Democracy”) dedicated to deconstructing if not debunking the conspiratorial mind. Maybe the CIA and LBJ and the KGB all murdered JFK (the only requirement is that you have to be able to boil the name down to three letters), maybe President Bush secretly engineered 9/11. And maybe the whole Apollo moon programme was just a Hollywood stunt. Maybe it’s impossible to prove a negative. Conspiracy theories are, by their nature, unfalsifiable. They are also hugely improbable. But, all due scepticism notwithstanding, every now and then a conspiracy theory turns out to be true.

Which is where Russia comes in. The recent revelation about the activities of a guy called Trump (Trump Jr perhaps but surely in some obscure way related to Trump Sr) prior to the US election, specifically with a view to subverting the cause of Hillary Clinton in cahoots with Russia, and therefore ultimately the Kremlin, suggests that this could be one of those rare times. The links are becoming clearer every day.

What is certain is that Trump won the election (even if he lost the popular vote) thanks to a conspiracy theory. Enough people bought into his absurd idea to the effect that President Obama and a Washington mafia or “elite” (definitely involving a lot of media people, Ivy League professors, the “deep state” and me too at some level) had all banded together to drag the American nation down into the dirt. And, secondly, that a saviour figure (guess who) like a Shane or Clint Eastwood riding into town all alone could come and clean out the stables or “swamp”.

Isn’t that the nuttiest thing you ever heard? Yeah, I’m in. The crazier the better where conspiracy theories are concerned. There is no point having a theory that is not far-fetched and fabulous. You can go on building – why stop with Lee Harvey Oswald? Behind him is one shady organisation, and behind them yet another, and so on. It’s infinite regression in action, involving nearly everyone, and everyone else turning a blind eye.

This week New York sees the annual ThrillerFest taking place at the Grand Hyatt hotel on 42nd Street, where noir writers of every stripe are spinning their tales. But at the same time there is a teller of tall tales (and tweeter extraordinaire) sitting in the White House. A narrative got him into power (the Hillary narrative barely existed – you can have more of the same – fundamentally boring, like her stultifying autobiography). Now, it is possible, another narrative may well deprive him of power and see him booted right back out again. To be honest (I might as well own up), I rather hope that it will. There would be some kind of poetic justice in that. A re-balancing of the universe.

And this is the point made by Dan Kovalik, who teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, in The Plot To Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia. The “liberal intelligentsia” are buying into a conspiracy theory about Trump, the idiots. But this argument is itself a conspiracy theory about people falling for a conspiracy theory. It reads like a riposte to another book, by Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election. I suppose the only weak spot in the subtitle is the word “tried”. Surely they did more than “try”? But the remarkable thing is that both these books are published by the same publisher in New York, Skyhorse, which is one of the biggest independent publishers in America. One which claims to aim to “fight against injustices, conspiracies, or abuses of power”, according to its website. It has even published the transcript of the Oliver Stone documentary, The Putin Interviews.

More regime than democracy: the Trump clan (AFP/Getty)

Allow me to summarise The Plot to Hack America: Putin done it. Conversely, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia is: oh no he didn’t. When I spoke to the sceptical Kovalik about the current scandal on the phone, he said “we have a phrase in the US – nothingburger”. Everything is being hyped up out of all proportion. “It’s the Democrats blaming Russia for losing the election”. America, he points out, does this kind of thing all the time – interfering in the elections of other nations. But, hold on, isn’t that a coup you’re talking about? “Some people are suggesting we attack Russia – which seems insane to me. Even if you assume the worst, that doesn’t justify it.” In his book he writes that he voted Green and scorned both Clinton and Trump but adds that “the one redeeming attribute I did see in Trump … was that he wanted, for whatever reason, to make peace with Russia, which I sincerely believe is a worthy friend and ally.”

Stone would agree. Quite rightly he decided that, rather than listen to all the bullshit and propaganda, he needed to go right to the source, to Putin himself, and have a word direct (even if mediated through interpreters). And lo, what does he come up with: so far, what looks suspiciously like more bullshit and propaganda, delivered in a Russian accent, direct from Putin himself.

Maybe Putin tells some version of the truth about his own upbringing (maybe), but when he says that, for example, Russia is “supporting the statehood of Ukraine” and other ex-Soviet Union satellites, you want to laugh. For no reason I can fathom Stone just sits there and keeps a straight face. He completely buys into a conspiracy theory when it is happening in the US (in his movie JFK Kevin Costner convincingly proves that everyone other than Oswald done it and probably the Warren Commission was in on it too). But when it comes to Russia, which actually is a totalitarian state (depleted, true, in the way that uranium is depleted) intent on reviving its imperial glories, Stone is polite and respectful.

In the blurb he wrote for the Kovalik book, Stone says “fake news is thriving in Washington DC”. Not only does that sound exactly like a Trumpism, it tends to suggest that Moscow, in contrast, is innocent of any fakery. It could be that The Putin Interviews turn out to be Oliver Stone’s most naive and embarrassing work to date. Particularly if Trump Jr is finally brought to book, with Sr not far behind. If the film has a soundtrack, it should be the sound of a man being played.

It is beyond satire for President Trump to go about saying “We need to work with Russia” when with every day that goes by it becomes more and more obvious that he already was working with Russia well before he ever became President. There are good diplomatic relations, and then there is treason. Malcolm Nance, who wrote The Plot to Hack America – which was published just before the US election – is not only a self-professed spy (or “career intelligence officer”) but also serves on the board of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. He was the first writer to put the story about Putin the Spymaster manipulating America out there and now sounds fully vindicated. “Everything that is coming out now, I wrote it in the book. I hope the guy that wrote the book about ‘scapegoating Russia’ is going to publish a second edition in which he retracts everything he wrote.” Nance says that his book is “rock-solid intelligence analysis”. It’s a conspiracy, but with no theorising. The “Kremlin Crew” created a plot and now it’s unravelling. “It’s Rosenberg meets Watergate meets Benedict Arnold,” he said in a pithy summary. Nance also quotes Lenin: “A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.”

More than ever the Trump set-up seems more like a “regime” than a functioning democracy. Or maybe the Mafia is the closest equivalent, with all these relatives helping out with the family business. I think the Borgias were a bit like that. Beyond that you have to reach for Tacitus and his history of decadent and self-serving Roman emperors. I think we owe the word “nepotism” to Italy but it has become thoroughly Americanised. I was almost forgetting Mrs Thatcher and her dear son Mark, who always had a nose for the next arms deal, and his commission. You have to hand it to Trump though, the spirit of egalitarianism runs through the White House: you have the First Lady and the First Daughter, then there is the First Son-in-law, and then First Son, and so on. I expect we will soon have the First Cousin and the First Aunt confessing involvement in some shady deal. They all come First at the White House. Everyone else comes Last.

Kovalik is right, there really is a kind of hysteria on the loose in America, reminiscent of the old Cold War “reds under the bed” mentality. But, at the same time, as someone wisely said, just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they are not after you. Or at least hacking you and scamming you and destroying your democracy.

Maybe, when you stop to think about it, conspiracies are not that rare. Most of them we know nothing about because they are very good conspiracies that manage to keep everything secret and nailed down and possibly eliminate any weak links. These are in fact the best conspiracies – about which no book will ever be written. There are vast and inhuman conspiracies out there for sure. Not necessarily alien-engineered. I think you could reasonably argue that every single religion we’ve every come up with – and cult – is a species of conspiracy.

But even in a more down-to-earth secular way, every now and then you can find a thread and you just keep pulling on it until the whole damn story comes out. Watergate (starring Nixon and a cast of if not thousands certainly dozens, “all the King’s Men”) was one such conspiracy and it brought down a President. Russiagate could be another. Karl Marx said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But, as he – being himself one of the great conspirators of all time – might have added, whether tragic or farcical, it’s all conspiracy.

Jared Kushner Keeps Making the Russia Scandal So Much Worse - New York Magazine

Jared Kushner Keeps Making the Russia Scandal So Much Worse

By Margaret Hartmann

In the first few months of the Trump administration, both the president and his political opponents placed much hope on Jared Kushner, a 36-year-old real estate heir with no experience relevant to the job of senior White House adviser. The left hoped that Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump would act as voices of reason, fighting against climate change, attacks on LGBT rights, and Steve Bannon’s general inclination to “blow things up.” Meanwhile, President Trump tasked his son-in-law with just about every thorny issue facing his administration, from rewriting U.S. trade agreements to solving the opioid epidemic to brokering peace in the Middle East.

Kushner has had a few successes (like possibly saving NAFTA) and several major failures (such as failing to prevent Trump from ditching the Paris climate according and bungling a trip to Jerusalem). But for the Trump administration, he’s proven to be a disastrous hire largely due to his inept handling of the Russia scandal.

Back in May, Kushner was reportedly among those urging President Trump to fire FBI Director James Comey. That sparked a massive, days-long crisis that culminated in the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Russia’s election meddling and the Trump camp’s potential involvement. The New York Times reported that while White House staffers ultimately decided to respond with a statement saying they welcomed the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Kushner “was one of the few dissenting voices, urging the president to counterattack.”

Later that month, Kushner was at the center of another episode in the ongoing Russia scandal when reports emerged that he tried to establish a secret backchannel between the Trump team and the Russian government in December. Several weeks later, the Washington Post reported that Mueller was looking into Kushner’s “finances and business dealings.”

At this point Kushner can’t do much about his meetings with Russians during the campaign, or his potentially shady business dealings. However, he’s consistently tackled Russia-related issues in a manner that’s created unnecessary problems for his family members and fellow White House staffers.

While Donald Trump Jr. is currently at the eye of the “Category 5 hurricane” surrounding the White House, his emails about a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, which Kushner attended, are apparently coming to light now because of his brother-in-law.

When Kushner initially filed his application for a security clearance in January, the foreign contacts section was blank. His lawyers said this was an accident and in May they filed a revised form listing more than 100 meetings with officials from more over 20 countries – but not the meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. The Times reported that the emails from Don Jr. “were discovered in recent weeks by Mr. Kushner’s legal team as it reviewed documents.” The SF-86 form Kushner filed with the FBI was then updated for a third time to disclose the meeting.

CNN fleshed out the timeline on Thursday, reporting that Kushner’s lawyers provided the amended SF-86 on June 21. A few days later, Kushner’s team ignored a reporter’s question about the filing:

On June 26, CNN asked a White House spokesman assigned to Kushner about the additional meeting on the amended security clearance form, including that it was organized by Donald Trump Jr.

But Kushner’s team did not respond. On June 28, Jamie Gorelick, Kushner’s lawyer handling the issue, sent a letter to the FBI to complain about what she believed was an improper leak, according to a person close to the matter.

A source close to Kushner said his team discussed whether they should just go public with the information, but he “told his lawyers he planned to sit down with the president to discuss the meeting and the email that had been discovered.” So, if true, Kushner’s instinct was to get the president more deeply involved in the handling of evidence that may be construed as proof that his campaign colluded with Russia.

The Times reported that Trump’s attorney for Russia-related matters, Marc Kasowitz, is so fed up with Kushner’s behavior that he’s considered resigning, and that sounds like the kind of thing he’s talking about:

Mr. Kasowitz and his colleagues have complained that Mr. Kushner has been whispering in the president’s ear about the Russia investigations and stories while keeping the lawyers out of the loop, according to another person familiar with the legal team. The president’s lawyers view Mr. Kushner as an obstacle and freelancer more concerned about protecting himself than his father-in-law, the person said.

It’s not clear if Kushner actually had a chat with his father-in-law about the meeting, but if so, the president has been lying about it. Trump has repeatedly said he only learned of the emails and the meeting “a couple of days ago.”

Yahoo reported on Thursday that attorneys representing the president and the Trump Organization were informed of the emails right after they were discovered by Kushner’s legal team. It’s possible that the attorneys didn’t update the president, but Richard Painter, the former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said he found that idea “weird” and “unbelievable.” “You have a professional obligation to inform the client about information that he needs to make informed decisions,” he said.

Even if Trump wasn’t personally informed, Kushner and a number of other people in his orbit were aware of the issue for weeks – yet the White House appeared caught off guard when the Times broke the story on July 8. Trump Jr.’s initial response – which required multiple follow ups – was reportedly drafted by top Trump advisers on Air Force One as they returned from a trip to Europe.

White House staffers who didn’t inherit billions have been hesitant to get involved in Russia-related matters because they can’t afford to hire a high-priced lawyer should they be pulled into the Mueller probe. But CNN noted on Thursday that those aides may have exposed themselves to special counsel scrutiny when they scrambled to craft Trump Jr.’s response.

Nevertheless, Kushner is reportedly pushing White House staffers to get even more involved, and mount a more vigorous defense. According to Politico, his argument is that the meeting impacts Trump’s presidency, so the White House should deal with it. But some people on the communication team, including press secretary Sean Spicer, say the issue should be left to the lawyers who were hired to handle the scandal.

Sources said Kushner was angry that the White House communications team wasn’t immediately putting surrogates on TV, issuing talking points, and calling up cable news outlets to complain about their chyrons.

“Jared wanted to get surrogates, he wanted an op-ed in the [Wall Street] Journal and the [New York] Times, and we said, ‘Wait, we have to talk through how that will play out. Who is going to say it, who is going to put their name on the op-ed and what baggage do they have?’” said an outside adviser.

Some of the turmoil, CNN reports, stems from the feeling among White House aides that the PR strategy is designed to protect Kushner, the only person mentioned in the emails who works in the White House. “Who do you have to protect? You have to protect the guy who filled out the form saying I never took this meeting,” one source said.

But according to Axios, Kushner’s view is that the Trump administration can squash the whole controversy over Trump Jr.’s emails with a bit of good PR – and peace in the Middle East.

The view in Kushner’s orbit is that the brutal new revelations are more P.R. problems than legal problems. And if he makes progress with his Middle East peace efforts, perceptions would be very different.

So far he’s been wrong about firing Comey, ignoring legal advice, failing to prepare a coherent response, and creating new questions about who knew what, and when they knew it. But hey, he’s Jared Kushner. If he can’t make this Russia scandal blow over, nobody can.