why the fuck is an 88-count indicted criminal being allowed to sabotage US foreign policy

how is this even legal

today, not-yet-fired House Speaker Holy Mike Johnson is traveling down to Donald Trump’s vermin-infested Florida golf motel.

he’ll be there to get his marching orders from an 88-criminal-count diaperload who is under indictment and out on bail for stealing our nation’s most closely-guarded classified secrets and showing them off to god knows who.

it’s just another maddening day here in the United States of Have We All Gone Fucking Insane.

ostensibly, Holy Mike will be at Motel-a-Lago for a “major announcement on election integrity” — whatever the fuck that means — but you know he’s also going to get an earful from Dear Leader about Ukraine and all the other bugs Donny has up his ass.

Donald Trump has running his own private foreign policy operation, undermining our national security and destabilizing the world — and we’re all left standing around, gaping in astonishment and wondering how the fuck is this even legal.

Donny has ordered the House GOP to block all aid to Ukraine. Trump wants Ukraine to lose their war because Putin wants Ukraine to lose the war — so we have a private citizen working against interests of the United States in favor of his despot snugglebunny Vlad — and we have an entire political party who is more than happy to go along with this treasonous fuckery.

but wait, it gets worse.

did you know that Trump has his own “shadow secretary of state” who’s been flying around the world, cooking up secret deals with right-wing regimes?

‘Building an authoritarian axis’: the Trump ‘envoy’ courting the global far right

Richard Grenell’s shadow foreign policy campaign is unsettling diplomats and threatens to collapse US interests

For Donald Trump, he is “my envoy”, the man apparently anointed as the former US president’s roving ambassador while he plots a return to the White House.

Meet Richard Grenell, vocal tribune of Trump’s America First credo on the international stage and the man hotly tipped to become secretary of state if the presumed Republican nominee beats Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.

I’m sorry, what? private citizens shouldn’t get to meddle in foreign policy and they sure as hell shouldn’t be allowed to have their own “roving ambassador” going around and fucking shit up.

In recent months, he has pitched up in Guatemala, where he tried to stymie US state department pleas for a peaceful transition of power by backing rightwing efforts to block the inauguration of the liberal president-elect, Bernardo Arévalo, on supposed electoral fraud grounds about a poll previously declared “free and fair” by international observers.

how is this not a violation of the Logan Act?

The Logan Act was intended to prohibit United States citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments.

once again, the fuckface who stole nuclear war plans and waved them in them in the faces of randos at his New Jersey wife cemetery is being allowed to get away with shit that anyone not named Donald Trump would already be behind bars for.

Donny’s also hard at work trying to get Republicans to kill FISA.

the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 — FISA — establishes “procedures for the surveillance and collection of foreign intelligence on domestic soil.”

Trump hates the shit out of the act because it’s through FISA that we found out that his 2016 campaign was colluding with the Russkies.

of course, Donny is distorting what happened. no, Obama wasn’t “spying on Trump’s campaign.” what occurred is that the government was monitoring Russian phone calls and it just so happened the homey on the other end of the line was Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.

if Donny’s flunkies hadn’t been taking marching orders from Putin’s operatives, Trump’s campaign would have never been “spied on.”

Republicans enjoy a long tradition of presidential candidates meddling in foreign affairs in order to gain a political advantage — because fuck national security, we have an election to win.

in 1968, Tricky Dick Nixon campaigned on a “secret plan to end the war in Vietnam” — but behind the scenes, he was doing everything he could to derail peace talks and prolong the war past the election.

Handwritten notes from Nixon’s future White House Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman show evidence that the 36th president tried to secretly influence the peace talks while still a presidential candidate and a private citizen.

According to David Taylor at the BBC, in 2013 declassified tapes from Johnson’s White House show that the FBI had intercepted Chennault’s calls to the South Vietnamese ambassador telling them to “just hang through the election.” Johnson also ordered the FBI to surveil the Nixon campaign and to figure out if Nixon was personally involved in the back channel operation.

Nixon’s secret plan, by the way, was to threaten to nuke the shit out of Hanoi. you’ll be shocked to learn that Henry Kissinger thought the whole idea was totally awesome. North Vietnam called Nixon’s bluff and told him to go fuck himself.

and there was this well-known fuckery by candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980.

What happened next, Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

the plan worked — Jimmy Carter lost the election and the hostages were released mere hours after Reagan was sworn in.

and now it’s déjà vu all over again as a confessed classified document thief does Putin’s bidding while this Grenell stooge flies around the world, making who knows what underhanded deals with any number of right-wing totalitarians.

and once again we’re all left to stand around and go how is this treasonous fuck allowed to walk the streets a free man?

folks, a word on a different subject before I let you go: we’re doing some quarterly fundraising at my other venture, The Smirking Chimp. I’m leery of even mentioning it because if you’re one of the people paying to support my own writing here, you’re already doing god’s work and you’re already doing more than enough to help out. but if you’ve got five dollars that you absolutely wouldn’t miss and you do feel like supporting the Chimp, well, that just makes you twice the hero. the donation link is here, or you can go straight to paypal if you need no further convincing. and if you don’t care to donate, that’s totally cool, too, and we will not speak of this again. in fact, we never had this conversation. thanks for listening and that’s it from me for now.