"So when we've met, when I came out of the plane and I said, 'Good afternoon, dear neighbor. Very good to see you in good health and to see you alive.' I think that is very neighborly."

"I think that's some kind words that we can say to each other. We're separated by the strait of Bering, though, there are two islands only between the Russian Island and the U.S. Island. They're only four kilometers apart. We are close neighbors, and it's a fact."

Said Vladimir Putin, quoted in "Here's the transcript of what Putin and Trump said in Alaska." 

I pulled that quote because it's very near the beginning and because it reminds me of "I can see Russia from my house and because "to see you alive" might be what he'd say if he had been behind the 2 assassination attempts.

But I want to read it all. I'm going to live-blog my reading of the transcript here. Sorry I missed the live event last night, but at the last second we realized we could get access to the baseball game by submitting to the plot to force us to subscribe to Apple TV. The home team extended its winning streak to 13. We're joking please, please it's too much winning, we can't take it anymore.

On to the transcript. Putin continues:

"It means that the Justice Department is prepared to go out and use its criminal powers, the power of subpoena, the power to compel witnesses to testify, the ability to go to a judge and try and get a search warrant.... the federal government's most powerful tools...."

Words intoned unironically on today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, which is titled "The Sprawling Government Effort to Prosecute Barack Obama."

Transcript and audio at Podscribe, here.

I was out on my sunrise walk, listening with earbuds, and when I heard "get a search warrant," I had to restrain myself from voicing my sarcasm: Who could have thought that a former U.S. President would have a search warrant executed against him? Is there a plan to invade his home in the early morning hours? To root through the underpants and bras of the former First Lady? Inconceivable — wasn't it? — before this tyrant fought his way back into the White House.

"Trump just wants the media to cover the story."

I'm reading "Getting media to cover Obamagate/Crazy Like A Fox Trump did it again with a fake but accurate video" by Don Surber, at Substack.

The media refused this weekend to cover the story of the century, in which Obama personally helped create and promote Russiagate which tied the first presidency of Donald Trump up in knots for years and also served as a cover story for Obama using the FBI to spy on Trump....

President Trump knows beating the media better than anyone. He did what no one would ever believe possible when he forced Disney’s ABC to admit it lied about him, He collected legal fees and a $15 million donation to the Trump Presidential Library. He also collected $16 million for the library from CBS for making Kamala Harris sound intelligent in a heavily edited 60 Minutes story. You’re gonna need a bigger library. Trump forced NBC to give him equal time for Kamala’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. His time was on Sunday Night Football, which has 10 times the audience.

The media wants the Obamagate story to go away, but Trump figured out a way to make them admit there is a story. He posted an AI video of Obama being arrested. This is his post on Truth Social....

"The FBI lacked 'any actual evidence of collusion' between the Trump campaign and Russia when it violated its standards and jumped over several steps..."

"... to initiate a full investigation, including probes into four members of the Trump campaign. The pretext for the probe -- a random conversation between unpaid Trump adviser George Papadopoulos and an Australian diplomat -- was so flimsy that FBI agents complained it was 'thin' and British intelligence was incredulous. The FBI opened the probe without doing interviews, using any 'standard analytical tools,' or conducting intelligence reviews -- which would have shown that not a single U.S. agency had evidence of collusion...."

From "Why the Durham Report Matters/It is a damning account of the corruption of the FBI and its accomplices" by The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal.

"Handwritten notes from fired former FBI agent Peter Strzok show that Obama himself directed key aspects of the campaign to target Flynn during a Jan. 5, 2017 meeting in the Oval Office."

The Federalist reports.

The new notes, which record Comey’s accounting to Strzok of the meeting’s substance, constitute definitive evidence that Obama himself was personally directing significant aspects of a criminal investigation into his political enemy’s top foreign policy adviser.

NSA-D-DAG = [illegible] Other countries
D-DAG: lean forward on [illegible]
VP: “Logan Act”
P: These are unusual times
VP: I’ve been on the intel cmte for ten years and I never
P: Make sure you look at things — have the right people on it
P: Is there anything I shouldn’t be telling transition team?
D: Flynn –> Kislyak calls but appear legit
[illegible] Happy New Year. Yeah right

“Make sure you look at things and have the right people on it,” Obama is quoted as saying.

Do people who want Trump to fail ever get tired of posing as if they're offering to help him avoid failure?

I'm reading Eugene Robinson over at WaPo:

President Trump’s increasingly frantic attempts to smear former president Barack Obama reek of panic. As disgusting as these efforts are, they are likely to backfire, perhaps in spectacular fashion.

Maybe there are readers at WaPo who lap this stuff up. They want Trump to be going nuts and they'd like to see his attacks backfire spectacularly. But there's no way an interpretation like this could influence Trump. He's not going to think: I'd better calm down and realize that attacks on Obama will only hurt me. It makes much more sense for him to interpret a column like that to mean that his attacks are effective.

Maybe Trump just cannot abide the fact that Obama is a Nobel laureate, respected around the world, while he has had to endure being snickered at by world leaders and portrayed as hapless and ignorant by the “fake news” media he claims to hate yet compulsively devours. Increasingly, his imagined victimizer is Obama himself. Trump even tries to blame Obama for his own administration’s botched response to a disease that did not exist when Obama was in office.

I thought everyone knew you don’t tug on Superman’s cape....

And yet, you're doing just that.

By the way, the line "you don’t tug on Superman’s cape" comes from Jim Croce's "You Don't Mess Around With Jim," and the question why Superman wears a cape — what good does it do him? — has long plagued readers of comic books who think too much.

IN THE COMMENTS: Calypso Facto said:

"Jim" also gets his ass handed to him by the upstart "Slim" at the end of Croce's song. Maybe more on point than Eugene Robinson intended? (And isn't Slim a great nickname for Trump in response to Pelosi's failed fat-shaming?)

"Obama, these people said, made few if any remarks about Trump or the newly released conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election."

"Impeachment also never came up. Rather, the evening was casual and friendly. Obama spoke about his own experience in Congress, however brief it was before his ascension to the White House. The former president — who had campaigned for a number of freshmen in the room — said he was proud of them for fighting for what they believed was right."

I'm reading "Obama cautions freshman House Democrats about the price tag of liberal policies" (WaPo), reporting on an Obama appearance at a Democratic Party rally that happened yesterday.

I have to highlight this one sentence, because... "garner"...

While the more liberal freshmen have garnered much of the attention in Washington, many first-year Democrats hail from swing- or even red districts and have struggled with how to respond to the emboldened far-left.

I just created a new tag this morning, "Obama and the Russia hoax." So this is my second post with that tag. It's not surprising that Obama doesn't want to talk about this subject, but I want to know about his role in getting the hoax rolling. Was he just a passive bystander? His party has a lot to account for. Where was his leadership?

I remember when Trump won the election. Obama sounded so gracious the morning after the election:

"We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country," Obama said in a statement in the Rose Garden. "The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy, and over the next few months we are going to show that to the world.... Everybody is sad when their side loses an election, but the day after, we have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We're not Democrats first. We're not Republicans first. We are Americans first... This was a long and hard-fought campaign. A lot of our fellow Americans are exultant today. A lot of Americans are less so, but that's the nature of campaigns. That's the nature of democracy. It is hard and sometimes contentious and noisy. It's not always inspiring.... Sometimes you lose an argument. Sometimes you lose an election.... We try really hard to persuade people that we're right, and then people vote, and then we lose. We learn from our mistakes. We do some reflection. We lick our wounds. We brush ourselves off. We get back in the arena. We go at it. We try even harder the next time."

The "arena" is the public space — politics, fought out in the open. The goal is the next election. That's not where Democrats chose to "go at it" and "try even harder." Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?

"The Mainstream Media is under fire and being scorned all over the World as being corrupt and FAKE."

"For two years they pushed the Russian Collusion Delusion when they always knew there was No Collusion. They truly are the Enemy of the People and the Real Opposition Party!"

Trump's morning tweet, 19 minutes ago.

ALSO: From last night:

WSJ: Obama Admin Must Account for ‘Abuse of Surveillance Powers’ https://t.co/mIE0vOFZae via @BreitbartNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 26, 2019