Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/13/fbi-reveals-name-of-saudi-emba.html
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Errr… but her e-mails?
Nah. What do you say to stuff from that period? The trumpism don’t work on that.
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Literally nothing to see here.
I mean “act on”, sorry.
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Here is your trumpism, at the end of the article:
Trump was receptive and even got energized after being told that among those who had resisted disclosure in the past were former FBI directors Robert Mueller and James Comey. Trump at one point said they were “scum” and vowed to help the families.
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Trump vowed to help, according to those in the meetings. “He shook all of our hands and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to help you guys,’” said Eagleson.
“We left that meeting feeling elated,” he said. “We were finally going to see the documents.’”
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The very next day, on Sept. 12, Justice Department lawyers gave the families the identity of the third man — but under the condition that they couldn’t publicly disclose it. That same day, Barr filed his first motion with the court declaring all the material being sought by the families as “state secrets” that could not be shared.
“We felt we had been stabbed in the back,” said Eagleson.
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Malfeasance tempered by incompetence
Sigh. Just another example of this administration’s approach to governance:
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Oops. Countdown until nothing substantive is done about it in 3, 2, 1…
Welcome to Trump’s America. Enjoy your stay.
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I’ll save you the dig:
"The reference is to Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official who was assigned to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., in 1999 and 2000. His duties apparently included overseeing the activities of Ministry of Islamic Affairs employees at Saudi-funded mosques and Islamic centers within the United States.
“Relatively little is known about Jarrah, but according to former embassy employees, he reported to the Saudi ambassador in the United States (at the time Prince Bandar), and that he was later reassigned to the Saudi missions in Malaysia and Morocco, where he is believed to have served as recently as last year.”
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Fun fact: the ambassador was so cozy with the family of the president at the time that he was nicknamed “Bandar Bush”.
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Everyone knows some rich Saudis were involved. But some rich Saudis are also our allies. That and the guy would have had diplomatic immunity.
I’m sorta wondering if this was an actually screw-up or a deliberate screw-up.
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It’s a handy shot across the Saudis’ bow regarding oil pricing and required arms purchases.
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Last I heard, oil prices had effectively gone negative.
Exactly. The warning may be to get OPEC to trim production and begin to raise prices once the tankers get offloaded. The US shale oil industry is devastated and needs prices to go way up.
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Wait, singular?
The prices on some oil futures contracts have reached the point of money loss. That’s what’s actually meant by that. The actual price to go and buy a barrel of oil necessarily never drops below the storage costs, which is around $20/barrel. A futures contract going negative is not a dramatic sound bite, though, so people keep repeating this “negative price” thing. A negative futures contract is just someone betting the price wouldn’t go down and it did.
Sorry to pick on you here, but this factoid has become a peeve of mine. 
Your use of the word “effectively” suggests you get something is amiss with this thing people keep saying. It makes no sense on the face of it, yet nobody seems to get curious enough to look it up from that. They just repeat it. Of course the price of a good never gets to the point where people pay you to take it. That’s silly.
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I heard something that implied an issue for some producers where there’s a cost and possible technica/safety issues with shutting down a well, meaning the oil is going to come out. They can’t just pump it out onto the ground (some will just pump it onto the ground) so they can store it (in a tank/tanker truck/tanker ship) and pay those costs, or sell it if they can, or pay someone to take it.
Also, there was a story about “traders” having contracts to buy which contracts they expected to resell at a later date, but with no buyers for their contracts the traders suddenly found themselves having to take possession of the oil, which they weren’t equipped to do because that never happens. They had to dispose of the oil i.e. pay someone to take it.
Not questioning what you know. This is just my impression. If this is naive, please educate me.
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Yah, those are all basically nuances of the same issue- negative futures contracts. The people who bought the contracts are trying to get out of having to take the oil, and the tank farms are running out of storage and getting desperate for someone to take it. The traders are being forced to buy oil at a loss, then have nowhere to put it, and there’s nobody to buy it because demand is so low. That’s no doubt causing a lot of unusual situations like you describe.
I’m definitely not an expert on this. My only knowledge comes from a Planet Money episode that got me interested and some subsequent additional reading on how futures contracts work. What’s been ruffling my feathers is the oversimplification that “the price of oil is negative”, which is reductive to the point of absurdity with regard to a very complex market.
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