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Month: October 2016

“We found a witch! Buuuhn Her! Buuuhn the witch!”

Published by digby on October 31, 2016

“We found a witch! Buuuhn Her! Buuuhn the witch!”

by digby

The latest Trump rally

Libertarian vice presidential nominee and former Justice Department official Bill Weld thinks FBI Director James Comey made a “disgraceful” decision when he announced he intended to look at a Hillary Clinton aide’s emails in a letter to Republican congressional committee chairs.

Think Progress reports:

Comey’s letter, we know now, was sent before the FBI even read Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s emails, which were reportedly found as part of an unrelated investigation on a computer she shared with estranged husband Anthony Weiner. During a Monday morning appearance on CNN, Weld argued that Comey’s letter was premature, unnecessary, and created a political firestorm that’s benefiting Donald Trump as the presidential campaign enters its final week.
The case for firing James Comey

Weld, who was head of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department under President Reagan and later served as a Republican governor of Massachusetts, said, “If you don’t know [what’s in the emails], keep your mouth shut. Don’t speculate.” 

“Now [Comey] announces, or someone announced, ‘We got permission to look at the emails.’ They’re not even announcing, ‘We’ve looked at the emails,’” he added. “What’s it going to be tomorrow? ‘We looked at an email. There was nothing there, but tomorrow we’re going to look at another email.” 

Weld said he was speaking in his role as a former top DOJ official and not as a candidate, but expressed concern about how Comey’s letter helps Trump, who he denounced as unfit for office in a statement released last week. 

“Mr. Trump braying about this latest development reminds me of the guy in Monty Python who says, ‘She’s a witch! Burn her, burn her!’ It has no more content than that,” Weld said. “And the point of that skit in Monty Python was that those townspeople were ignorant and stupid, not that they were great.”

Weld’s running mate Gary Johnson babbled something incoherent about this being bigger than Watergate….

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James Comey is no white knight

Published by digby on October 31, 2016

James Comey is no white knight

by digby

James Comey and Michael Chertoff of the Senate Whitewater Committee
Some of us always thought picking Comey for FBI was a huge mistake.  I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

Unless you spent the weekend fishing on the Yukon River with your phone turned off, you have heard about Comeygate, the latest nuclear bomb to drop into this already explosive presidential race. The details are well explained here, but with new information being leaked by the FBI minute by minute — and with no way of knowing if any of it is true — all that could change. At the time of this writing, the cable news outlets and the front pages of all the papers are obsessed with the story, both the substance of it and the political fallout. Democrats are stunned that the FBI director would inject himself into the presidential election just 10 days out, and Republicans are giddy with excitement that their nonstop condemnation of FBI director James Comey for failing to prosecute Hillary Clinton seems to have paid off.


Most legal professionals are appalled. Jamie Gorelick and Larry Thompson, former Justice Department officials under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, put it this way intheir scathing Op-Ed in the Washington Post yesterday:

Having taken the extraordinary steps of briefing the public, testifying before Congress about a decision not to prosecute and sharing investigative material, Comey now finds himself wanting to update the public and Congress on each new development in the investigation, even before he and others have had a chance to assess its significance. He may well have been criticized after the fact had he not advised Congress of the investigative steps that he was taking. But it was his job — consistent with the best traditions of the Department of Justice — to make the right decision and take that criticism if it came.

Yes, when Rep. Jason Chaffetz and his witch-hunt committee found out after the election that the FBI had found some emails on Huma Abedin’s laptop, they would have screamed bloody murder that the FBI had covered it up. So what? The larger issue is that the rules and norms of the Justice Department have held for a very long time, and for very good reason, that in the 30 to 60 days prior to an election they should make no public announcements that could influence the vote. That’s all Comey would have had to say by way of explanation. And if Chaffetz and Trey Gowdy yell at him for doing this, well, he’s the FBI director. If he can’t take the heat and defend both his own institution and democratic norms, maybe he’s not the right man for the job.

But then this isn’t the first time Comey broke with DOJ guidelines in this case. His press conference last July announcing that no charges would be brought, while excoriating Clinton for her handling of classified emails, was completely out of bounds. If the government doesn’t have the goods, it certainly doesn’t have the right to smear the subject of its investigation anyway, which is essentially what Comey did with his statement and repeated inappropriate testimony before a partisan congressional committee. And now there’s this.

Some of us are anything but surprised. Liberals who lived through the ’90s and the endless Whitewater probe that went nowhere met President Obama’s appointment of James Comey as director of the FBI with a primal scream of “Are you kidding me?” It was inconceivable that just as President Bill Clinton foolishly appointed a Republican FBI director, Louis Freeh, who saw it as his primary duty to investigate a president he did not respect, a Democratic president was appointing a GOP lawyer to the same job 20 years later in an even more toxic political environment.

At the time, everyone in Washington seemed to be very pleased with the choice, seeing Comey as a “straight-shooter” without a political agenda. That was largely based on his dramatic congressional testimony about the night in 2004 that he and then-FBI director Robert Mueller raced to John Ashcroft’s sick bed to stop Alberto Gonzales from coercing the ailing attorney general into signing an illegal domestic spying order. A lot of civil libertarians understood that to mean the heroic Comey was arguing the constitutional point, but he wasn’t. His concerns were over a technical problem with the program’s legal basis. They fixed a few little details and Comey himself signed the order that month to keep the secret domestic surveillance program going for many years. A civil liberties hero he is not.

Comey was also the U.S. attorney who oversaw the prosecution and torture of José Padilla, an American citizen convicted of terrorism whose horrific treatment was described by a forensic scientist at his pre-trial hearing as “essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind.” Again Comey took to the microphones to gallantly inform the public that his purpose was to “allow the American people to understand the threat he posed, and also understand that the president’s decision [to prosecute Padilla as an ‘enemy combatant’] was and continues to be essential to the protection of the American people.” If there’s a camera for Comey to preen before to proclaim his righteous purpose, he’ll find it.

It’s not as if the Democrats didn’t know that Comey’s reputation for being nonpartisan was bunk before the White House inexplicably tapped him for FBI director either. He first came to public attention as the deputy special counselfor the Senate committee investigating Whitewater. Foreshadowing his testimony last summer, he and his committee were unable to find any criminal wrongdoing, but nonetheless decided to issue a public report filled with aspersions and innuendo accusing both Bill and Hillary Clinton of hiding secrets and engaging in misconduct. That’s par for the GOP course with their congressional witch hunts, but it’s beyond the pale for an FBI director.

Nonetheless, Obama appointed him and the political establishment rejoiced. But it wasn’t long until he showed that he wasn’t going to adhere to the normal rules. Indeed, Comey is the first FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover to flout institutional processes, ignore scientific data and independently wield his authority however he chooses. Since taking office on 2013 he’s battled with the executive branch on sentencing reform and how to handle the Black Lives Matter movement. He’s defied the White House on its attempt to create new policy on cybersecurity issues. He’s gone around the country ginning up hysteria about ISIS infiltration in small-town America. And then there’s the Clinton email investigation.

Comey doesn’t resemble Hoover in temperament or background. But law enforcement and justice officials have worried for years that his independent, authoritarian style was dangerous, making him politically unassailable in the same way Hoover was back in the bad old days. Legal luminaries like longtime Justice official Philip Heymann, former attorney general Eric Holder and numerous other former federal prosecutors and law enforcement officialshave objected to his latest action. Unfortunately the damage is already done. It’s a mess that can only be cleaned up with James Comey’s resignation.
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“Emails! The crime!”

Published by digby on October 31, 2016

“Emails! The crime!”

by digby

Matt Yglesias examines the Clinton Rules, which are in full-effect:

The latest Hillary Clinton email revelations arose out of an unrelated investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting.

The best way to understand this odd hopscotch is through the Prime Directive of Clinton investigations: We know the Clintons are guilty, the only question is what are they guilty of and when will we find the evidence?

So somehow an investigation that once upon a time was about a terrorist attack on an American consulate becomes an inquiry into FOIA compliance which shifts into a question about handling of classified material. A probe of sexting by the husband of a woman who works for Clinton morphs into a quest for new emails, and if the emails turn out not to be new at all (which seems likely) it will morph into some new questions about Huma Abedin’s choice of which computers to use to check her email.

Clinton has been very thoroughly investigated, and none of the earlier investigations came up with any crimes. So now the Prime Directive compels her adversaries to look under a new rock and likewise compels cable television and many major newspapers to treat the barest hint of the possibility of new evidence that might be damning as a major development.

It’s the same drive that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial on the grounds that he had perjured himself to try to cover up an affair that was uncovered in an investigation that was originally supposed to be looking into a years-old Arkansas land deal on which the Clintons had lost money. The Whitewater investigation did not reveal any crimes. So rather than wrap things up and consider the Clintons exonerated, the investigators went looking under other rocks and came up with Monica Lewinsky.

There are several rules that govern media coverage of the Clintons, but this year the Prime Directive has dominated them all. Network news has devoted more minutes of coverage to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined even as email investigations have not uncovered any wrongdoing. It’s inexplicable news judgment, unless you simply assume there’s a crime out there.

I don’t understand why someone who has been investigated for years by a runaway prosecutor and a relentless media machine and found to have committed no crime continues to be the holy grail to these people but she does. There’s a hive-mind mentality about all this that comes into play when the media decides to “like” or “not like” a politician. It’s really that simple. And they do not like Hillary Clinton.

But the assumption that Clinton is guilty of crimes based upon her use of emails in the state department is just … nonsense. There is simply no there, there. And yet it’s taken on a life of its own, as these things do, and the original “crime” is no longer the issue. And we have no idea what the issue actually is. The idea that this has anything to do with the substance of “the case” is ludicrous. There is no case.

There’s more on this at Vox. It’s a good piece.

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Should anyone be bothered by this?

Published by digby on October 31, 2016

Should anyone be bothered by this?

by digby

Whether or not you agree that VladimirPutin is a great leader whom we should admire, isn’t it just a little bit weird that Trump clearly said he knows him back in 2013 and now denies it? Was he lying then or is he lying now?

A hollowed out economy by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 31, 2016

A hollowed out economy
by Tom Sullivan

Making money using money to make more money has all but killed off the middle class. The post-war economic expansion that Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower embraced was built on making real stuff, and while the rich got theirs, the rest of working America benefited. Financialization and globalization have unmade that economy and replaced it with a hollowed out one, with hollowed out communities and hollowed out futures for the country’s youth. To the extent that both the Democratic and Republican Parties bought into the new reality they helped create, they lost authority to represent working people. Two lengthy articles address how Trumpism grew out of America’s dying blue-collar workscape left by both parties’ embrace of globalization and free trade.

At New York magazine, Jonathan Chait looks at how feeding authoritarians in its ranks slowly drowned the Republican Party, not the government, in the bathtub. The party’s elite now struggles “to appease Trump’s blue-collar supporters while still maintaining their grip on the party’s agenda, especially its fixation with reducing the top tax rate.” Accomplishing that may take some “tough, and perhaps even odious, compromises.” Trumpism with a human face, perhaps:

This misalignment between the conservative movement and the American people has, in fact, bred among conservatives a fundamental distrust of the American people. The welfare state, in the eyes of conservatives, was merely a government-sponsored mechanism by which the masses of voters could steal from the minority. (Russell Kirk, the influential mid-20th-century conservative, lamented that “taxation of the prosperous for the benefit of the less wealthy, through the votes of the benefiting crowd,” was “first cousin to theft.”) Since conservatives define liberty as the preservation of property rights, democracy — and its potential for legalizing theft via redistribution — poses a constant threat.

Some things never change.

At the New Yorker, George Packer examines how Democrats’ attempts to appease and co-opt the center separated the party from its blue-collar base. Bill Clinton led that effort in the 1990s with NAFTA, deregulation, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Hillary Clinton hopes to reconnect with them during her presidency:

In our conversation, Hillary Clinton spoke of the limits of an “educationalist” mind-set, which she called a “peculiar form of élitism.” Educationalists, she noted, say they “want to lift everybody up”—they “don’t want to tell anybody that they can’t go as high as their ambition will take them.” The problem was that “we’re going to have a lot of jobs in this economy” that require blue-collar skills, not B.A.s. “We need to do something that is really important, and this is to just go right after the denigration of jobs and skills that are not college-connected.” A four-year degree isn’t for everyone, she said; vocational education should be brought back to high schools.

What Hillary Clinton sees is how her husband’s advocacy of what Packer calls “a secular brand of Calvinism, with the state of inward grace revealed outwardly by an Ivy League degree, Silicon Valley stock options, and a White House invitation” has left behind anyone not suited or constitutionally inclined to life among the “cosmopolitan élite.” The question is, what to do about it?

Clinton believes you start with telling a better story:

I asked Clinton if Obama had made a mistake in not prosecuting any Wall Street executives after the financial crisis. She replied, “I think the failure to be able to bring criminal cases, to hold people responsible, was one of the contributing factors to a lot of the real frustration and anger that a lot of voters feel. There is just nobody to blame. So if we can’t blame Company X or C.E.O. Y, let’s blame immigrants. Right? We’ve got to blame somebody—that’s human nature. We need a catharsis.” F.D.R. had done it by denouncing bankers and other “economic royalists,” Clinton said, her voice rising. “And by doing so he told a story.” She went on, “If you don’t tell people what’s happening to them—not every story has villains, but this story did—at least you could act the way that you know the people in the country felt.”

The question is whether Clinton the policy wonk is up to that task. Clinton herself may be more up to the task of addressing people’s beliefs that government works against rather than for them by changing how government approaches their problems. Trump voters and disaffected blue-collar Democrats didn’t want less government. They want government “to do more things that benefitted them (as opposed to benefitting people they saw as undeserving).” As a minimum, they would like their lives stabilized. If we all survive this election, maybe Clinton will get half a chance to begin work on that.

Stopped clocks

Published by digby on October 31, 2016

Stopped clocks

by digby

This is another example of Republicans having no capacity for empathy unless they’ve experienced something personally. Pirro is rightly upset that a prosecutor would flout the normal rules and inject himself into an election just days before voters cast their ballots. But clearly the only reason she’s able to see the unfairness of this is because it literally happened to her.

To give her some credit, there are people like her who would find a way to defend Comey’s actions even if it had happened to them, rationalizing that it’s completely different because they didn’t deserve it and Clinton does. But there is very little evidence that Pirro had her eyes opened generally about abuse of power. It’s just that this very specific incident reminds her of her own experience.

It’s very much like the Republicans who change their minds on gay rights when one of their kids comes out or who work for government funding for a particular disease once one of their own family members contracts it. They often cling to their ideology when the concerns of other people seem like mere abstractions to them. They can’t even summon up the empathy for their constituents. It’s only when they are literally personally affected that they can feel any empathy.

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What happened to Poppy’s missing emails?

Published by digby on October 30, 2016

What happened to Poppy’s missing emails?

by digby

Here’s a little nugget from Rick Perlstein in a piece about presidential libraries and the government rules about maintaining presidential papers for historical purposes:

 Don Wilson, the national archivist appointed by Ronald Reagan (on the recommendation of Dick Cheney), was so bad that the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which usually superintends the library system with about as much vigilance as the Intelligence Committee reins in the CIA, was forced in 1992 to conclude he had “failed to exercise care and diligence in fulfilling his responsibilities.” 

So why in the world did George H.W. Bush name Wilson executive director of his library and foundation? Could it be because with only hours left in the Bush I term, Wilson signed a secret document granting Bush physical custody of the White House email backup tapes? (A federal judge would later strike this document down as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law,” but by then Wilson had already begun his new job.)

This is nothing compared to what his son did, of course, with the use of a private RNC email server and deletion of millions of official emails, but it shows that unless you’re Hillary Clinton you can do anything with emails that you like and nobody will think much about it.

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