Month: January 2017

Keep a list so you don’t adapt

by digby

This is a useful exercise. Amy Siskind is keeping a list of the weekly Trump atrocities on Facebook. Here’s just this week:

Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember. Here’s my list for week 9:

1. The Office of Government Ethics director publicly lamented, “we seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election.”
2.Three vendors have placed liens on the Trump hotel in DC for unpaid bills of over $5 million, in total.
3. The OGE similarly said they had not completed ethics reviews of Trump’s cabinet nominees. Leader McConnell said the Democrats need to “grow up” on Trump’s desire for speedy confirmations.
4. Sean Hannity endorsed a tweet which said “Make Russia Great Again” with the word, “Amen.” Hannity later deleted his tweet.
5. Meryl Streep used her Golden Globes lifetime of notable work speech to eloquently attack Trump, without mentioning his name.
6. Trump responded via a tweet that Streep is an “over-rated” actress, and denied he had mocked a disabled reporter.
7. Trump took credit for a Fiat Chrysler plant and jobs in MI and OH. Fiat Chrysler responded that Trump had nothing to do with it.
8. Trump appointed Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to a top WH post, possibly violating the 1967 federal anti-nepotism statute.
9. Trump told the NYT that all the dress shops in DC are sold out for his inauguration. This was a lie.
10. Trump team dismissed the National Nuclear Security Administration and his deputy, responsible for maintaining our nuclear arsenal, as of January 20. Trump also dismissed the commanding general of the DC national guard.
11. Cory Booker became the first US Senator to speak out against a fellow sitting senator at a confirmation hearing (Sessions for AG).
12. CNN reported a bombshell – Intelligence chiefs had briefed Trump that Russia had gathered information to blackmail him (the dossier).
13. Same day, BuzzFeed published contents of the dossier, which apparently had been in the hands of the FBI and some in the media since the summer. Contents included the infamous golden shower.
14. Trump denied having been briefed, and said the contents of the dossier were confirmed by intelligence to be fake. DNI Clapper issued a public statement indicating the dossier’s contents are still being verified (not fake), and media reported that Comey met with Trump one-on-one to review the dossier the prior Friday.
15. Trump held his first press conference since July. Trump packed the room with paid employees, who applauded him, and jeered at reporters.
16. At presser, Trump said he had no plans to release his tax returns, or resolve conflicts of interest, saying, “I have no-conflict situation because I’m president.”
17. Trump bullied reporters at two news outlets, calling them “fake news,” and used other news outlets as evidence.
18. The director of the OGE publicly blasted Trump’s non-plan for dealing with conflicts of interest. Next day, Rep Jason Chaffetz threatened to investigate the OGE.
19. Next day, while meeting with CEO of AT&T at Trump Tower (AT&T needs approval for their merger with Time Warner, parent company of CNN) Trump tweeted CNN is “FAKE NEWS” and tanking.
20. Rep Barbara Lee said she would not attend Trump’s inauguration. During the week, the list grew to 6 members of Congress.
21. Trump encouraged his followers in a tweet to “buy L.L. Bean,” in violation of a WH policy prohibiting the endorsement of products.
22. The Justice Department inspector general opened an investigation into allegations of misconduct by the FBI and Comey, leading up to the election.
23. C-Span’s online broadcast was interrupted by Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT, while Rep Maxine Waters was speaking. Waters has said she will not meet with Trump. The broadcast was also interrupted that morning when a Senator discussed Russian hacking.
24. WAPO reported that Michael Flynn, Trump’s NSA, spoke to Russia’s envoy on Dec 29th, the day Obama announced sanctions on Russia. Trump team initially denied this, then later, said they spoke only once that day. Reuters reports they spoke 5 times that day.
25. Trump continued to deny Russian hacking, and to use quotes around Intelligence in his tweets.
26. Trump appointed Rudy Giuliani to a cybersecurity role – albeit though a private company.
27. Trump appointed a sixth Goldman Sachs (past or present) employees to a major role in his administration.
28. After Congress was briefed by Intelligence chiefs, Rep John Lewis said, “I don’t see Trump as a legitimate president.”
29. Next morning, Trump tweeted a disparaging attack on Lewis, on MLK weekend, saying he was all talk.
30. Democrats in Congress were furious with FBI director Comey’s unwillingness to answer their questions and fully brief them.
31. UK media broke that the former agent who gathered the info in the dossier, had shared his findings with the FBI, starting in the summer, and had become concerned that a cabal within the FBI was compromised and attempting to cover-up information.
32. The Senate announced hearings on possible Russia-Trump ties, and said subpoenas would be used if necessary.
33. The FEC sent Trump a letter listing 247 pages of illegal contributions to his campaign.
34. In the wake of the Trump dossier becoming public, Russia’s cybersecurity head is out of a job.
35. Human Rights Watch issued it’s annual report of threats to human rights around the world. For the first time in 27 years, the US is listed as a top threat because of the rise of Trump.
36. A Quinnipiac poll showed Trump’s favorability ratings continuing to slide to historic lows for modern day presidents: only 37% of Americans view Trump favorably.

Past weeks:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8

Chaffetz searches for the real killer

by digby

House Republicans have found a subject for their opening review of conflicts of interest under Donald Trump: the federal official in charge of investigating conflicts of interest. 

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the head of the House Oversight Committee, criticized the director of the federal Office of Government Ethics on Thursday over his criticism of Donald Trump’s plan to address conflicts of interest. And he threatened to subpoena the official, Walter Shaub, if he refuses to participate in an official interview.

Isn’t that special? Chaffetz is upset that the with Schaub for making pronouncements about ethics rules which is his job. And for no reason!

Earlier Thursday, Chaffetz had praised Trump’s newly announced ethics policy. “President-elect Trump’s obligation is to comply with the laws on the books. It appears he is going to great lengths to be as responsible as possible and comply with those requirements,” he said in a statement. 

On Wednesday, Trump rolled out an ethics policy that places his two adult sons and a longtime executive in charge of his company, as well as imposing a prohibition on new international deals and requiring a newly-appointed Trump Organization ethics staffer to review any domestic changes in the portfolio. The approach falls short of the total divestment that Shaub, ethics officials and many Democrats have called for. 

This isn’t Chaffetz’s first time challenging Shaub. In late 2015, the Republican accused the Obama appointee of giving Hillary Clinton a pass on conflict-of-interest laws over speaking fees she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, were supposed to disclose.

Chaffetz plans to continue to persecute Hillary Clinton by the way.

Adapt or die
by Tom Sullivan

After the kakistocracy follies of the last few weeks and after watching both Democrats and the national press struggle to adapt to the new order, “adapt or die” came to mind from Moneyball:

Grady:
Baseball isn’t just numbers.
It’s not science.
If it was, anybody could do
what we’re doing, but they can’t
Because they don’t know what we know.
They don’t have our experience
And they don’t have our intuition.

Billy:
Okay.

Grady:
Billy, you got a kid in there that’s got
a degree in economics from Yale.
You got a scout here with with 29 years
of baseball experience.
You’re listening to the wrong one.
Now, there are intangibles that
only baseball people understand.
You’re discounting what scouts
have done for 150 years?
Even yourself?

Billy:
Adapt or die.

Replace “baseball” with “politics” and I imagine you could hear the same conversation several times a day inside the Beltway between sage, old political hands and the new kids on the block. It’s wisdom handed down from party elders with decades on their resumes of doing what they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it, because that’s the way it’s always been done and because that’s what donors are comfortable funding. Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) tells Oakland manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), “Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions.” Not only baseball.

Adapt or die. Welcome to a brave, new world.

What Democrats have (Republicans too) are consultants and aging political players who know the game inside out. Just like that scout. But they only know how to play the game one way: the way they’ve always played it. The way that’s always worked for them. Problem is, Donald Trump and his alt-right posse just tore up the rule book and burned the pieces. Other books come later.

Yes, norms matter. To the civilized. To barbarians, not so much. So now what?

I’ve got a growing collection of Democratic postmortems with all kinds of advice you can expect the party cognoscenti to ignore because it takes them out of their comfort zone. A lot of criticism focuses on Hillary Clinton’s team being arrogant, or on the DNC for supposedly having its thumb on the scale — but no more than the Russians. Some Berners speak as though Debbie Wasserman Schultz personally twisted 17 million arms into voting for Hillary Clinton in the primaries. (Bernie Sanders received 13 million votes.) Clinton partisans point to the 2.8 million more votes Clinton received than Donald Trump as though his win was just a fluke. Indeed, it may have been a fluke. But it wasn’t only a fluke.

Even if Clinton had pulled in another 100,000 votes in the right states to win in the Electoral College, the down-ballot losses and loss of governorships and legislatures Democrats have accrued over years would not have changed. That’s not a presidential candidate problem, but a more systemic one.

Adapt or die.

Here in North Carolina, Democratic legislators are so outgunned by a Republican supermajority, they attend each session as walking punching bags to be shut out and laughed at by GOP legislators. On Capitol Hill, Democrats face similar margins and have to hope for fractures on the Republican side to prevent Republicans from rolling back the 20th century and chopping up the social safety net.

The Washington Post observed:

The traditional Washington ways of messaging have not changed either. Members of Congress speak from the floor to largely empty press galleries. They gather in TV studios, where few networks cut in to cover them. They respond to tweets with wordy press releases, columns, or open letters, each one staff-edited down to the last period after the last talking point.

And they hold press stunts that worked before Trump came to town. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday, for instance, that Democrats would “hold the floor late into the night” to protest the Obamacare repeal push with cameras rolling. Less clear was whether anyone would be watching.

Adapt or die.

“if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball

Billy Beane has to build a winning team for his bottom-of-the-barrel club using the limited budget he’s given. He has to get creative. He does. Democrats are facing an epic shitstorm dismasted and without a rudder. To get through it and come out on the other side, they had better find some fresh thinking.

If you’re not Goliath, fine. Be David.

Friday Night Soother: snowday!

by digby

Portland Oregan has had record snowfall. And the animals are loving it. Even the human animals:

Ted Lieu FTW!

by digby

My congressman:

Heh. Clever on several levels.

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They don’t come any dumber than this

by digby

Trump at a Republican Hindu Association campaign event

It’s just … unbelievable:

A Texas lawmaker on the House intelligence committee says it wasn’t just the Russians who interfered in last year’s election.

Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland, is comparing the use of Mexican entertainers to energize Democratic voters to the email hacking that officials say was orchestrated by Vladimir Putin’s government.
“Harry Reid and the Democrats brought in Mexican soap opera stars, singers and entertainers who had immense influence in those communities into Las Vegas, to entertain, get out the vote and so forth,” Conaway told The Dallas Morning News this week. “Those are foreign actors, foreign people, influencing the vote in Nevada. You don’t hear the Democrats screaming and saying one word about that.”

Asked whether he considers that on par with Russian cyber-intrusions that aimed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Conaway said: “Sure it is, it’s foreign influence. If we’re worried about foreign influence, let’s have the whole story.”

Vicente Fernández, a famous Mexican singer and entertainer, recorded a song during the campaign supporting Clinton. After the third presidential debate, Fernández joined California-based band Los Tigres del Norte and American-born Mexican actress Angélica María at a post-debate “fiesta” in Las Vegas.

Well, they do believe that Mexico is a formidable enemy so I guess that makes sense to them.

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What was he sitting on?

by digby

This sounds like they learned something pretty upsetting:

A number of House Democrats left Friday’s confidential briefing on Russian hacking fuming over the actions of FBI Director James Comey and convinced he’s unfit to lead the agency.

“I was nonjudgmental until the last 15 minutes. I no longer have that confidence in him,” Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), ranking member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said as he left the meeting in the Capitol.

“Some of the things that were revealed in this classified briefing — my confidence has been shook.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), senior Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, delivered a similar condemnation.

“I’m extremely concerned — extremely,” he said.

“I’ll just — I’m very angry,” echoed Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.).

The intelligence community believes Russia hacked Democratic groups in an effort to help elect President-elect Donald Trump, claims Trump had publicly cast doubt on before this week.

Comey has been under fire since several weeks before the Nov. 8 elections, when he announced a new leg in an FBI investigation into the use of a private email server by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — a probe that, as with the first round, resulted in no criminal charges. In response, many Democrats have accused Comey of altering the course of the presidential race in favor of Trump.

The Justice Department’s inspector general on Thursday announced a new investigation into the agency’s actions leading up to the election, a probe that will focus on Comey’s public statements as well as FBI leaks and other relevant correspondences.

Republicans have largely defended Comey, and many left Friday’s briefing with their minds unchanged.

“The FBI director is a good man who was placed in a very difficult position,” said Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.). “His boss [U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch] made life very difficult for him in the last year when she met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac.”

Democrats have a markedly different take.

“I want to [have faith in Comey],” said a visibly annoyed Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.). “I have concerns. Stay tuned.”

Yet there’s also a powerful sense among the Democrats that, while their faith in Comey has plummeted, they’d rather have him atop the FBI than roll the dice to see who Trump would tap as a replacement.

“Do I have confidence in him? Not really. But I think he’s probably going to be better than the guy they’d put in,” said one Democrat, who spoke only anonymously to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s like a rock and a hard place, but I think that’s pretty much where a lot of people are.”

Walz, for one, is not in that place.

“I’m disappointed, outraged — many of us are right now,” Walz said. “I’ll wait to pass full judgment, but the exchange that just happened in the final 15 minutes gives me no reason to have confidence.”

Shortly after the meeting, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — a sharp critic of Comey’s actions leading up to the elections — spoke broadly about the FBI without weighing in on Comey specifically. She suggested she’s waiting for the results of the DOJ’s IG report to pass a judgement on the FBI director.

“No, I haven’t lost confidence in the agency,” she told reporters in the Capitol.

“My concern about the FBI is the timing and their not signing [the broader intelligence document on Russian hacking]. And that was the judgment of Director Comey, unless it goes deeper, and that’s what the investigation will find out,” she added. “Let’s find out how they thought this was a good idea to make the judgments they did, and understanding — weighing full well — that the Russians were actively engaged in disrupting our election.”

I don’t know what he told them but I have to guess that the anger stems from the fact that he was sitting on Russian information before the election (as he should have been) but thought it was appropriate to drop the nuclear bomb in the race 11 days out to hurt Clinton. Either he’s a partisan Republican or he’s a dolt who shouldn’t be in such a sensitive position. Either way it’s a travesty.

I understand they are worried about what might replace him. And maybe this is one situation where doing the right thing by firing him could really backfire. But damn .. this is bad.

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He’s  sick

The leap to “guilty as hell” was a big one. The investigation will center on why Mr. Comey sent a public letter to Congress in the last days of the campaign announcing that the F.B.I. was reopening the Clinton emails investigation after discovering other messages on the laptop of Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide. Days later, Mr. Comey announced that the computer held no incriminating evidence.

Today’s “imagine if …”

by digby

Brought to you by Lindsay Graham:

WATCH: Not healthy to question the competency and loyalty of US intel community, Sen. Graham says of pres.-elect’s “Nazi Germany?” tweet. pic.twitter.com/FnhnLNx97i

— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) January 12, 2017

A CIA director who’s waiting for the Rapture

by digby

Yep. Pompeo’s another freakshow. I wrote about him for Salon this morning:

One of the many side stories that has gotten lost in the chaos of the Trump transition is the fact that far-right Islamophobe Frank Gaffney has been serving as a foreign policy adviser. Considering Donald Trump’s views about Muslims, this isn’t too surprising. Trump’s shallow understanding of the issue of Islamist extremism has obviously been gleaned from the right-wing fever swamps and Gaffney owns that end of the bog. (The Southern Poverty Law Center has the full Gaffney dossier here.)

But with all the excitement over Trump’s various mounting scandals, Gaffney’s influence has flown under the radar, at least until this week, That’s when one of his close associates went up to Capitol Hill to testify at his CIA director confirmation hearing. That’s right, Trump’s nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas, is a Gaffney guy.

This article by Michelle Goldberg in Slate delves into Pompeo’s ultra-conservative religious beliefs, which clearly inform his ideas about Islam. And it led him to an alliance with Gaffney, who is so extreme that he believes Grover Norquist is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who has infiltrated the National Rifle Association. He is so far out there that he was banned from CPAC for insisting that their board was similarly tainted. According to Goldberg, Trump’s CIA director nominee appears frequently on Pompeo’s radio show:

Gaffney once called Pompeo “one of the most intelligent men I know in public life,” and the two see the world similarly. In February 2015, they spoke about President Obama’s use of the term “violent extremism” instead of “radical Islam,” a linguistic choice that some on the right see as a secret message of solidarity with jihad. Gaffney suggested that Obama might be conveying “an affinity” for ISIS’s cause, if not all its tactics: “the raising up of the Muslim Ummah, a grand rebalancing of America’s role in the world.” Pompeo relied, “Frank, every place you stare at the president’s policies and statements, you see what you just described … every policy of this administration has treated America as if we are the problem and not the solution.”

While we have no word on Pompeo’s position on Grover Norquist, he has told Gaffney on his show that he believes “there are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways. They’re not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas, and small towns all throughout America.”

Pompeo is a deeply conservative evangelical Christian who says, “America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.” He believes politics is “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.” He does not sound like the type of person one normally associates with the intelligence community. But this is the Trump administration, and Trump has promised to shake things up. An apocalyptic Islamophobic fanatic at the head of CIA will no doubt bring change to the agency.

Before the hearings began on Thursday, I had assumed one of Trump’s main attractions to Pompeo for the job must have been his enthusiastic support for CIA torture. He was on the record after the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s  report as being fully supportive of the program:

“Our men and women who were tasked to keep us safe in the aftermath of 9/11 — our military and our intelligence warriors — are heroes, not pawns in some liberal game being played by the ACLU and Senator Feinstein,” Pompeo said in a statement on Dec. 9, 2014. “These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots. The programs being used were within the law, within the constitution, and conducted with the full knowledge [of] Senator Feinstein. If any individual did operate outside of the program’s legal framework, I would expect them to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

They were done under secret legal findings and were not within the Constitution, but that’s another story. The fact is that Pompeo was clearly an advocate of torture and his new boss, Donald Trump, is ecstatic about it:

“They asked me, What do you think about waterboarding, Mr. Trump?’ I said I love it. I love it, I think it’s great. And I said the only thing is, we should make it much tougher than waterboarding, and if you don’t think it works folks, you’re wrong.”

Trump has also declared that his presidential orders to torture suspected terrorists would not be refused by those under him. When told that torture is illegal, he simply said he would change the law because we “have to get tougher.”

Pompeo surprised the committee when he said he would not comply with an order to torture and that he couldn’t imagine Trump would ask him to do it. He insisted he would always comply with the law. Of course, he also says the Bush administration’s torture regime was legal, so that’s not entirely reassuring. Still, Pompeo’s testimony was widely interpreted as distancing him from Trump’s stated position.

Pompeo also seemed to come down hard on the Russian hacking allegations, which was again seen as diverting from the Trump party line. But then it was pointed out that he had enthusiastically tweeted about the hacking of the DNC, and Pompeo stumbled badly under questioning by Sen. Angus King of Maine. King asked Pompeo if he thinks WikiLeaks is a reliable source, and Pompeo said he did not. Then King inquired why Pompeo had cited WikiLeaks as “proof” that “the fix was in.” Pompeo hemmed and hawed, and finally said he’d have to go back and look at it. But that tweet shows that Pompeo has the temperament of a right-wing political activist, not the sober and mature temperament required for the job of CIA director.

Like many of Trump’s nominees, he deviated just enough from the boss’s craziest pronouncements and policies to give the impression that he will serve as a moderating force in the administration. This seems odd, considering Trump’s domineering personality. It is more likely that Trump and his team are telling the nominees to say whatever they need to say to be confirmed.

Maybe Trump isn’t listening to what his nominees say on the Hill, or just doesn’t care. Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter. Trump will be the president and they will either do as he says or they will have to resign. Judging from Pompeo’s past comments and his apocalyptic worldview, if Trump orders actions against “radical Islamic terrorists” or demands that suspects be tortured, he will probably have no problem following orders. Indeed, he will likely be eager to do it.