Month: February 2017

All hell is breaking loose in the White House this week. With the resignation of Michael Flynn as national security adviser on Monday night and the ensuing fallout, the Trump administration is careening into a full-blown crisis. This didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s been obvious since the campaign that Donald Trump’s alleged leadership talents were more hype than reality.

His fluky campaign victory convinced him that he was a genius. But he’s never run anything more complicated than his family business, doesn’t read books or listen to people and is a narcissist who thinks he already knows everything there is to know and actually knows almost nothing.

This is not the first time we’ve had presidents who didn’t have a lot going on upstairs or were a bit kooky. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush come to mind when you think about the former and Richard Nixon was more than a little bit unbalanced. But both Reagan and Bush respected the office and hired experienced staff to help them execute the job professionally. Nixon had major personality defects but was highly intelligent. Trump’s incompetence and extreme egotism are a lethal combination and it’s led to his presidency’s coming apart before it even came together.

Our democratic system does have methods to deal with a situation like this. The press was slow off the mark but is working hard to inform the public now that Trump has assumed office. Reporters seem to be blessed with dozens of sources from inside the administration, government agencies and the intelligence services, all of whom seem to be in a near state of panic about the evolving Trump debacle.

The courts have independent power and have already begun to deploy it against Trump’s ill-considered travel ban. At the end of the day they may not be able to stop the administration’s odious orders entirely, but they are slowing down the process. Trump and his staff may not understand that the judiciary is an equal branch but judges do. Although they generally show a lot of deference to the executive in national security cases, this early experience may have them exerting more resistance than usual.

The federal police agencies and the intelligence community have vast power to investigate, and from what we have learned through the Flynn case, they are doing just that. But while the Department of Justice could prosecute staff, the president can be removed only through impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment, checks that belong solely to Congress. Unfortunately, that looks like the least promising avenue for accountability.

Congressional investigations are familiar events in American political life going back many decades and have included the McCarthy hearings, the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals, the Clinton impeachment and the 9/11 Commission. Most recently we saw one of the most relentless investigations in history — an examination of the attack in Benghazi, encompassing half a dozen probes by five different committees and the formation of a Select House Committee for that specific purpose. Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, promised to continue investigating after the election, saying, “It’s a target-rich environment. Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up.” Of course, he was envisioning investigations of a White House led by a President Hillary Clinton.

On the news that Flynn had resigned, Chaffetz said the matter “was taking care of itself” and he feels no need to look into it. He’s also not interested in Trump’s conflicts of interest and has decided to investigate the head of the Office of Government Ethics for questioning the Trump administration’s conflicts of interest instead.

Rep. David Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, says he’s launching an immediate investigation — of the leaks about the Flynn matter, not about what went on in the White House. He says executive privilege prevents it. (If only Hillary Clinton had known things worked that way! We could have saved tens of millions of dollars and years of fruitless investigating.)

Nunes was part of Trump’s transition team and should rightly recuse himself but hasn’t indicated any plans to do so, instead issuing a glowing statement about the heroism of Michael Flynn. According to Department of Justice rules, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who also advised Trump throughout the campaign, must recuse himself here as well. There is no word that he has done so — a matter the press will presumably pursue in the coming days.

There is some good news from the Senate. While Majority Leader Mitch McConnell still wishes to confine the investigation to the secretive intelligence committee, a few GOP Senators are taking the matter more seriously, which could perhaps lead to a call for a broader probe. Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bob Corker, John Cornyn and Roy Blunt have all made statements at least suggesting that it might be a good idea to look into this thing.

Sen. Rand Paul probably spoke for the majority of Republicans, however, when he told a radio show on Tuesday, “I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense.”

That’s quite a switch from Paul’s righteous declaration in 2012 that “you need to have people within your own party that have the wherewithal to stand up to you. If a Republican does injustice, I’ll be up on the floor saying the same thing.”

As Salon’s Simon Maloy noted on Tuesday, this issue has Republicans in a bind. If they let it go and these leaks continue and it becomes obvious that something very bad lies beneath the Flynn scandal, they will look cowardly and unpatriotic. If they do take up the investigation, it could indeed suck up a lot of the energy that they need to pass their ambitious dystopian agenda.

That was the Donald’s devil’s bargain. As The New York Times reported on Sunday:

[T]he Republican-controlled House and Senate seem to have made a collective decision: They will accommodate — not confront — his conduct as long as he signs their long-stalled conservative proposals on taxes, regulations and health care into law. 

“There’s a widely held view among our members that, yes, he’s going to say things on a daily basis that we’re not going to like,” said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the third-ranking Senate Republican, “but that the broad legislative agenda and goals that we have — if we can stay focused on those and try and get that stuff enacted — those would be big wins.”

Allowing a president to blow up the world is a small price to pay in exchange for tax cuts for the wealthy, am I right?

Knowing the difference
by Tom Sullivan

A lot of people around this lefty, but defiantly “independent” town have discovered political activism for the first time. A couple of Indivisible groups have already formed and merged. There is a large Our Revolution group as well. They are planning to attend Democratic precinct meetings in a couple of weeks. It is the same across the country.

A notice showed up the other day about a traveling road show that seems to be connected somehow with the Democratic Party. It looks to be former Obama and OFA staffers, a kind of mainstream Democrat effort to reinvent Wellstone or something.

The feeling I get from people is they want action. They are looking for when the next rally gives them an opportunity to burn Donald Trump in effigy. They want to engage. They want to do something, anything. They’re just not quite sure what what that something looks like. So they march, hold meetings, etc. They want to organize phone banks. What they want to do with them outside of campaign season escapes me. But they’ll figure that out if they stay with it.

The “take back the Democratic Party for the people” rhetoric from Sanders campaign vets at Our Revolution has some regular Democratic operatives wary and put off. What are we, chopped liver? When they say they aren’t being defensive about it, they are being defensive about it. For me, if Bernie vets think they can do better, show us what you’ve got. About the time of Dean’s 50 state strategy, we were the crazy, too-far-left, too “ain’t from around here” insurgent Democrats the old boys thought were going to ruin just everything. Me, I want to see all that new blood: Indivisible, Revolution, whatever.

What’s troublesome is just how conservative established players become about embracing new energy. Boldness, being willing to take risks and fail fades. They are forever protecting whatever it is they think they have left to protect. We play “rope-a-dope,” thinking we’ll win by decision, not realizing we’re just getting pummeled. To win over the crowd, Democrats have to come out of the corner punching.

People jumping into activism now are looking for bold leadership. Democrats — with a few noteworthy exceptions — are too often the party of same-old leadership. Competent, yes, but not bold. (That’s not a dig at Hillary Clinton; this is widespread.)

I’m reminded of the “drink the sand” scene in The American President. In the current circumstance, many Americans went to the Trump mirage and drank the sand because Trump is their idea of what leadership looks like. Democrats as a party are too invested in waiting for the other team to fail to display the kind of boldness that says leadership to Americans looking for some.

“People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.”

The spigot of lies

by digby

A word from Dan Rather:

Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now. It was the closest we came to a debilitating Constitutional crisis, until maybe now. On a 10 scale of armageddon for our form of government, I would put Watergate at a 9. This Russia scandal is currently somewhere around a 5 or 6, in my opinion, but it is cascading in intensity seemingly by the hour. And we may look back and see, in the end, that it is at least as big as Watergate. It may become the measure by which all future scandals are judged. It has all the necessary ingredients, and that is chilling.

When we look back at Watergate, we remember the end of the Nixon Presidency. It came with an avalanche, but for most of the time my fellow reporters and I were chasing down the story it rumbled along with a low-grade intensity. We never were quite sure how much we would find out about what really happened. In the end, the truth emerged into the light, and President Nixon descended into infamy.

This Russia story started out with an avalanche and where we go from here no one really knows. Each piece of news demands new questions. We are still less than a month into the Trump Presidency, and many are asking that question made famous by Tennessee Senator Howard Baker those many years ago: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” New reporting suggests that Mr. Trump knew for weeks. We can all remember the General Michael Flynn’s speech from the Republican National Convention– “Lock her up!” in regards to Hillary Clinton. If Hillary Clinton had done one tenth of what Mr. Flynn had done, she likely would be in jail.

And it isn’t just Mr. Flynn, how far does this go?

The White House has no credibility on this issue. Their spigot of lies– can’t we finally all agree to call them lies– long ago lost them any semblance of credibility. I would also extend that to the Republican Congress, who has excused away the Trump Administration’s assertions for far too long.

We need an independent investigation. Damn the lies, full throttle forward on the truth. If a scriptwriter had approached Hollywood with what we are witnessing, he or she would probably have been told it was way too far-fetched for even a summer blockbuster. But this is not fiction. It is real and it is serious. Deadly serious. We deserve answers and those who are complicit in this scandal need to feel the full force of justice.

He oughtta know…

The Big Q

by digby

So Flynn was talking to the Russian ambassador during the election campaign. Oh.

David Corn:

When the news first emerged in June that the Democratic National Committee had been cyber-penetrated, private cyber experts immediately concluded that Russian intelligence was the culprit. Trump and his campaign, though, refused to acknowledge that. But on August 17, Trump, as the GOP presidential nominee, began receiving briefings from the US intelligence committee. And the material presented to him included the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was meddling in the US election. Flynn was with Trump for this briefing. So whatever was being reported in the media, as of mid-August, Flynn knew that US intelligence believed Moscow was trying to undermine the election. And on October 7, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement publicly announcing this conclusion.

This means that during the campaign, Flynn, a high-ranking Trump aide, was knowingly talking with a senior official of a regime that was trying to undermine the election to benefit Trump. So what did they chat about? Did Flynn warn Kislyak not to mess with US democracy? Or did he give the Russians reasons to prefer Trump over Hillary Clinton and, consequently, more motivation for their covert efforts to nudge the election toward Trump?

What Flynn told Kislyak during the campaign could be much more important than their discussions about the sanctions prior to the inauguration. There is a possibility that Flynn, acting on behalf of the Trump campaign, signaled to Putin that his decision to assist Trump was on the money. Of course, there are even darker possibilities of more direct collusion.

I have no idea what really went on, of course. But the stuff that happened at the GOP convention has always struck me as very, very weird. It’s one thing for the Russians to hack the campaign, if that’s what happened. It’s creepy but not entirely surprising. If Trump’s campaign was involved in it it’s a whole different story. That’s the question we’re homing in on.

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Lying to the FBI is a big no-no

by digby

And it looks as though Flynn may  have done so:

F.B.I. agents interviewed Michael T. Flynn when he was national security adviser in the first days of the Trump administration about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, current and former officials said on Tuesday.

The interview raises the stakes of what so far has been a political scandal that cost Mr. Flynn his job. If he was not entirely honest with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it could expose Mr. Flynn to a felony charge. President Trump asked for Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night.

While it is not clear what he said in his F.B.I. interview, Mr. Flynn maintained publicly for more than a week after his interview that his conversations with the ambassador had been innocuous and did not involve Russian sanctions, something now known to be false.

The New York Times would like to hear from readers who want to share messages and materials with our journalists.

Shortly after the F.B.I. interview, on Jan. 26, the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, told the White House that Mr. Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail because of inconsistencies between what he had said publicly and what intelligence officials knew to be true.

At issue is a conversation during the presidential transition in which Mr. Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador about sanctions levied against Russia by the Obama administration. The call spurred an investigation by the F.B.I. into whether Mr. Flynn had violated the rarely invoked Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes with the United States.

The National Security Agency routinely eavesdrops on calls involving high-ranking foreign diplomats. Mr. Flynn was not a focus of the eavesdropping, officials said.

It is not clear whether Mr. Flynn had a lawyer for his interview with the F.B.I. or whether anyone at the White House, including lawyers there, knew the interview was happening.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that President Trump was made aware of the situation weeks ago. Mr. Spicer said the White House had reviewed the situation and determined that Mr. Flynn didn’t violate any laws during his call with the Russian ambassador.

Mr. Spicer said Mr. Flynn was asked to resign because he had lost the trust of the president and vice president.

Spicer said the White House counsel Don McGahn had been told and he determined that no laws had been broken. Maybe that means Flynn didn’t lie to the FBI. Or maybe it means that McGahn thinks executive privilege or something exempts Flynn. He’s the guy who has told Trump it’s impossible for the president to be corrupt so anything’s possible.

This is a new wrinkle though. It was not public knowledge that Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI before today.

Update: Here’s an interview with Flynn given yesterday to the Daily Caller, just published today:

In the final hours before his resignation, now-former White House National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn said he “crossed no lines” in his discussion with Russia’s ambassador, but ultimately he was most concerned about the steady stream of leaks to reporters based on classified information.

“In some of these cases, you’re talking about stuff that’s taken off of a classified system and given to a reporter. That’s a crime,” Flynn told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group during a telephone interview from his White House office on Monday.

“You call them leaks. It’s a criminal act. This is a crime. It’s not just a wink and a nod,” Flynn said.

“Over the weekend,” Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports, Flynn “was instructed not to speak to the press when he was in the fight for his political life. His staff was not even allowed to review the transcripts of his call to the Russian ambassador.” 

On Monday morning, he spoke with TheDCNF at length, saying he was told to “go out and talk more.”

“He [President Donald Trump] expressed confidence,” Flynn told TheDCNF, just hours before his resignation. “That’s when he told me that we need to go out and talk more. So I’m going to do that.”

“I haven’t been fighting back because I’m not that kind of guy. I’m behind the scenes. I’ve always been behind the scenes. But this is ridiculous. It’s so out of control. I’ve become an international celebrity for all the wrong reasons.”

Flynn said he didn’t know where the leaks originated. “One has to wonder, ‘Are they coming out of people in the National Security Council? Are they coming out of people in the intel community? Or State? Or Defense?’”

The politicization of intelligence and the release of classified information for use against political opponents is likely to spark a fierce firestorm in Washington.

President Donald Trump tweeted early Tuesday on leaks from officials within his administration, saying, “The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at his daily briefing on Tuesday that the president “is clearly upset” about leaks and that past leaks affected earlier administrations, including Obama’s.

“People who are entrusted with national security secrets, classified information, are leaking it out. That’s a real concern for this president,” he said.

“We have to wonder that people who work for our government, who are entrusted with classified information, decisional-based materials are leaking that information out. That, I do believe is a big story.”

Spicer did not spell out any steps Trump might take to stem the flow of leaks, however.

Before his post in the administration, Flynn was in charge of military intelligence in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was appointed to the highest levels within military intelligence, including as director of intelligence for the U.S. Central Command. After that, he was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

President Barack Obama fired him as DIA director in 2014 after Flynn delivered testimony before Congress that was at odds with Obama’s contention that radical Islamic terrorism, including ISIS, was not a major threat. Since then, Obama administration officials have openly held low regard for him.

Since Trump and Flynn entered the White House, anonymous sources have given select reporters information about telephone intercepts conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The classified information secretly given to reporters purportedly showed that Flynn discussed sanctions on Dec. 29, when 35 Russian diplomats were being expelled that same day by the outgoing Obama administration.

Other intelligence leaks have revealed Trump’s private discussions with heads of state soon after he became president-elect.

In a Feb. 9 story, The Washington Post cited unnamed “current and former U.S. officials” who accused Flynn of violating the law in a Dec. 29 telephone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislvak.

Flynn called the leaks of classified information against government officials “unprecedented,” and predicted those would be the focus of future congressional investigations.

“Members of Congress are very concerned because these are leaks from classified systems. The House and Senate are looking into those things, as they should,” he told TheDCNF.

The issue of government leaks is an issue for House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. On Monday, Nunes told Bloomberg News that he views leaks about Flynn’s private conversation as part of a pattern.

“There does appear to be a well-orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” said Nunes, who is a California Republican. “From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial Tuesday asked, “Did U.S. spooks have a court order to listen to his conversations?”

Former intelligence and military officers told TheDCNF they agree Flynn was the victim of a highly orchestrated “disinformation campaign” generated by current and former intelligence officers, many with loyalties to former President Obama.

Intelligence officials are supposed to use their expertise in psychological warfare and disinformation campaigns against enemy states, but never against an occupant of the Oval Office.

“Who pulled the NSA tapes on Mike Flynn?” asked retired Col. James Waurishuk, a 30-year intelligence officer who once served in the National Security Council. “Who compiled it? Who released it?” the retired Special Forces veteran asked in an interview with TheDCNF.

Waurishuk argued the many leaks meant the public is seeing the politicization of intelligence. “There are those in the intelligence community that are more concerned with their agendas than with national security,” he said.

“Notice how the intelligence community can leak Flynn’s conversation, but there are no leaks on Hillary Clinton and Benghazi,” he added.

Another former intelligence official, retired Col. James Williamson, told TheDCNF, “What is illegal is that Flynn has his conversations eavesdropped on. Who at NSA leaked the transcript?”

Williamson called it an “egregious overstep” by current and former intelligence officials.

Flynn insisted that he crossed no lines in his telephone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak: “If I did, believe me, the FBI would be down my throat, my clearances would be pulled. There were no lines crossed.”

Flynn said there was a brief discussion of the 35 Russian diplomats who were being expelled by Obama in retaliation for Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 campaign.

“It wasn’t about sanctions. It was about the 35 guys who were thrown out,” Flynn said. “So that’s what it turned out to be. It was basically, ‘Look, I know this happened. We’ll review everything.’ I never said anything such as, ‘We’re going to review sanctions,’ or anything like that.”

Flynn said he apologized to Vice President Mike Pence about his earlier contention that there were no discussions about the expulsion order, which was part of the Obama sanctions.

“For the vice president, I feel terrible. I put him in a position. He’s a man of incredible integrity. I think the world of him. He is so good for our country,” he said. “I should have said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t recall,’ which is the truth. Looking back, that’s what I should have done.”

The December conversation “was not to relieve sanctions. It was basically to say, ‘Look, we’re coming into office in a couple of weeks. Give us some time to take a look at everything.’”

Before he submitted his resignation, Flynn said the president urged him early Monday morning to speak out more frequently.

“That’s when he told me that we need to go out and talk more.” Flynn told TheDCNF he intended to do that.

“I haven’t been fighting back because I’m not that kind of guy. I’m behind the scenes. I’ve always been behind the scenes. But this is ridiculous. It’s so out of control. I’ve become an international celebrity for all the wrong reasons.”

Flynn has been silent since tendering his resignation.

I don’t know who’s doing the leaking or what their motivations are, but then we never really know that about leakers do we? People are complicated. For instance, I believed that Edward Snowden was doing a good deed when he leaked those classified documents. I think whoever is leaking this information about that lunatic freak Michael Flynn is too.

Your mileage always varies depending on who’s ox is being gored, I know. But it matters to me if the government is secretly spying on its own citizens. And it matters if the national security adviser is an unbalanced nutcase doing the bidding of an authoritarian imbecile of a president.

It is a good thing that Michael Flynn is no longer in the White House. We may have taken a tiny step back from the brink of something truly catastrophic.

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General Jerry Boykin for National Security Adviser?

by digby

Here’s the president’s favorite news source Breitbart.com relaying an idea from the crazed Islamophobe (and transition adviser) Frank Gaffney about who should replace Michael Flynn.  It’s hare to imagine they could find anyone crazier than Flynn, but if anyone could find one Gaffney can:

“Obviously, the underlying issue was the relationship he had with this ambassador from Russia, but I think it’s much more than that,” Gaffney said of Flynn. “It seems to me what Flynn was attacked for most vigorously, though often in an oblique way, is the same kind of thing that all of the other people you’ve been talking about this morning are under attack for, and most especially Donald Trump. And that is a clarity about the nature of the enemy that we’re facing at the moment.”

“At the risk of sounding like a globalist, unfortunately, that enemy is on the march globally. I think it’s best described as ‘sharia supremacism,’ but whether you call it that or ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ or ‘jihad’ or any number of other names, euphemisms, Mike Flynn was pretty squared away on that. I think people who are determined not to see it or at least not to come to grips with it – and in some cases that certainly was true of the Obama team, enabling it – I think are determined to take out everybody in this administration who is prepared to see it as the existential threat of our time,” Gaffney said.

“I’ve just done a commentary on a similar moment, interestingly enough, 35 years ago,” he remarked, referring to Ronald Reagan’s early loss of his own National Security adviser, Richard Allen. Reagan made what Gaffney hailed as an “extraordinary choice,” Judge William Clark.

Gaffney recalled Clark was “plucked from obscurity, as far as the Washington Beltway guys were concerned,” a man who was “not seen as a great foreign policy guru.”

“But man, what he helped Ronald Reagan do – and I hope your audience will recognize is needed now – is he understood that time’s, as Ronald Reagan put it, existential threat to freedom, namely Soviet communism. And he helped Ronald Reagan put together a strategy for defeating it – which, when executed, did just that,” he said.

“We need a similar guy. I have a candidate. I’m sure that’s the kiss of death, but I believe the guy who should replace General Mike Flynn is another retired Army Lt. General by the name of William ‘Jerry’ Boykin,” Gaffney proposed.

He said Boykin has “that kind of clarity and courage under fire, most especially, of an extraordinary leader of men, one of our most decorated special operators.”

“This is the guy for this time, I think, and I hope that Donald Trump will think about bringing him in. He knows him, he worked with him in the course of the campaign, and he would, I believe, help him execute a strategy for victory over jihad, which is what we need at the moment,” he said.

Marlow agreed that Boykin would be a “fantastic” choice and said Flynn’s resignation gave President Trump an opportunity to “show he has a deep bench,” having put together “the best cabinet since Reagan, maybe even better than Reagan’s first cabinet.”

Gaffney agreed with Marlow that Flynn’s resignation could represent the Washington establishment’s knocking out an important connection between President Trump and his core voters.

“I think it’s a serious problem, and I think what you’ll see now, with the blood in the water, is that the sharks will be circling for others who have that connection,” Gaffney predicted. “It’s not just the connection to Trump’s base, of course. It’s the people who helped bring Trump to his present position and who have enabled him to articulate that threat to the establishment Republicans and to the Left – the Obama team, and worse – and not least to the Islamists.”

“You do have an unholy alliance, it seems to be, that has formed up, whether it’s overt or simply implicit, a shared purpose: to try to take down a Donald Trump who would drain the swamp, and who would challenge all that’s been wrong with Washington,” he said.

Jerry Boykin is a far right religious extremist who was forced out of the Army and believes we are literally in a Holy War between Islam and Christianity. Here’s just one recent example of his lunacy from last August:

Speaking at a conference in Colorado Springs in August, Family Research Council executive vice president Jerry Boykin warned that Muslims are “going to infiltrate every element of our society, including the church,” and insisted that there is no such thing as moderate Muslims, just people “who have chosen not to follow the teachings of the Quran and the hadith.”

In a panel discussion on “the threat to America” at the “Breaking the Silence” conference at Colorado Springs’ Church For All Nations, Boykin cited a 1991 “explanatory memorandum” that anti-Muslim activists like to claim is secretly guiding the actions of all Muslims in the United States before claiming that conservative California pastor Jack Hibbs had had a fake Muslim convert “planted” in his church:

They’re going to infiltrate every element of our society, including the church. We have a friend that is a pastor in Chino Hills, California, his name is Jack Hibbs. A six, seven thousand member church in Chino Hills, California. He had an associate pastor that was a Muslim convert. Turns out the guy wasn’t a convert at all, he had been planted there. He’d been planted there in this church, huge megachurch, that guy’d been planted there.

They’re infiltrating every element of our society while we are trying to believe that there is a big separation between the radical Muslims and moderate Muslims. And the reality is, John [Guandolo] said it, the moderate Muslims are just simply Muslims who have chosen not to follow the teachings of the Quran and the hadith. And there are a lot of them, and God bless them, I wish that more of them would refuse to follow it.

Trump would love him. But even he may see that even though he’s a general who really looks the part, Boykin is a bad replacement for Flynn at this moment. But you never know with this guy.

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A strong executive in charge

by digby

Just a little aside in one of several articles today in the New York Times about the lunacy in the White House:

In record time, the 45th president has set off global outrage with a ban on travelers from Muslim countries, fired his acting attorney general for refusing to defend the ban and watched as federal courts swiftly moved to block the policy, calling it an unconstitutional use of executive power.

The president has angrily canceled a summit meeting with the Mexican president, hung up on Australia’s prime minister, authorized a commando raid that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL member, repeatedly lied about the existence of millions of fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election and engaged in Twitter wars with senators, a sports team owner, a Hollywood actor and a major department store chain. His words and actions have generated almost daily protests around the country.

That’s just an overview.

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Right after the election upset in November, one of the important stories that had been neglected by most of the media during the tumultuous campaign, Donald Trump’s overwhelming conflicts of interest, suddenly took on tremendous urgency. It always struck me as bizarre that Trump wasn’t questioned closely about the potential for corruption before the election, since he and the Republicans had made a fetish of that issue with regard to his opponent, to the point of giving her the sophomoric nickname “Crooked Hillary.”

On the rare occasions when Trump was even asked about this, he made clear that he had no understanding of the complications involved. He simply assured his questioner that he wouldn’t care about his business if he became president because he’d be so busy making America great again. Even though he refused to release his tax returns, and it was revealed late in the cycle that he likely had not paid any federal taxes for more than a decade, the issue of his potential conflicts and the national security implications of his foreign business entanglements went largely unaddressed.

That changed after Trump was elected president, and everyone suddenly understood he had no intention of divesting himself of his holdings and placing the proceeds into a blind trust, as every predecessor had done. He continued to meet with business partners and allowed his family members to participate in meetings with foreign leaders. His White House counsel, Don McGahn, a shady character known mostly as the defense attorney for former House whip Tom DeLay and as the man who made the Federal Election Commission into a joke, apparently told Trump that “the president can’t have a conflict of interest” and that was that.

Trump promised to “do something” to set people’s minds at ease about the ludicrous situation in which he’d put the country. After postponing a press conference on the subject for weeks, he finally held an absurd event in which he had a lawyer testify to his good intentions and show us a pile of folders which presumably contained documents proving he was turning over the company to his sons, Eric and Donald Jr. Ivanka Trump was said to be leaving her branding company and her husband, Jared Kushner, was leaving behind his lucrative real estate business to work in the White House, despite the existence of nepotism laws clearly designed to preclude such an arrangement.

Throughout this period the airwaves were flooded with ethics experts and constitutional scholars rending their garments over all these clear violations of ethical norms. There was a boomlet in arcane discussions of the Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the president from receiving gifts from foreign governments. Trump just carried on as if the whole matter were settled.

In any normal time, this would have launched the scandal of the century; Congress would have half a dozen investigations already underway. The public still has no idea what Trump’s global business ventures around the world really are, to whom he owes money or who owes money to him. Although the Trump sons have pledged not to do any “new deals” in foreign countries, that doesn’t mean much since nobody knows what the existing deals are. There is no official and public record indicating that the president paperwork is no longer operating as the CEO of the Trump Organization, and he’s spending weekends at his private golf course in Florida, hobnobbing with people who have personally paid him six figures for the privilege.

These are not normal times. On Monday morning the New York Times featured a major front-page profile of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump in their new roles running the Trump Organization. We learned that they are still traveling the world, opening golf courses and hotels and leaving untold piles of conflicts in their wakes. Nobody cares.

The reason why no one cares, of course, is that the three-week-old Trump administration is experiencing such a nuclear meltdown that the family using the presidency to enrich themselves has fallen far down the list of major concerns. There aren’t enough hours left in the day to discuss it. What with the president insulting allies, embarrassing himself in front of visiting dignitaries, threatening the judiciary, overseeing deportations and travel bans and trying to plug the leakiest sinking ship since the Titanic hit that iceberg, the news media is running around in circles trying to keep up.

Then there’s the matter of Trump’s advisers, perhaps the weirdest collection ever assembled in the White House — now blessedly minus the kookiest of all, national security adviser Michael Flynn, who resigned late on Monday night after weeks of speculation about his inappropriate communications with the Russian government.

Let’s just say there is a lot going on and it appears that in the midst of the chaos, the Trump family is planning to make a financial killing. Al though the press is dutifully reporting on their plans to open new hotels all over the U.S. (where people seeking and giving favors are welcome to put oodles of money into the family coffers), plan golf courses and make other deals with foreign actors with unknown motivations, the Republicans in Congress have no intention of even doing a perfunctory investigation.

The head of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who promised to chase Hillary Clinton’s family charitable foundation to the ends of the earth had she been elected, says his hands are tied:

I think the president is required to do his financial disclosure and by all accounts he has done that — the president is exempt from most of all of the conflict of interest laws.

When asked about the Emoluments Clause, Chaffetz said, “That’s not something I’m looking at right now.”

He did rouse himself to send a tepid letter of complaint to the White House about presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway shilling for Ivanka Trump’s clothing line in the White House after Nordstrom announced it was dropping her line due to poor sales. Conway is still in the White House and Ivanka attended a high-level meeting about women in business with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday morning, so they don’t seem terribly concerned about Chaffetz’s mighty oversight power.

It would appear that while the Trump administration is a historic dumpster fire, the Trump Organization is still working like clockwork to cash in on it.

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer jackass

by digby

Just watch it. It’s only a couple of minutes.

WATCH EVERY SECOND OF THIS. DON’T MISS A THING. IF THE PHONE RINGS, START IT OVER. WATCH IT THREE TIMES. pic.twitter.com/HTNiaQWF9b

— Yashar (@yashar) February 14, 2017

A good rule of thumb is to assume that whatever any Trumpie says about others is true of themselves.

I wrote a lot about Flynn during the campaign. Just one excerpt from a piece last December:

Basically, it looks like Trump is going to deliver Wall Street’s wish list and leave the “populism” to people like Jeff Sessions and Kris Kobach, who are designated to bring “law and order” to communities of immigrants and people of color. Surprise.

Despite the fact that Trump routinely disparaged the military’s leadership on the trail, often saying that he knew far more than it does about everything, Trump is actually a military fanboy. (He is not, as often erroneously described in the press, a “history buff.” He does not read.) As often as he has insulted the current brass for being “stupid,” he would evoke the memory of World War II-era generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur, who seem to be the only two he’s ever heard of. It’s clear that he has a deep fondness for “tough” military leaders of the kind he’s seen in the movies.

He’s said to be considering former generals David Petraeus, James “Mad Dog” Mattis and John Kelly, along with Admiral Mike Rogers for high-level jobs in the administration. As a Washington Post article by Phillip Carter and Loren DeJonge Schulman spells out in some detail, this is unusual and frankly unnerving. But none of them are as unnerving as the former general who has been tapped to serve as Trump’s national security adviser, his close associate Michael Flynn.
Flynn’s recent descent into extremism and his unfitness for this particular job have been well documented, but every day seems to bring new revelations of just how unhinged he really is. For instance, it came to my attention that in the days just before the election, Flynn was talking to the media about Hillary Clinton’s alleged association with pedophilia, which means that he’s enmeshed in the deepest reaches of the right-wing fake-news fever swamps. That reference could only be to #Pizzagate, the bizarre and spurious claim that Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of the back of a pizza parlor in Washington.

It also turns out that Steve Bannon isn’t the only close Trump associate with connections to the white nationalist “alt-right.” CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported that a week after the election Flynn was praising Breitbart’s odious racist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos:

Speaking to a gathering of young conservatives at Trump’s Washington hotel, Flynn said, “I was with Dinesh D’Souza last night, and the other, for the young audience here, for the young ones here, I mentioned it to a couple of you, I was also with Milo Yiannopoulos. . . . See, a lot of people in here won’t know who he is. I tag him on Twitter, you know, because he’s a phenomenal individual, and I’m mentioning him tonight because he spoke alongside of me last night to another group of folks.”

He went on to call Yiannopoulos one of the bravest people he’s ever met. Keep in mind that this is a former general who led troops into battle, praising the so-called courage of a nasty little online troll who describes Donald Trump as his “daddy.”

It’s known that Flynn travels on the far edge of the conspiratorial extreme of neoconservative thinking, having recently written a book called “The Field of Flight” with Michael Ledeen, a longtime proponent of the idea that the U.S. faces an existential threat from . . . well, pretty much everyone. (Ledeen famously speculated that even Germany and France were in cahoots with al-Qaida when they failed to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq.)

Flynn and Ledeen are heavily influenced by the late Laurent Murawiec, a French-American neocon ideologue who wrote a book they hail as a “masterpiece” called “The Mind of Jihad.” Murawiec apparently found a web of connections between radical Islamism, Bolshevism and and the Nazis that Ledeen and Flynn find convincing. Among other things, Murawiec was associated for many years with Lyndon LaRouche, one of the fringiest political figures in American life.

Curious about Flynn’s views of China and North Korea, about which he has said very little, The New York Times consulted “The Field of Flight” for clues as to his thinking. This is what it found:

In the introduction, [Flynn] wrote that radical Islamists “are not alone, and are allied with countries and groups who, though not religious fanatics, share their hatred of the West, particularly the United States and Israel.” The introduction continued, “Those allies include North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela.”

The general expanded on his definition of the anti-Western alliance: “The war is on. We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS and countless other terrorist groups.”

“Suffice to say, the same sort of cooperation binds together jihadis, Communists and garden-variety tyrants,” he added.

The technical term for that absurd and paranoid worldview is “nutty as a fruitcake.” And what’s more frightening is that the man Flynn will now be working for can fit his own knowledge of world affairs in a shotglass. 

As national security adviser, Flynn will be the last man in the room with this totally unprepared president when he makes the most important foreign policy and national security decisions. In an administration already filled with terrifying prospects in almost every regard, this is the one that sends chills down my spine.

We have dodged on bullet by having that lunatic out of White House. Unfortunately the gun is still loaded with them.

But thank goodness for small favors.  His departure very slightly lowers our chance for a nuclear war and I’m grateful.

.

The General is: OUT
by Tom Sullivan

Image via C-Span.

Michael Flynn resigned late Monday night:

Washington (CNN) — Embattled White House national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned Monday night, an abrupt end to a brief tenure.

His departure came just after reports surfaced that the Justice Department warned the Trump administration last month that Flynn misled administration officials regarding his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States and was potentially vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians.

The DOJ official who warned Trump of this was, of course, Sally Yates, the acting attorney general he fired, as the Washington Post did not report last night:

For Yates and other officials, concerns about the communications peaked in the days after the Obama administration on Dec. 29 announced measures to punish Russia for what it said was the Kremlin’s interference in the election in an attempt to help Trump.

After the sanctions were rolled out, the Obama administration braced itself for the Russian retaliation. To the surprise of many U.S. officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Dec. 30 that there would be no response. Trump praised the decision on Twitter.

In trying to suss out why the Russians did not respond, U.S. intelligence analysts turned up Flynn’s calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak prior to Trump’s inauguration. Transcripts of the intercepted calls described by U.S. officials, Reuters reports, “showed that the subject had come up in conversations between him and the Russian ambassador.” The implication being that Flynn told the Russians they would not have to worry about sanctions once Trump took office.

The Post account continues:

Yates, then the deputy attorney general, considered Flynn’s comments in the intercepted call to be “highly significant” and “potentially illegal,” according to an official familiar with her thinking.

Yates and other intelligence officials suspected that Flynn could be in violation of an obscure U.S. statute known as the Logan Act, which bars U.S. citizens from interfering in diplomatic disputes with another country.

Curiouser and curiouser:

you couldn't make this up: Russian politicians leap to the defense of Flynn https://t.co/IzKCBIQyr4— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) February 14, 2017

The New York Times elaborates on Flynn’s troubles. They may be just beginning:

In addition, the Army has been investigating whether Mr. Flynn received money from the Russian government during a trip he took to Moscow in 2015, according to two defense officials. Such a payment might violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits former military officers from receiving money from a foreign government without consent from Congress. The defense officials said there was no record that Mr. Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, filed the required paperwork for the trip.

Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement late Monday that Mr. Flynn’s resignation would not close the question of his contact with Russian officials.

Apparently not:

Not that congressional Democrats will be able to goad their GOP colleagues into investigating this matter, but Flynn had better — to use a Republican taunt of Democratic administrations — lawyer up. Should Flynn need coaching in how to hold up under 11 hours of tough questioning on Capitol Hill, a retired secretary of state (and former presidential candidate) might be able to offer pointers.

Not one month into his ratings-challenged, reality-show presidency, Trump already faces replacing his first cast member. First to audition?

The White House has already begun canvassing for Flynn’s permanent replacement. Retired Gen. David Petraeus is scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the plans.

Sorry if that sent coffee shooting out your nose.