Month: May 2017

He’s unbelievable

by digby

Kush that is:

Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker unpacks the Kushner problem and draws attention to the fact that Kushner was especially hostile to Comey and alone among Trumps advisers wanted his to “counter-attack.” One wonders why.

Here’s the conclusion:

The main takeaway from the Kushner news is similar to the takeaway from Trump and Flynn’s handling of the Russia probes. In each case, we have a series of actions by people who seem to be concealing specific contacts with Russians connected to the Kremlin’s intelligence services and then acting to thwart an investigation. Flynn lied about his contacts with Kislyak. Trump tried to kill the F.B.I. investigation of Flynn and eventually fired his F.B.I. director. Kushner hid his contacts with Russian officials and then pressed his father-in-law to sack Comey, who was looking into the matter. “Anytime someone on the Trump campaign conceals or misleads about a contact they had with Russia at the time of Russia’s interference campaign, that’s a big red flag,” Eric Swalwell, the Democratic congressman, who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said.

We still don’t have a crime in this case, but there is an awful lot of coverup.

And this doesn’t even get into the “back-channel” at the Russian embassy stuff.

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Nevertheless Benghazi persisted

by digby

Considering what we are hearing about the Trump administration’s nefarious activity, I can’t help but find it jarring that this even exists. I’m sure it won’t be the end of it, however:

A federal judge in Washington has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that Hillary Clinton’s lax security surrounding her emails led to the deaths of two of the Americans killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

In a ruling Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson tossed out the wrongful death claims as well as allegations that Clinton essentially slandered the parents of the deceased by contradicting accounts the parents gave of events related to their children’s deaths.

The suit was filed last August by Patricia Smith, the mother of State Department information officer Sean Smith, and Charles Woods, the father of CIA operative Tyrone Woods.

The parents sued weeks after Patricia Smith took to the stage at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to deliver an emotional speech blasting the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and for failing to save the four Americans who died in the Benghazi attack while she was secretary of state: Smith, Woods, CIA operative Glen Doherty and U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.

Jackson dismissed the wrongful death portion of the suit on technical grounds after granting the State Department’s motion to step in as the defendant on those claims. The Obama-appointed judge concluded Clinton used her email in the course of her official duties.

“The Court finds that Secretary Clinton was acting in the scope of her employment when she transmitted the emails that are alleged to give rise to her liability,” Jackson wrote in her 29-page opinion. “The untimely death of plaintiffs’ sons is tragic, and the Court does not mean to minimize the unspeakable loss that plaintiffs have suffered in any way. But when one applies the appropriate legal standards, it is clear that plaintiffs have not alleged sufficient facts to rebut the presumption that Secretary Clinton was acting in her official capacity when she used her private email server.”

Jackson cautioned that she was not opining on the appropriateness of Clinton’s use of the private server or on whether what she said publicly about the Benghazi episode in its immediate aftermath.

“Nothing about this decision should be construed as making any determination or expressing any opinion about the propriety of the use of the private email server or the content or accuracy of the statements made by the Secretary to the family members or to anyone else in the days following the Benghazi attack,” the judge wrote.

Jackson added that she was also not making a determination about whether Clinton’s use of the private server was legal or not.

For the purposes of the suit, “it…does not matter whether Secretary Clinton used a private email server lawfully or unlawfully. Instead, the relevant inquiry is whether Secretary Clinton’s electronic communications with State Department personnel about official business during her tenure were within the scope of her employment as the head of the State Department,” the judge said.

“Her actions – communicating with other State Department personnel and advisors about the official business of the department – fall squarely within the scope of her duty to run the Department and conduct the foreign affairs of the nation as Secretary of State.”

The judge also rejected the defamation claims, concluding that Clinton’s public statements that the family members’ were “wrong” about what she’d said to them about the motivation for the attack were not the equivalent of saying they lied. In short, Jackson concluded that Clinton was saying that the parents could be mistaken in their recollection, particularly given the impact of their children’s deaths.

“Secretary Clinton did not refer to plaintiffs as liars,” Jackson noted. “Plaintiffs may find the candidate’s statements in her own defense to be ‘unpleasant or offensive,’ but Secretary Clinton did not portray plaintiffs as ‘odious, infamous, or ridiculous….’ To the contrary, the statements portray plaintiffs as normal parents, grieving over the tragic loss of their loved ones.”

My social media feeds today are debating her use of a private email server. It will never end.

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Alt-right crater

by digby

Oh heck. It looks like having a dim-witted cretin win the election isn’t as good for business as they thought it would be:

With its former chairman Steve Bannon as White House chief strategist and plans for an ambitious international expansion, Breitbart was supposed to be on its way to becoming a media behemoth in the Trump era, one with unparalleled access and a passionate audience. “While several publishers have enjoyed an uptick in traffic due to election coverage, we are proud to have built a massive and deeply-rooted community that will remain long after the election cycle fades,” Larry Solov, Breitbart’s C.E.O., predicted back in November.

Early on, Solov’s prediction seemed to be coming true. “Breitbart News is the #45th most trafficked website in the United States, according to rankings from Amazon’s analytics company, Alexa.com,” they wrote on January 9, 2017. “With over two billion pageviews generated in 2016 and 45 million unique monthly visitors, Breitbart News has now surpassed Fox News (#47), Huffington Post (#50), Washington Post (#53), and Buzzfeed (#64) in traffic.” A month later, the site had even greater cause to celebrate. “Breitbart News is now the 29th most trafficked site in the United States, surpassing PornHub and ESPN,” they crowed. In the article, its staffers bragged that their bonkers traffic reflected the site’s cementing a permanent place in American politics. “The numbers speak for themselves,” said Solov. (Many outlets, including The Hive, experienced traffic peaks around Trump’s inauguration.)

Just a few months later, the numbers have a different story to tell. As of May 26, 2017, according to Alexa.com—the same web-ranking analytics company that Breitbart drew its numbers from in January—Fox News is the 64th most-trafficked site in the country. Huffington Post is at 60. Buzzfeed is at 50. The Washington Post, on the strength of a series of eye-popping scoops, is at 41.

Breitbart is in 281st place.

Alexa global rankings of Breitbart measured against news sites they have compared themselves to. Trends reflect U.S. rankings.

Alexa global rankings of Breitbart measured against competing conservative news sites. Trends reflect U.S. rankings.

Measuring web traffic is an inexact art, but other web-analytics companies reflect a similar, unusually steep decline in Breitbart’s traffic. ComScore estimated that Breitbart had nearly 23 million unique visitors during the month of November 2016, but only drew 10.7 million in April 2017, a 53 percent drop. Last month, the site had fewer visitors than it did in April 2016, when 12.3 million people visited the site. In contrast, the four sites that Breitbart benchmarked itself against saw nowhere near that drop—and, in the case of both Fox News and Buzzfeed, saw small increases in traffic since the November election.

The Breitbart traffic graph in Alexa, the service that Breitbart cites when they celebrate their traffic goals, is oddly shaped, rocketing up to a high plateau where it remained over a period of months, then dropping back precipitously around April 30, Trump’s 100-day mark. In an email to The Hive, an Alexa customer representative suggested that the traffic anomalies could have been caused by Breitbart enabling, then disabling, Alexa’s certified-results feature, which temporarily created an apples-to-oranges comparison with sites that don’t enable the feature, like The Washington Post. (The dates the representative provided coincide perfectly with the dates that Breitbert’s traffic spiked, and then plummeted.)

Other conservative media sites have also experienced declines in traffic in recent months, but none as pronounced as Breitbart’s. According to Alexa data, National Review Online, Infowars.com, The Daily Caller, and Drudge Report all saw slumps in their rankings. Over the last week, as Trump was engulfed in the Comey scandal, Fox News’s viewership dropped to third place behind CNN and MSNBC for the first time in 17 years.

At the most basic level, Trump’s struggles are producing a passion gap among news consumers. “If you’re anti-Trump, there’s never been a better time to read news. It’s like Christmas every morning,” an editor at another conservative media outlet told me. “So every time you open the newspaper or open Twitter or turn on Facebook, you get to enjoy the fact that there are a lot of other people who don’t like Trump and there’s a lot of news stories that show Trump in a negative light. Whereas if you’re Breitbart, you’re scrambling to explain or defend or continue to back the guy that you backed throughout the election. And eventually, if your posture continues to just simply be reactive and trying to explain away things that are happening to or by the president, I think people slowly become sort of disheartened by politics.”

[…]

Traffic has long been the definitive measure of the strength of the movement Breitbart championed. “The growing traffic numbers was a huge focus for Bannon and the Breitbart senior management, as it would be for any online platform,” Kurt Bardella, Breitbart’s former spokesman, who left the company in March of 2016, told me in an e-mail. “They saw the growth as validation that their perspective and strategy was paying off. More than that, I think Steve saw it as a big F.U. to the establishment/MSM. In some ways, I think their rapid growth fueled their desire to try and take Breitbart global and expand.”

Trump’s election, however, changed the trajectory and raised journalistic questions the site had never had to ponder. “There’s two types of bias in news,” said a former Breitbart staffer. “There’s bias in news as to how you cover a particular story. And then there’s selection bias as in which stories do you cover. And I think that Breitbart has both of those.” The former staffer pointed to the site’s current homepage, just a few hours after the C.B.O. score for the House’s second attempt at repealing Obamacare was released. The biggest headline on the site was “Associated Press Cracks, Issues Correction Undermining Hit Piece From Leftist Activist Hired to Sneak into Kellyanne Event.” “This is not news anyone wants to read right now, come on,” he said. “That’s not even in English.” (A story about the C.B.O. score was buried in the bottom right-hand corner.)

Another factor could be an apparent decline in the number of times Breitbart stories receive a link from Matt Drudge—a single link on the Drudge Report homepage can fuel an entire month’s worth of web traffic. Andrew Breitbart, a former Drudge employee, essentially built his organization on the back of the Drudge Report; Bannon continued the close relationship after Breitbart’s death. (“Bannon used to go around bragging that he ran Drudge [and that] he could get a Drudge link anytime he wanted,” said the former Breitbarter.) Many see the current editor, Alex Marlow, as having a more difficult time now that Bannon has gone. Says the former staffer, “Alex’s main strategy was to get Drudge links,” while Bannon was there. “When that’s your training, it’s hard to get away from that.” (Drudge did not return a request for comment.)

[…]

Their international expansion, too, seems to be slipping past the benchmarks they set for themselves. Reuters reported that Bannon hoped to open Breitbart bureaus in France and Germany in time for their elections with the aim of electing right-wing, anti-immigrant politicians. The model had worked wonders in the U.K., where Breitbart London had opened in 2013 and became a political powerhouse for Brexit. But Breitbart France failed to materialize in time for the presidential election, where a centrist candidate decisively beat Marine Le Pen, the nationalist politician favored by the website. Breitbart Germany does not exist yet, but there is still plenty of time until their September elections.
[…]

But for now, the simplest explanation may be that Breitbart’s traffic struggles reflect the struggles of the man they backed during the election, now mired in the difficulties of governance and scandal. “When you tie yourself to a candidate you shouldn’t be surprised,” said the former staffer. “If the candidate has trouble, you’re going to have trouble. And if your goal is to provide cover for that candidate and the news is about that candidate, it’s going to be difficult to cover the news in a way that’s interesting.”

The numbers, indeed, speak for themselves.

Live by the Trump, die by the Trump.

Right wing media is in a crisis. They’ve never needed the leadership of a guy like Roger Ailes more. But he’s gone, Limbaugh is tired and Hannity has become Trump’s geisha. The newer group of wingnuts, Ingraham, Levin etc are stuck in their old conservative movement groove and really don’t know how to deal with Trump any better than anyone else. He is destroying the machine they’ve built.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a powerful right wing media anymore. It’s just that it’s being run by foreign entities using modern social media tactics. These old fashioned dinosaurs are no longer relevant. They are being devoured by a virus they helped create and a wingnut host that will believe anything.

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The Borgias take over the RNC

by digby

Amid mounting questions at the White House about Russia, three prominent members of President Trump’s family — his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and Eric’s wife, Lara — have ramped up their engagement with the Republican Party’s national political operation, having met privately with GOP leaders to share their concerns and outlook. 

Their most recent effort came Thursday, when the president’s eldest sons and Lara Trump visited the Republican National Committee’s headquarters in Washington. Those three family members, who were invited by the RNC, stayed for about two hours, according to four people who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Their appearance at the RNC irked at least two prominent Republicans who were briefed on the session, who wondered whether it was appropriate for the president’s sons, who run the Trump family real estate business, to be highly involved in discussing the party’s strategy and resources. 

But two other people familiar with the meeting said it was appropriate for the president’s sons and daughter-in-law, who all volunteered for Trump’s campaign, to huddle with Republican leaders and offer their perspective on what would be most helpful to President Trump ahead of the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential race.

Everything’s fine.

Dispatch from the spooks

by digby

A round-up of reaction from the experts:

Former intelligence officials described Jared Kushner’s reported attempt to set up a backchannel line of communication with Russia last December that would bypass the US’ national security and intelligence apparatus as “off the map,” “explosive,” and “extremely dangerous.”

Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said during a press conference on Saturday that, if Kushner did try to set up such a back channel, “I would not be concerned about it.””We have back-channel communications with a number of countries,” McMaster said. “So, generally speaking, about back-channel communications, what that allows you to do is to communicate in a discreet manner.”

Scott Olson, a recently retired FBI agent who ran counterintelligence operations and spent more than 20 years at the bureau, agreed that it is not unusual for low-level staffers to work between governments and bypass bureaucracy to exchange views and build consensus in advance of higher-level negotiations.

But what Kushner appears to have done is “substantially different, in two ways,” he said.

“First, he is not seeking a back-channel for a low-level staff exchange,” Olson said. “He wants high-level direct-contact communication. This is extremely dangerous because it results in verbal (and therefore undocumented and unwitnessed) agreements, which are binding on governments. Free governments do not work this way. They can’t. If they do, they are no longer free.”

He continued:

“Second, he asked to use a foreign government’s communication facilities. This is way beyond a private server. This is doing US government diplomatic business over a foreign government’s communication system. It’s not an off-the-record conversation. It’s a conversation recorded by the opposing party. This shows a staggering lack of understanding of the US and its place in the world. Actually, it shows a staggering lack of common sense. When he negotiates a business deal does he use the other guy’s notes?”

Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a top White House adviser, was willing to go extraordinary lengths to establish a secret line of communication between the Trump administration and Russian government officials, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Kushner met with Russia’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, in December at Trump Tower, where he floated the possibility of setting up a secure line of communication between the Trump transition team and Russia — and having those talks take place in Russian diplomatic facilities in the US. That would essentially conceal their interactions from US government scrutiny, The Post wrote, citing US intelligence officials briefed on the matter.

Let’s play White House
by Tom Sullivan

This is why you don’t hire people with no experience in government to run it:

Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.

Ambassador Sergey Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, son-in-law and confidant to then-President-elect Trump, made the proposal during a meeting on Dec. 1 or 2 at Trump Tower, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by U.S. officials. Kislyak said Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.

The Washington Post report adds that Michael Flynn was also there.

The New York Times’ Nick Confessore told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, from the Trump team’s perspective perhaps their business ties led them to believe the Russians were “deal partners and friends.” Confessore concluded, “Totally boneheaded.”

“If an American intelligence officer had done anything like this, we’d consider it espionage,” former Acting Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin told Lawrence O’Donnell last night on MSNBC. “I think to some degree, the Trump administration at these senior levels is being consumed by its own hubris. They must think of themselves as masters of the universe.” Their seeming contempt for the institutions of government that carry out the functions of democracy reflects, McLaughlin said, “that sophomoric idea we used to hear about, about deconstructing the administrative state.” He asked, as if Trump’s people should use those they trust more? The Russians? [timestamp 3:30]

The Post first received the information via an anonymous letter in mid-December. This week, officials who reviewed the letter and spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the secret channel portion of the letter was consistent with their understanding of events. This suggests there may be more to come from the letter once the information is confirmed.

Marcy Wheeler wants to know who sent it:

Outside of Flynn, though, it’s not clear many people knew this meeting ever happened, much less what happened in it. The meeting was first disclosed by the New Yorker, following which the White House quickly added (in a story to the NYT) Flynn to the story — suggesting he, and not the President’s son-in-law suggested the communication channel.

[…]

That said, one person who knew about the meeting ahead of time was Marshall Billingslea, who tried to warn Flynn about Kislyak. And his request for the Kislyak profile would have alerted the CIA to his concerns about the meeting.

As Steve Kornacki’s guests observed, there may be completely innocent reasons behind the attempt. At every turn, they make decisions that suggests they suffer from, as officials told the Post, “staggering naivete.” And yet they went to extraordinary if not paranoid lengths to avoid exposure to U.S. intelligence gathering. The Post concludes:

In addition to their discussion about setting up the communications channel, Kushner, Flynn and Kislyak also talked about arranging a meeting between a representative of Trump and a “Russian contact” in a third country whose name was not identified, according to the anonymous letter.

The Post reported in April that Erik Prince, the founder of the private security firm Blackwater, now called Academi, and an informal adviser to the Trump transition team, met on Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean with a representative of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Besides the lack of experience and the hubris, another thread runs through the Misadventures of Donald Trump and the people who elected him. It is the notion that we need businessmen running the government.

That evangelicals spend so much time defending the notion of biblical inerrancy from science — to the point of erecting creation museums across the country and building full-scale Noah’s ark replicas to somehow “prove” science wrong — reflects how well science has successfully co-opted the thinking of even its fiercest critics from another cognitive domain. The same is true for business. It is so successful and so dominant in our way of life that average citizens and business moguls themselves believe that everything could be and must be operated according to a business model. Even when that is totally inappropriate.

But it’s the only thing Trump and his kinsmen know. He’s a one-trick pony. When the only tool in your toolbox is real estate, etc. After Trump’s first international trip and interactions with key U.S. allies, if that truth wasn’t painfully obvious before, it should be now. And that goes for “Tel Aviv” Tillerson too.

People who have devoted their entire lives to making money should leave public service to people with not just the brains for it, but hearts for it as well.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

I’m exhausted so I’m just going to give you a sweet little video of a monkey and his best friend to make you smile a little bit:

Best Friends pic.twitter.com/XHYJrA77is

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) May 24, 2017

We all have to stick together. Enjoy your evening.

by digby

He’s always lurking somewhere in the background isn’t he?

Months after the FBI began examining Paul Manafort as part of a probe into ties between President Donald Trump’s team and Russia, Manafort called Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to push back against the mounting controversy, according to four people familiar with the call.

It was about a week before Trump’s inauguration, and Manafort wanted to brief Trump’s team on alleged inaccuracies in a recently released dossier of memos written by a former British spy for Trump’s opponents that alleged compromising ties among Russia, Trump and Trump’s associates, including Manafort.

“On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” said a person close to Manafort.

Manafort had been forced to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman five months earlier amid scrutiny of his work for Kremlin-aligned politicians and businessmen in Eastern Europe. But he had continued talking to various members of Trump’s team and had even had at least two conversations with Trump, according to people close to Manafort or Trump.

While the people say the conversations were mostly of a political or, in some cases, personal nature, the conversation with Priebus, described by the four people familiar with it, was related to the scandal now consuming Manafort and the Trump presidency.

It suggests that Manafort recognized months ago the potentially serious problems posed by the investigation, even as Trump himself continues to publicly dismiss it as a politically motivated witch hunt while predicting it won’t find anything compromising.

The discussion also could provide fodder for an expanding line of inquiry for both the FBI and congressional investigators. They’ve increasingly focused on the Trump team’s handling of the investigations, including evolving explanations from the White House, and the president’s unsuccessful efforts to get the FBI to drop part of the investigation, followed by his firing of FBI Director James Comey. All that has led to claims that the president and his team may have opened themselves to obstruction of justice charges.

Why in the hell would the Trump campaign continue to have contact with this guy after it was revealed he was under investigation for his Russian ties?  Were they really this dumb?

Yes, apparently they were. Never mind.

You’ve got to love this part:

Manafort discussed with other Trump allies the possibility of launching a countervailing investigation into efforts by Ukrainian government officials who allegedly worked in conjunction with allies of Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to damage Trump’s campaign, according to the operative. The operative added that Manafort saw such an investigation as a way to distract attention from the parallel FBI and congressional Russia probes.

Priebus and the White House press office declined to comment, as did the Ukrainian presidential administration, though it previously challenged the notion it meddled in the U.S. presidential election.

Priebus did, however, alert Trump to the conversation with Manafort, according to the operative familiar with the conversation and a person close to Trump.

Apparently even Trump didn’t go for that one, at least not publicly. He continues to portray the whole thing as a nefarious plot by Crooked Hillary. Ukrainians don’t get big cheers at his rallies.

Oy…

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“A full-fledged assault on truth and reason”

by digby

Clinton: “You are graduating at a time when there is a full-fledged assault on truth and reason.” pic.twitter.com/JnDfvjJC9J

— RogelioGarcia Lawyer (@LawyerRogelio) May 26, 2017

The media is giving Clinton the usual rasher of shit for saying this even though it’s obviously true. I mean, consider the news today that Comey knew that the memo alleging collusion between Loretta Lynch and the Clinton campaign was a Russian fake but he used it as an excuse anyway because he was afraid it would come out anyway and shake people’s confidence in the electoral system and the Department of Justice. This was why he felt the need to inject himself in the election in July by holding that first press conference calling Clinton reckless.

Yes, that gives me a headache too. But it shows how successful this election interference really was.

And keep in mind that Trump and the Russians didn’t invent it. The Republicans have been at this for a long time, aided and abetted by the political media:

It’s the full manifestation of Cokie’s Law: it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It’s out there.

QOTD: Texas Governor Greg Abbott

by digby

They’re just going for it:

After signing a bill to reduce handgun license fees on Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) fired some shots at an indoor shooting range.

He then held up his target sheet and quipped, “I’m gonna carry this around in case I see any reporters,” according to the Texas Tribune.

Remember when they were all “Je Suis Charlie” condemning attacks on free speech?

Yeah, I do too.

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