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Month: June 2017

How we know it’s true

Published by digby on June 15, 2017

How we know it’s true


by digby

President Trump’s personal lawyer is soooo dumb. When the news of the obstruction of justice investigation came out they responded with this:

“The FBI leak of information regarding the president is outrageous, inexcusable and illegal.”

Translation: The report is true, and we’re really mad that someone (actually five someones) made the obstruction investigation public.

Trump followed with a tweet that seemed to further confirm that, yes, he is under investigation for possible obstruction.

The talking points all do the same:

Anyone with a brain would just say they have no comment on ongoing investigations or anonymous quotes in the newspapers, period. It wouldn’t stop the questions but it would maintain at least a little bit of dignity for the president.

But then, why bother? He believes in getting low down and dirty as he needs to to win even the tiniest point that will only last for 10 minutes. He has no capacity for long term strategy. He survives from one news cycle to the next.

But you’d think his lawyers would be more circumspect. Of course, if they don’t do what he wants he’ll just find someone who will. And anyway, from what we’ve seen they agree with him.

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Shutting out the public

Published by digby on June 15, 2017

Shutting out the public

by digby

This is a perfect example of how the Republicans will use political violence to shut down Democratic processes:

Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) on Wednesday said members of Congress should “absolutely” cut down on public events in the wake of a shooting at Republican lawmakers’ baseball practice that left six people injured, including Senate Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), who remains in critical condition.

“Do you think that for now members of Congress and the Senate should curtail that kind of activity until perhaps we agree that we need to be more civil?” Pennsylvania radio station WILK’s host Sue Henry asked Barletta, as flagged by CNN’s KFILE.

“I think absolutely,” Barletta replied. “There’s no question.”

Barletta said he has “been at the end of some of those town halls where the police had to carry people out.”

“You get concerned not only for your own safety but for the safety of the people who are there,” he said. “Even if you have an opposing opinion, that’s great, that’s what these events are for, but there’s a level, you know, when people cross a line to actually inciting other people and when individual safety becomes an issue, well, then the purpose of doing it is lost.”

Barletta said he believes town halls have “become such, really, just targets for people to try to incite other people.”

“It’s not good,” he said.

There’s been no evidence of people showing up at townhalls brandishing guns as they did in 2009 and 2010.

This was a typical scene:

Nearly 350 right-wing protestors crowded a New Mexico town’s busiest intersection yesterday to protest President Obama’s supposed anti-gun agenda and the “government takeover of our health care system.” While the event mostly looked like any other recent right-wing rally — complete with signs reading “replace the communists in DC” and “the sky is falling! A black man is president!” — what set this protest apart was that there “were plenty of handguns and rifles displayed.”

The local Tea Party and a group called the Second Amendment Task Force (2ATF, a reference to the ATF, which enforces gun laws) encouraged people to bring guns to the event in Alamogordo, NM, in order to “put a positive light on gun ownership,” said 2ATF’s founder Dan Woodruff. While the two protests were technically separate, they were planned together for the same day in adjacent locations. Otero Tea Party Patriots coordinator Don Omey said he was “proud” of the gun-toters. “That’s what we need to turn some minds around,” Omey said. Under New Mexico law, it’s legal for anyone over the age of 19 to open-carry a holstered firearm in most public places.

And while there was no violence during the event, one protestor wearing a Tea Party shirt said his loaded gun was a “very open threat” to anyone who might “try to take over the country completely as a socialist communist [state].” The New Mexico Independent attended the protest and put together a report on the event. Watch it:

They didn’t have to commit violence. All they had to do was show their guns and hold their signs to get the message across.

Today, Republican representatives don’t want to face their constituents on the health care and Russia stuff. They are cowards. But they are also looking for more and more ways to govern in secret, the mark of an authoritarian government.

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QOTD: A sick piece of work

Published by digby on June 15, 2017

QOTD: A sick piece of work

by digby

I’m talking about Steve King of Iowa speaking about the shooting in Alexandria yesterday:

In an interview with Simon Conway of local WHO Iowa radio, King accused the former president [Obama] for “dividing” the American people during his tenure.

“I do want to put some of this at the feet of Barack Obama,” said King. “He contributed mightily to dividing us. He focused on our differences rather than our things that unify us. And this is some of the fruits of that labor.”

Conway didn’t exactly protest.

“Of course he also spent eight years telling us all how terrible we all are and what a garbage can America was and how unexceptional we all were,” said the British-born Conway. “I agree. I absolutely agree with what you said.”

Right. That Obama American Carnage inaugural speech was really divisive. Like when he only went to rallies in places where people voted for him and extolled the virtues of his own voters, the “forgotten Americans” as the only people he cared about. I hated it when he did that.

The bizarroworld “I know you are but what am I”tactic is very effective. Honestly, I think this is all just a technique to drive the rest of us mad.

And by the way, what the hell is the matter with Iowa that they keep voting in this sick piece of work? If this is Real America, they are a real bunch of assholes.

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Gun talk for troubled times

Published by digby on June 15, 2017

Gun talk for troubled times

by digby

I wrote about yesterday’s mass shootings for Salon this morning:

On Wednesday we had two mass shootings, one on each coast. A gunman opened fire with an automatic rifle on a group of Republican lawmakers who were practicing for a baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia, injuring six people. The shooter was shot and killed by Capitol Police. Later the same day in San Francisco, an angry employee went into a UPS facility and opened fire, killing three co-workers and himself.

I had wondered about the lack of high-profile mass shooting events recently and had thought that maybe the recent spate of killing had peaked at this time last year with the horrifying Orlando terrorist attack and the targeting of police in Dallas. But the truth is that they have been happening all along. We just stopped paying attention.

Mother Jones gathers data on mass shootings and has pretty strict criteria for inclusion: The shooting must happen in a public place and result in three or more deaths. This leaves out many incidents in which people are only injured, such as the shooting of 10 people in Philadelphia last month, or those that take place on on private property, such as the recent killing of eight people in Mississippi during a domestic violence shooting spree. (The Gun Violence Archive collects incidents that involve the shooting of two or more victims. It is voluminous.)

According to the Mother Jones criteria, yesterday’s Virginia shooting doesn’t even count since it didn’t meet the death threshold. The San Francisco UPS shooting does, bring the total of such mass shootings to six so far this year.

Let’s recap, in reverse chronological order: On June 7, a 24-year-old grocery worker in Pennsylvania fatally shot three co-workers with a shotgun, then turned the gun on himself. On June 5, a 45-year-old man in Orlando, Florida, fatally shot five of his former co-workers, and then killed himself. On May 12, a 43-year-old man in rural Ohio killed two employees in a nursing home, shot and killed the chief of police who responded to the scene and then shot himself. On April 18, a 39-year-old man opened fire on a downtown street in Fresno, California, killing three people at random. On Jan. 6, a 26-year-old man fired into the baggage claim area at the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, airport, killing five people and wounding six more.

Meanwhile, 93 people on average are shot and killed every day in America, many of them in incidents involving multiple victims. More than 100,000 people are struck by bullets every year. President Donald Trump was right to speak about “carnage” in America in his inaugural address. He just didn’t acknowledge that the carnage is from gun violence. According to the gun safety website The Trace:

Using data from the the World Health Organization, researchers found that America accounted for 82 percent of all firearm deaths among 23 comparable nations in 2010. Ninety percent of women killed by guns in the study were in the U.S., as were 91 percent of children under 15.

Wednesday’s shooting in Alexandria was particularly troubling because it appears to have been politically motivated. The accused shooter was an active left-winger who apparently had come to the conclusion that the Republicans had to be “destroyed” and he targeted GOP officials. We don’t know the whole story yet, but he had previously been charged with domestic violence and shooting his guns in a residential area.

We are in a volatile period in this country and people’s emotions are running high. But if politics is war by other means, those other means must not include deadly violence. With all the anti-government rhetoric out there and easy access to firearms, it was probably inevitable that some violent man would decide to make a statement, punish his perceived political enemies and go out in a blaze of glory. We certainly make that easy with lax gun laws and our illogical insistence that military-style semiautomatic weapons are constitutionally protected.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, the Republican congressman who was shot and badly injured on Wednesday, is a high-profile gun-proliferation proponent. Luckily, he was accompanied by the security detail that goes along with his office because it did the best one could hope for to prevent a massacre. Still, five people were shot, including one of the U.S. Capitol Police officers. Unless we all hire trained security for protection, the rest of us will not be that lucky in a similar situation. Had any of the Republican officials at that game been armed, as the president usually insists is the answer to this problem, the outcome would have probably been even worse.

Some Republicans who were there feel the fear that others have felt in these situations:

According to The New York Times, Republicans are responding to that fear with their usual call for even more guns. That’s not surprising. If a madman shooting up a first-grade classroom full of small children didn’t make them reassess their approach to this issue, it’s unlikely anything will.

It doesn’t change the fact that there are ways to address this problem. In the wake of a horrific mass shooting in 1996, Australia banned semiautomatic weapons and required everyone to sell those they already owned to the government. There have been no mass shootings in the country since then. This simply required the political will to tackle the problem in the most practical way. There are still privately owned guns in Australia and sometimes they are still used to kill people. But the body count has gone way, way down since Australia got rid of weapons whose only purpose is to kill and injure many people in a short period of time.

On the occasion of yet another workplace shooting in 2015, I wrote about the story of Dr. John Snow one of the first epidemiologists back in the 1850s who observed through careful data collection and observation that the source of a disease in a given area was the common well from which everyone was pumping out their drinking water. It was many years before science discovered the bacteriological basis for cholera and found treatments for it. But Snow’s central insight — to shut down the pump — saved many lives: The same solution is to be found with the epidemic of gun violence in America. Of course a ban on semiautomatic weapons would not prevent all murders or address the human propensity for violence. But we would greatly lower the death toll.

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“Dear God, keep him away from Twitter” by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 15, 2017

“Dear God, keep him away from Twitter”
by Tom Sullivan

The Trump White House made quite the fuss of insisting former FBI director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate last week “completely and totally vindicated” him. As Trump had insisted, Comey told the president he was not personally under FBI investigation at the time. His victory dance, however, was completely and totally premature.

The Washington Post last night reported those assurances are, in Washingtonese, no longer operative. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election has expanded to include examination of whether Trump himself attempted to obstruct justice:

The move by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump’s conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.

The Post reports that Trump’s current director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers, and Richard Ledgett, a former Rogers deputy, could be interviewed by Mueller’s team “as early as this week.”

Trump’s personal attorneys declared the leak behind the Post report, “outrageous, inexcusable and illegal.”

A followup report by the Wall Street Journal adds more detail to the financial crimes angle (emphasis added):

The Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller has requested to interview Rick Ledgett, the NSA’s recently retired deputy director. Ledgett reportedly wrote a memo documenting a phone call between Admiral Mike Rogers, the NSA’s director, and the president. Trump questioned the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered with the election, and tried to persuade Rogers to say there was no evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia, the Journal reported.

Trump could theoretically invoke executive privilege to try to block the release of documents like that memorandum, but would be unlikely to find a sympathetic judge: The U.S. Supreme Court blocked Nixon from using the privilege to withhold evidence in a criminal investigation in U.S. v. Nixon in 1974. The Times also reported Mueller is probing the possibility of money laundering by Trump’s associates, on the theory that any collusion with Russian officials might have involved pay-offs, which would then have needed to be concealed.

Follow the money laundering, Deep Throat said (more or less) during the Post’s Watergate investigation.

No one knows how deep this rabbit hole goes, but the challenge now for White House officials will be to stop Donald Trump from digging himself deeper. They worry he might yet attempt to fire Mueller. “Political suicide,” one White House official told Daily Beast, conceding Trump might just try it anyway:

For now, officials are simply concerned with limiting fallout from what is sure to be a thunderous reaction from the president to news that he is personally the target of the FBI’s probe.

Asked what the internal game plan should be, one senior Trump administration official replied, “Keep him away from Twitter, dear God, keep him away from Twitter.”

“The president did this to himself,” the official added.

Keeping him off Twitter is not working. At all.

Donald Trump imagined the power of the presidency the way he viewed his power as a real estate magnate. That being the richest guy in the room and a celebrity, he could stare down, shout down, bully, intimidate or leverage his way to getting his way. As president, he would just have more of that. But Trump has never held real power or sat across the table from people with real power. Trump the political naif is in the position he is this morning because he brought the same vainglorious style to the world stage that seemed to work for him in the private sector. But the White House is not the private sector. World leaders are not so easily browbeaten and cowed as subcontractors. Trump’s alpha-dog handshake routine won’t work here. And it won’t intimidate Robert Mueller. Trump has the power to fire him. Mueller has the power to neuter his presidency.

It is not clear Trump has yet learned that lesson. Trump being Trump, he will likely refuse to.

He did it to himself

Published by digby on June 15, 2017

He did it to himself

by digby

He couldn’t stop interfering and this is what happened:

The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.

The move by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump’s own conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.

Trump had received private assurances from former FBI Director James B. Comey starting in January that he was not personally under investigation. Officials say that changed shortly after Comey’s firing.

Five people briefed on the requests, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said Daniel Coats, the current director of national intelligence, Adm. Mike Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, and Rogers’ recently departed deputy, Richard Ledgett, agreed to be interviewed by Mueller’s investigators as early as this week. The investigation has been cloaked in secrecy and it’s unclear how many others have been questioned by the FBI.

He thought members of the Department of Justice worked for him the way that the janitors worked for him in Trump Tower — he could make messes and tell them to clean them up. He thinks of the presidency as a dictatorship and since he has so many willing accomplices in the Republican Party he naturally assumed he could get away with it. He still might.

But his claims of total vindication were … premature.

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A little miracle on a very bad day

Published by digby on June 14, 2017

A little miracle on a very bad day

by digby

The fire in London was so terrible. But this is a wonderful outcome to the most horrifying decision anyone could possibly have to make:

During the massive fire at west London’s Grenfell Tower, a woman tossed a baby out of a window and someone below caught the baby.

The tiny tot fell at least nine floors before landing in the arms of a stranger.

Samira Lamrani told NBC News, “A woman appeared at the window gesturing and trying to get somebody’s attention. She had the baby in hand — she was gesturing like she was going to throw the baby out.”

“She wrapped the child up in some sort of thick blanket, and then just dropped the baby out of the window.”

Lamrani then watched as a bystander “miraculously” caught the child.

She added, “The baby just sort of dropped in a straight line, and a guy just ran forward and the baby fell into his arms.”

They expect discretion?

Published by digby on June 14, 2017

They expect discretion?

by digby

Read this piece by Greg Sargent on the latest state of play on the health care bill. I’m hearing that McConnell is having success at wooing the “moderates” to his cause. God help us.

House Republicans are angry with President Trump for blurting out an inconveniently candid view of their health-care bill, Politico reports today. Trump reportedly told a closed-door gathering of GOP senators that the House repeal-and-replace bill is “mean” and called on them to make it “more generous.” This promptly leaked, and a lot of people are noting that Trump undercut House Republicans politically and provided Democrats with ammo for a thousand attack ads.

But I’d like to argue that this moment has broader significance than that. If you place Trump’s private candor in the context of the indefensibly opaque and secretive process that Republicans are using to get this health-care bill through, it reveals in a fresh way just how scandalous their approach to remaking one-sixth of the U.S. economy really has been.

Here’s how Politico characterizes the anger at Trump among House Republicans right now:

Imagine if you’re a House Republican, and voted for the leadership’s health-care bill in May after being told that you were doing the newly elected president a solid. You listened to the White House’s pleading — perhaps you got a phone call from Vice President Mike Pence, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus or even the president himself. The administration was on the Hill nonstop to push their legislation. You explained to your constituents that the late-in-the-game changes made to the bill helped cover more people. You celebrated with him in the Rose Garden after passage.

Now you hear the president has gone behind closed doors and told senators the House bill is “mean” and says it doesn’t do enough to cover people. Wouldn’t that anger you? Well, it’s angering a lot of House Republicans, who believe their president put them at political risk with that comment … If you’re a House Republican, are you going to help the White House next time after the president privately just dumped all over you after you cast a vote for him? A lot of GOP lawmakers are buzzing about it, and many are none too pleased with the president right now.

The multiple reports on Trump’s comments differ slightly in the details, but not in their overall thrust. Sources who spoke to the Associated Press said Trump told GOP senators that the House bill is “mean, mean, mean” and must be made “more generous.” CNN adds that Trump told the lawmakers that the House bill would leave too many people vulnerable and that he wants more money spent on those people. One Republican senator related that Trump “talked about the need to take care of people.”

House Republicans are now angry at this, Politico reports, because they stuck out their necks making the case for a bill that would leave many millions without coverage and gut protections for people with preexisting conditions. They “explained to their constituents” that the last-minute changes to the bill (adding all of $8 billion) would make it less destructive to that latter group. But Trump has now upended all of this, putting them at greater political risk.

But their anger over this is particularly galling, because Republicans themselves do not want their constituents to actually know what is in the bill they are set to pass. And they are taking active, extensive and possibly unprecedented steps to make sure they don’t. Trump merely made this harder for them to get away with.

There’s more at the link.

All we can hope for is that they start fighting among themselves. And it could happen.

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The Mueller gambit

Published by digby on June 14, 2017

The Mueller gambit

by digby

My piece for Salon this morning:

Another week, another day of dramatic testimony from a Department of Justice official about a counterintelligence investigation of possible collusion by the president’s election campaign and the Russian government. Ho hum. Tuesday’s episode featured none other than Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who insisted that he had never even thought about the Russian interference in the campaign before he recused himself. This may explain why fired FBI Director James Comey testified that he and other high-ranking Justice Department officials were so sure Sessions’ recusal would be imminent from the beginning of his term.

It was obviously extremely odd that an attorney general would not be interested in an assault on the country’s electoral integrity and would not seek some way to thwart this happening again in the future. That Comey and others gave Sessions the benefit of the doubt by assuming he was simply trying to avoid the obvious conflict was actually quite generous. Someone else might conclude that he simply didn’t care — or worse, that he was personally implicated. (A Washington Post article by Philip Bump has pointed out that Trump’s lack of interest in the issue is equally startling.)

In any case, Sessions’ testimony was mostly marked by his refusal to characterize any conversations with President Donald Trump by evoking some strange new extended version of executive privilege that has never existed before. And the problem with these claims of privilege based upon rules he was making up on the fly is that special counsel Robert Mueller will not care about any of that if he decides to investigate Trump for obstruction of justice, convenes a grand jury and calls Sessions to testify about those conversations. Nobody knows if such an investigation has been opened, but we know for sure that Trump is very upset about that possibility.

Reports this week that Trump has talked about firing Mueller have been corroborated by numerous sources. The topic also came up during an earlier hearing on Tuesday in testimony by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the man who appointed Mueller. Rosenstein told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee he has no reason to believe that Mueller has done anything untoward and he would not fire him simply because the president ordered him to.

For now, the White House has said Trump has “no intention” of firing Mueller, but administration officials insist he has every right to do so. Apparently it took some hard work on the part of Trump’s staff and friends to get him to agree to that. The reports that Trump was considering firing Mueller bubbled up from the right-wing fever swamps over the weekend. Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a good friend of Trump, was the one who intentionally thrust it into the mainstream on Monday night. According to CNN’s John King:

Chris Ruddy achieved his goal. His goal on going on television was to start a conversation in Washington about this so the president could see and today the speaker of the House and any number of other Republicans said, “Whoa whoa whoa, let Bob Mueller do his job, Bob Mueller is doing a fine job, I respect Bob Mueller.” Why would a friend do that? Why would a friend go on television to influence a friend? Because friends who have talked to the president about this [say] that he sounds very much about Bob Mueller — venting about this unaccountable investigation that he has no control over — the way he sounded about James Comey right before he fired him.

On Tuesday evening The New York Times published a behind-the-scenes look at the issue that shows the president once more to be the most infantile 71-year-old in history.

But people close to Mr. Trump say he is so volatile they cannot be sure that he will not change his mind about Mr. Mueller if he finds out anything to lead him to believe the investigation has been compromised. And his ability to endure a free-ranging investigation, directed by Mr. Mueller, that could raise questions about the legitimacy of his Electoral College victory, the topic that most provokes his rage, will be a critical test for a president who has continued on Twitter and elsewhere to flout the advice of his staff, friends and legal team.

If you thought Trump’s mistaken assumption that firing Comey would be popular with Democrats was obtuse, his understanding of how his threat to fire Mueller would bring him the result he wants is mind-boggling. The Times further reported as follows:

The president was pleased by the ambiguity of his position on Mr. Mueller, and thinks the possibility of being fired will focus the veteran prosecutor on delivering what the president desires most: a blanket public exoneration.

The man is a skilled con artist who can easily spot a gullible mark, but his understanding of intelligent people who have power and independence is sorely lacking.

According to the Times, Trump has calmed down for the moment, but nobody knows how long this will last. The question then is what happens if he actually fires Mueller?

The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told Greg Sargent of The Washington Post he believes that if this happens it will spur the Republicans into action and Congress will immediately pass an independent counsel law with enough votes to override the president’s veto. It’s a nice thought but I think he’s being wildly optimistic.

Here’s a sample of where the Republican Party stands on the Russia scandal:


Follow
GOP
✔@GOP

Enough is enough. There’s been no evidence of collusion with Russia. America is ready to move on.
7:06 PM – 12 Jun 2017

1,4241,424 Retweets
3,4223,422 likes
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Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., echoed this notion on Fox News, saying, “What the hell are we investigating? Why are we going through with this charade?”

As Sargent’s article pointed out, changing course would require that Republicans pretend “they have not actively enabled the serial trampling on rules, norms and constraints — the abuses of power and contempt for the rule of law and our institutional processes — that have characterized Trump’s presidency since the beginning.”

Trump already fired the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who was examining his business dealings, the acting attorney general for refusing to violate the Constitution with his ill-fated Muslim ban, and the FBI director who refused to swear a loyalty oath and back off investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia. The president has shown that he’s more than willing to flout any rule, norm or law that gets in his way.

And the Republicans have gone along with him at every turn. We simply cannot assume that they will save us. They’re in on it.

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