Month: December 2017

Is the media marching toward cretinism?by digby

So MSNBC fired Sam Seder because they were too craven and cowardly to ignore right wing hit men who pretended to be offended by what anyone with a 6th grade education knew was satire.

Jesse Singal writes about the flap:

Yesterday, the Wrap reported that MSNBC was cutting ties with its contributor Sam Seder, host of the progressive podcast Majority Report, after the following old tweet of his, archived here, was unearthed:

At the time of the tweet, there was a heated discussion going on over filmmaker Roman Polanski, who some liberals were attempting to rehabilitate despite the fact that he had been convicted of child rape for a case involving a 13-year-old girl, forcing him to flee the United States. Seder’s tweet comes across as shocking, of course — that’s the point — but any adult human who takes more than 20 seconds to sit with it will realize that Seder was abrasively ridiculing those who were defending Polanski on the grounds of his artistic brilliance. He was not — and the fact that anyone even needs to type this sentence suggests that the invention of the internet may have been a grave error — literally saying that if his daughter were raped, he would hope that the rapist possesses certain creative attributes.

But the tweet’s obvious intent didn’t matter to the far right, which began enthusiastically circulating the tweet after far-right manosphere personality Mike Cernovich first resurfaced it last week. Soon it was further broadcast by a sizable chunk of far-right Twitter, including figures like, well, the son of the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump Jr.

Last week, Seder put out a video explaining the situation:

[…]

Last week, I wrote about how companies desperately need to do a better job distinguishing internet outrage that can be safely ignored from outrage that needs to be responded to. The former often comes from people who were never your customers in the first place — but online, they can pose as your customers to try to force you to take some action that furthers their agenda.

This is a textbook example. The people trying to get Seder fired have every incentive in the world to pose as outraged customers of his advertisers, and as deeply concerned about sexual assault, when in reality, all the available evidence suggests that they are mad at him for criticizing men who, overwhelming evidence suggests, actually committed sexual assault.

These right wing supporters of Donald Trump and Roy Moore are sending Seder’s advertisers unctuously dishonest comments saying how offended they are because they are supposedly “survivors” of pedophilia or whatever and the advertisers panic and drop the show.

This may be a bad faith tactic by the right but we expect that from them. What is concerning to me is the stunning cowardice on the part of MSNBC and other companies in buckling to this nonsensical charge that what he said was the opposite of what he said. In fact, it’s mind-boggling, headache-inducing, ridiculous.

This is the equivalent of the British government putting Jonathan Swift in jail for proposing cannibalism.

We are becoming very, very dumb in this country. So dumb that we are electing infantile imbeciles to lead us. But if media companies that are not affiliated with the right wing join this stampede to cretinism it’s hopeless.

Full disclosure: I appear regularly on Sam’s radio show on Ring of Fire and on his podcast, Majority Report.

Please subscribe to the podcast and contribute to the defense fund so that he is not dependent on timorous advertisers. And sign this petition to have MSNBC rehire Sam. They need to recognize who their audience is. It isn’t right wing cranks who pretend not to understand satire.

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Illegal or not, Trump still betrayed the countryby digby

I wrote about the fact that the Trump transition betrayed the country last December whether they broke the law or not for Salon this morning:
I’ve been around long enough to have gone through several presidential scandals. If there’s one consistent theme among all of them, it’s that there’s always a moment when the president’s defenders start to argue that even if the president did what he’s accused of doing, it’s not illegal and therefore it’s no big deal.

During the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon himself operated on the belief that his status as the chief executive meant that he answered to no authority. He fought the charges on that premise, until it became untenable when the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over the White House tapes and he lost the confidence of his own party, which told him it was time to go. After leaving office, he famously told interviewer David Frost, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

In the Iran-Contra scandal, the argument was made explicitly by congressional Republicans, who fought the independent counsel investigation every step of the way. In the face of outright lying and obstruction of justice by Reagan administration officials, they waved it away as the result of excessive patriotism. Rep. Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican, argued they deserved no punishment:

All of us at some time confront conflicts between rights and duties, between choices that are evil and less evil, and one hardly exhausts moral imagination by labeling every untruth and every deception an outrage.

During the Lewinsky scandal a decade later, Hyde was not quite so philosophical. While Bill Clinton’s defenders all claimed that the alleged perjury and obstruction of justice by the president in dealing with his extramarital affair did not meet the impeachment threshold for a high crime or misdemeanor, Hyde thundered, “Lying poisons justice. If we are to defend justice and the rule of law, lying must have consequences.”

In other words, these scandals are always partisan to some degree, which is to be expected. But they also always seem to feature arcane legal and constitutional arguments about what constitutes obstruction of justice and perjury as the scandal moves closer to the president himself.

Despite the fact that President Donald Trump hasn’t even been in office a year, we have already reached the point where these questions are being asked. Cable TV lawyers are hashing out the usefulness of an archaic law like the Logan Act and arguing about whether lying to the FBI is a crime if it’s not “material” or whether the president can be charged with obstruction of justice as a criminal matter.

Normally we don’t reach this point so quickly, but then, Trump’s administration is a dumpster fire in which two of his former top advisers have already been indicted and face jail time and there’s more turnover in the White House than the average fast food joint. Mostly, however, the pace of this scandal’s unfolding is a testament to the seriousness of the underlying issue: a foreign government sought to influence the U.S. presidential election to help its chosen candidate. It may be the most serious presidential scandal in our history.

It’s certainly not the first time a nation has either openly or covertly interfered in another country’s election to help one candidate or another. The United States has done it in the past, on multiple occasions. In this case, however, the point seems to have been to create discord and mistrust in the electoral system itself, to help Donald Trump malign and discredit his opponent and to turn allies against each other. This too is not unprecedented. Richard Nixon was known for this sort of thing — they called it “ratf***ing,” and one of Nixon’s original hitmen, Roger Stone, was intimately involved in this one too. But the fact that it happened, and resulted in the election of someone so unqualified, has shaken the American democratic system to its core.

It’s obvious at this point that there was a concerted Russian effort to infiltrate the Trump campaign. The extent to which it was successful is still unclear, although we have plenty of evidence that members of the Trump campaign were willing to talk about it. At least one, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, may well have been working for more than one boss. There are many questions about Trump’s business dealings with Russia, mostly because he has been opaque and secretive about his finances and because the world in which he worked is rife with oligarchs and mobsters looking for people with whom to park their money. All this is worthy of a thorough investigation, particularly since Trump is so obviously unwilling to be forthcoming about any of it.

But frankly, even if none of that turns out to be true — or if the Mueller investigation finds no evidence that anyone else committed any crimes — it doesn’t much matter. Michael Flynn has admitted to calling up Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak — at the behest of other members of the incoming administration and likely the president himself — and telling him not to worry about any U.S. retaliation against Russia for its election meddling, because when the Trump team took office they’d make it all go away. He might as well have said, “Tell Vlad thanks for the help. We’ve got his back.”

Indeed, Donald Trump, who was then the president-elect, tweeted this the very next day:

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016

What Flynn relayed to Kislyak that day was a shocking act of betrayal by the president-elect of the United States and his team. One can only imagine what authorities at the Department of Justice thought when they figured it out. After all, the Obama administration was not protesting the legitimacy of Trump’s victory when it imposed those punishments. Our government was sending a straightforward message to the Russians that there would be a price to pay for their audacious interference in the American democratic system and their attack on American sovereignty. And then the newly elected president, the beneficiary of that attack, secretly sent a different message saying he would make sure there was no such penalty.

Was that to pay back Russia for its help or simply because he didn’t want to give his political opponents any credibility? I can’t say. But before he was even sworn in, Trump acted against the interest of the country in order to protect himself. Everything he’s done since then has been in service of that same interest: Donald J. Trump.

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Heaven’s, tax cuts are delicious with applesauce or pudding
by Tom Sullivan

The cultish economic beliefs and behavior of many conservatives and their political party of choice has not gone unnoticed here. The Midas cult, as I’ve called it for years, seems determined to turn every human interaction into a transaction. Anything that can be can be turned into profit (underpants?) must be, or else the gods will punish us for our crimes against capitalism.

“Money answereth all things,” (Ecclesiastes 10:19), a shameless radio evangelist once preached while hawking his “prosperity plan,” i.e., send your prayers to God and send your money to me. With the exception of the sitting president, the GOP leadership, its consultants and mega-donors simply wear better-fitting suits.

But the behavior among the Republican faithful today moves beyond the worship of the golden calf to something darker still. It has not gone unnoticed among conservatives who have so far avoided the prion-tainted venison.

Thanks to Cliff Schecter (UnPresidented podcast, “The Real McCain”) for noticing an op-ed in Forbes by Chris Ladd. Identified as a “recovering Republican,” Ladd wonders how far members of the party of Donald Trump and Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama are from castrating themselves, downing poisoned applesauce, and waiting for God’s flying saucer to ferry them up to the comet:

The same magical reasoning infects Republicans tax reform plans. We are in the eighth year of continuous job growth, the eighth year of economic expansion, and the eighth year of a head-spinning stock market boom. Corporate profits are at record levels and the economy has been redlining at full-employment for almost three years. By any marginally credible economic reasoning, this would be an ideal moment to raise taxes, curb debt, make investments in public infrastructure, and just generally do the things one does at the peak of a long economic expansion.

At this moment, why are Republicans trying to slash taxes for the wealthy? Why would someone castrate themselves and commit suicide? Because that’s what the cult demands.

There are no bright economic minds suggesting that this is a good idea. There is no difference of opinion among sane, credible people about whether America needs a massive tax cut for the rich. An effort by Republican leaders to claim support among economists devolved into unabashed lying. One of the “economists” listed as a supporter, Gil Sylvia, has yet to be identified and may not even exist. When one of the president’s minions pitched this idiotic tax plan to a panel of American CEO’s – men who will be getting fat tax cuts – they balked. In public. On camera. Director Cohn’s stunned response after soliciting their backing should be etched on the tombstone of the former Party of Lincoln, “Why aren’t the other hands up?”

Cohn didn’t pause to hear their answer, because that isn’t how a cult works. Like a Soviet Commissar, he wasn’t soliciting feedback but measuring loyalty. He noted the disbelief of the apostates and simply moved on in righteous oblivion. No reasoning accessible on the plane of logical thought supports this plan, just like no one outside the cult would ever let Roy Moore make decisions on their behalf. Tax cuts, along with slashing government services, ending government support for health insurance, burning more coal, and a whole collection of other loony ideas, are now unconsidered articles of faith. Republican Jesus wants a tax cut. The faithful will comply.

But it’s not a just a backsliding, “former GOP Precinct Committeeman” who knows madness when he sees it.

Conservative columnist Michael Gerson pleads in the Washington Post for “social solidarity — an economic system that allows everyone to live lives of dignity.” But such talk angers the Market gods worshipped by the House and Senate majority. The cult will seat a pederast if that’s what it takes to appease them. The gods demands sacrifice. Yours.

How is this for symbolism: In their tax bill, Senate Republicans gave a break to private jet owners but refused to increase the corporate rate by 0.94 percentage points to cover the cost of helping an estimated 12 million working-class families. The 20 percent corporate rate, Rubio and Lee were told, was sacrosanct, nonnegotiable — until the day after the vote, when President Trump conceded it may need to rise anyway. What drives many elected Republicans to embody every destructive, plutocratic stereotype? Do they really need to wear spats and a top hat every time they appear in public?

Decades of fear-mongering have turned the party into “a white nationalist cult,” Ladd believes. All it needed was the right cult leader to exploit fears that changing times meant plutocrats and Dixiecrats would have to share the country with the wrong people. “The Party of Lincoln now exists to help Neo-Confederates win the Civil War politically, long after losing it on the battlefield,” Ladd concludes.

With a backpedaling RNC now all in on supporting Moore’s candidacy, Lincoln’s heirs signaled they are just fine with the South rising again.

* * * * * * * *

Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Another Trump official who forgot her Gingko before she testified before congressby digby

K.T. McFarland was a Fox Newser who had once worked in PR in the Reagan administration when Trump brought her on board the White House as a high level national security expert. And like so many before her, she has a serious memory problem:

An email sent during the transition by President Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, K.T. McFarland, appears to contradict the testimony she gave to Congress over the summer about contacts between the Russian ambassador and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.

Ms. McFarland had told lawmakers that she did not discuss or know anything about interactions between Sergey I. Kislyak, who had been Moscow’s ambassador to the United States, and Mr. Flynn, according to Senate documents.

But emails obtained by The New York Times appear to undermine those statements. In a Dec. 29 message about newly imposed Obama administration sanctions against Russia for its election interference, Ms. McFarland, then serving on Mr. Trump’s transition team, told another transition official that Mr. Flynn would be talking to the Russian ambassador that evening.
[…]
As part of the confirmation process, Ms. McFarland testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July. After the hearing, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, asked her in writing: “Did you ever discuss any of General Flynn’s contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak directly with General Flynn?”

“I am not aware of any of the issues or events as described above,” Ms. McFarland replied.

Mr. Booker said in a statement on Monday that the newly surfaced emails were disconcerting.”

They all have weird memory loss when it comes to Russians. Go figure…

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Oh yeah, Sessions was there in 1998by digby

And he certainly believed a president could commit obstruction of justice:

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer argued Monday that, as the nominal head of federal law enforcement, the president is legally unable to obstruct justice. But the exact opposite view was once argued by another senior Trump lawyer: Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In 1999, Sessions – then an Alabama senator – laid out an impassioned case for President Bill Clinton to be removed from office based on the argument that Clinton obstructed justice amid the investigation into his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

“The facts are disturbing and compelling on the President’s intent to obstruct justice,” he said, according to remarks in the congressional record.

Sessions isn’t alone. More than 40 current GOP members of Congress voted for the impeachment or removal of Clinton from office for obstruction of justice. They include Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – who mounted his own passionate appeal to remove Clinton from office for obstruction of justice – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, who was a House member at the time.

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In all, 17 sitting senators supported the obstruction of justice charge against Clinton in 1998 and 1999.

“The chief law officer of the land, whose oath of office calls on him to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, crossed the line and failed to defend the law, and, in fact, attacked the law and the rights of a fellow citizen,” Sessions said during Clinton’s trial in the Senate, two months after he was impeached by the House. “Under our Constitution, equal justice requires that he forfeit his office.”

Keep in mind that Clinton supposedly committed obstruction of justice when he got Lewinsky a job in another department and suggested she write an affidavit even though she said he never told her to lie (they just knew that’s what he must have meant) and some other silly things. He wasn’t leaning on the FBI to let his subordinate off the hook for telling the Russian government they would receive no punishment for helping them win the election — and then lying to the FBI about it.

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The Rump Trumpiesby digbyThey are a shrinking minority, but they hold all the power of the United States government

Trump’s base is less than 30% of the voting population. And yet the government they support is destroying the country and nobody can do anything to stop them for another year. There are institutions that are trying. The media is working overtime. They Department of Justice was able to keep one little bit of institutional integrity when Sessions recused himself (before fully realizing that those rules are no longer operative — just ask Devin Nunes who also recused himself and is just ignoring the recusal.) But really, as long as the Republicans congress remain total whores — and there is no evidence they will change — Mitch McConnell’s getting ready to welcome an ideological nutcase and molester of underage teen age girls into the US Senate as we speak.

The system is not working.

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Going anti-abortion won’t help you Demsby digby

This piece in Huffington Post by Amanda Terkel should be read by every Democratic strategist who is just sure that if only the Democrats would stop being so damned rigid on women’s rights, they could pick off a few Republicans. It’s not at all clear that the supposedly make or break issue of abortion is especially important:

{T}here’s been significant speculation that if Jones were anti-abortion, maybe ― just maybe ― some Republicans who find Moore distasteful would vote Democratic.

But a new poll questions that assumption.

On Nov. 4-5, Clarity Campaign Labs, a Democratic polling firm, surveyed 707 Alabama voters in a survey commissioned by Planned Parenthood Votes. (Planned Parenthood has no involvement in the Alabama special election and has not endorsed a candidate.) The results were shared with HuffPost.

Clarity Campaign Labs was specifically interested in Republican voters who might be persuaded to back Jones. The survey found that less than 1.5 percent of Moore’s supporters said they had considered switching and backing Jones.

The pollster then tried to figure out why those voters decided to stick with Moore. Was it because of Jones’ support for abortion rights?

But Clarity didn’t want to limit people with a list of possible answers. So they were asked to explain, in their own words, why they continued to reject Jones.

“Abortion wasn’t really in the top couple issues people gave us,” said John Hagner, the Clarity pollster who conducted the survey.

More than one-third of those Republican voters who said they decided not to switch to Jones gave a reason that fell into the category of just generally not liking him. Ten percent said they didn’t like his personal history. (Jones is a former U.S. attorney best known for finally putting Ku Klux Klan members behind bars for blowing up an African-American church back in 1963.) Eight percent cited abortion as the reason.

“Of the people who were undecided, they weren’t citing choice as the major driver,” Hagner said. “Of the people who had considered voting for Jones and decided not to, there was a whole range of issues.”

The poll was conducted before the Moore underage molestation revelations which actually makes it more convincing.

Jones is simply “disliked” by certain people for a bunch of different reasons that people can’t really articulate but which probably come down to simple tribalism (Democrats: bad) and the fact that he put white supremacists in jail.
Or maybe it’s something else. But abortion isn’t the first thing that most Alabamans said was their reason — it’s just the one that the Republicans are trying to push as the “respectable” reason to oppose him in spite of his predatory behavior.

One hopes that Democrats will take the time to explore this more fully. It’s always very easy to just “accept” that if you abandon women’s rights you can pick up some of those Real Americans because it’s the most important cultural affinity signifier. But that may not be true.

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Friedman explodesby digby

He’s pretty much always wrong about everything but he still maintains his sanctimony. It’s not easy …

Tom Friedman on criticism of his Mohamed bin Salman article: "fuck that" (the whole clip is really something) pic.twitter.com/vv3psVHzay— Tom Gara (@tomgara) December 3, 2017

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Thanking Vlad had a big big priceby digby

I thought this piece by a former special agent in the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI was an interesting analysis of the foreign policy implications of the Trump machinations with Russia over the election meddling sanctions. Regardless of the legal issues, Trump and his cronies have done untold damage to American prestige and credibility. When you do that all you have left is “might makes right.” That’s not a good option with Trump in charge.

Most in this whirlwind of legal speculation is an important detail in Flynn’s plea: The Trump transition team’s response to the Obama administration’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats last December. The secretive actions Flynn and others took following these sanctions reveal a fundamental breach of public trust that cannot be overlooked in the frenzy to find criminal wrongdoing.

I know firsthand from my experience working counterintelligence investigations for the FBI that kicking a diplomat out of the country is no small thing. The process of expelling a diplomat is called “PNG”-ing, which stands for declaring the individual a “persona non grata.”

Diplomats, who are visiting dignitaries, typically receive the highest level of courtesy from the host government and enjoy diplomatic immunity — so a PNG is the harshest punishment the U.S. can give a diplomat, and is only done in the most serious cases. Because it is also highly embarrassing for the country being reprimanded, it is also usually done very quietly.

The FBI gets involved in PNGs because it monitors foreign intelligence activity in the United States as part of its counterintelligence mandate. Most foreign spies come to the U.S. under diplomatic cover (which, as noted above, affords them immunity if they engage in illegal acts). While most often the FBI’s goal is to quietly “neutralize” their activities, sometimes the actions taken by a foreign intelligence service are so egregious that the FBI makes a request that the spy be removed from the U.S.

However, the process is very difficult. PNG-ing a spy has repercussions that impact other government agencies and missions. Usually, for example, a country will retaliate against a PNG by doing a tit-for-tat expulsion of one of our diplomats — likely a CIA officer under diplomatic cover there. This disrupts our intelligence collection efforts abroad. The PNG may also hinder diplomatic efforts that may be in progress with the country through other channels.

As a result, a PNG request involves a tug-of-war between the FBI, the CIA and the State Department (with the final decision taken by the White House), and is most often denied. Of the cases I was involved with, the only time a PNG was approved was when allowing the spy to remain would have resulted in actual physical harm to a U.S. person.

This is the complex process and very high threshold to keep in mind when looking at President Obama’s actions against Russia last December. In response to Russia’s election hacking, the U.S. expelled not just one, but 35 spies posing as diplomats — the strongest response ever to a cyberattack against the U.S.

In addition, President Obama made a public statement on the expulsions, calling them a “necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior.” Both the magnitude of the sanctions and the public condemnation by the president was intended to send as sharp a rebuke as possible to Russia’s attack on our democracy.

As Flynn’s plea deal reveals, the Trump transition team immediately made a concerted effort to undermine the signal that the United States was sending. In particular, Flynn, with the approval of “senior transition officials” (identified in reporting as Jared Kushner and Katie McFarland), sought to discourage Russia from escalating the situation. Flynn reportedly promised that the Trump administration’s foreign policy goals would be more conciliatory.

By relaying this message covertly (and in spite of a “pointed request” by the Obama administration to avoid sending mixed signals to foreign officials), the Trump team negated the message being sent by the United States to Russia — and effectively put its stamp of approval on Russia’s efforts.

The repercussions of the Trump team’s covert efforts are not merely symbolic; they have also had serious long-term consequences on our intelligence capabilities against Russia. After secretly “reassuring” Russia that it need not worry about facing consequences, the Trump administration did not deliver. In July, Congress passed (and the president after much delay signed) a sanctions bill against Russia. Putin, either angry for being misled or having to save face from taking no action at all in December (or both), retaliated much more forcefully than he likely would have otherwise. Russia expelled 775 American diplomats in response, severely crippling our intelligence and diplomatic apparatus in that country.

The White House has argued that the incoming Trump administration was merely engaging in “normal outreach” with a foreign power. But this is belied by the fact that every person involved with the campaign and transition subsequently denied having any contacts with Russian officials — even to Congress and FBI.

In fact, this pattern of deception helps explain why Obama took the step of PNG’ing so many diplomats at all, and at such a late stage in his administration. If the intelligence community by November believed (correctly, in retrospect) that evidence of Russian election hacking and interference might be denied and even “buried” by the incoming administration, a strong public stance was necessary. It’s telling that the FBI, CIA and NSA issued their own unclassified public report of Russian election meddling eight days later, on Jan. 6, 2017. Had Obama and the intelligence community not taken these actions, it’s possible that the American public would still be in the dark about Russia’s active measures.

Focusing on whether the Trump campaign and transition team broke the law misses the bigger picture. By secretly sabotaging a measure designed to protect America’s sovereignty in the face of a foreign attack, these individuals acted against the interest of the United States and aided our adversary. Now they are the stewards of the country and its institutions. Whatever happens in a court of law, that is what should concern us all.

It’s not illegal if the president does itby digby

I wrote about the president’s obstruction tweets for Salon this morning:
President Trump had quite a week. He lied about his “Access Hollywood” tape, attacked CNN International — prompting authoritarians all over the globe to follow suit — made a racist slur in front of Native American war heroes and tweeted out far-right conspiracy websites and anti-Muslim videos, prompting a major diplomatic crisis with America’s closest ally. It didn’t get any better over the weekend.

The Daily Beast reported that Trump had been worried for a while that former national security adviser Michael Flynn had “turned on him” and that the president was “personally hurt” by the news Flynn was potentially cooperating with the special counsel. When it turned out on Friday that Flynn had agreed to plead guilty to lying to the FBI in exchange for telling the prosecutors everything he knows, Trump pretty much lost it. From the tenor of his tweeting over the weekend, hurt has given way to panic.

He managed to stay quiet through Friday night while he attended several fundraisers in New York to deliver the good news to his fellow multi-millionaires that their massive tax cut was one step closer to fruition — and collect his commission. As he always says, “To the victors belong the spoils!” But by Saturday it had all obviously become too much and Trump tweeted: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”

It appeared that the staff hastily tweeted a tribute to Rosa Parks and yet another Melania Trump “Christmas at the White House” picture in a vain attempt to make that tweet slide down the timeline, but it was too late. Everyone saw that the president had admitted to something he’d never admitted to before: He already knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when he fired him. Knowing that, Trump took FBI Director James Comey aside the very next day and asked him to go easy on his buddy. That would be known as obstruction of justice.

That tweet sent the White House spinning like a top. At first officials insisted it was a “paraphrase” of the statement White House lawyer Ty Cobb had released the day before. But when reporters went to check, there was nothing like that to paraphrase. Finally, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd fell on his sword and said he had composed the tweet and made a mistake in the way it was worded. He hadn’t meant to say that Trump knew Flynn had lied to the FBI before he fired him.

Normally, if a lawyer made such a mistake they would be fired, particularly if the client was the president of the United States. Moreover, nobody believes that anyone but Trump wrote that tweet, because nobody but him would be stupid enough to think that tweet should be written in the first place. The idea that his lawyer would think it was a good idea to tweet anything about the case is simply absurd. It was a foolish admission, right up there with Trump going on TV with Lester Holt and admitting that he fired Comey over the Russia investigation.

Unfortunately for Trump, Dowd went on to confuse the matter even more by telling The Washington Post that Trump “knew in late January that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had probably given FBI agents the same inaccurate account he provided to Vice President Pence about a call with the Russian ambassador.” In other words, Trump knew that Flynn had lied, since lying to Pence was supposedly the reason he was fired.

More importantly, why in the world would Trump have asked the FBI director to go easy on Flynn if he hadn’t known Flynn was in legal trouble? That never made any sense at all. Trump attempted to clean that little matter up on Sunday morning with this tweet:

I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017

That, of course, is where this was always headed. It’s Comey’s word against Trump about what happened when he shooed everyone out of the Oval Office to talk to the FBI Director alone the day after Flynn was fired. Comey took notes and told other members of the Justice Department what happened at the time. We don’t know if Trump told anyone. But since Trump lies compulsively, it’s going to be tough to make the case that the country should take his word over Comey’s — or anyone’s.

What this bizarre episode over the weekend showed was the degree of stress that Trump is under, knowing that Flynn is cooperating. It also reveals the right’s bold strategy to save him. Trump only tweeted a few words about Flynn. But he was obviously watching Fox News and issued a flurry of tweets about the counter-narrative that network is launching to discredit the Department of Justice and the FBI.

The idea is that Comey and his cronies covered up Hillary Clinton’s crimes because they were against Trump from the beginning. (Yes, I know this doesn’t make sense; it’s a narrative, not a legal brief.) Trump’s allies were helped along with that this weekend when news broke that a high ranking FBI agent, whom Mueller had dismissed last summer because he had sent some anti-Trump texts to his girlfriend, was also involved with the Clinton email case.

House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who has supposedly recused himself from the Russia investigation but is obviously up to his eyeballs in it, has declared war on the Justice Department, saying it isn’t cooperating. (The department says it is.) Now Attorney General Jeff Sessions has gotten involved, saying that he will ensure that Justice is operating with integrity.

Trump was very excited about this and posted a series of rambling hysterical tweets claiming that the FBI is “in tatters, the worst in history” but that he will “bring it back to greatness.” FBI agents and Department of Justice employees were not amused. Former Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted, “you’ll find integrity and honesty at FBI headquarters and not at 1600 Penn Ave right now.”

All this dragging on the FBI is a smokescreen, of course. But it will give the right-wing media and Trump supporters a storyline, and Trump loyalists like Nunes probably hope it will eventually turn up something to give Trump a reason to fire Mueller. It hard to see why they bother. If he wants to do it, he’ll do it. After this weekend it feels as though the odds of such an impulsive action just went up. For an innocent man, the president is sure acting rattled.

Update: Axios has more on Trump’s Lawyer Dowd saying something stupid today:

The “President cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case,” Dowd claims. 

Why it matters: Trump’s legal team is clearly setting the stage to say the president cannot be charged with any of the core crimes discussed in the Russia probe: collusion and obstruction. 

Presumably, you wouldn’t preemptively make these arguments unless you felt there was a chance charges are coming. 

One top D.C. lawyer told me that obstruction is usually an ancillary charge rather than a principal one, such as aquid pro quo between the Trump campaign and Russians. 

But Dems will fight the Dowd theory. Bob Bauer, an NYU law professor and former White House counsel to President Obama, told me: “It is certainly possible for a president to obstruct justice. The case for immunity has its adherents, but they based their position largely on the consideration that a president subject to prosecution would be unable to perform the duties of the office, a result that they see as constitutionally intolerable.” 

Remember: The Articles of Impeachment against Nixon began by saying he “obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice.”

They actually impeached Clinton for it. And many of the same Republicans who did that are still in congress today. Please.