Month: December 2017

“Pervasive Connections”

by digby

I wrote about the news that the FBI “briefed and warned” the Trump campaign about possible infiltration by Russian agents for Salon today:
On Monday, NBC News reported that sometime after Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee for president on July 19, 2016, FBI officials delivered him a top-level counterintelligence briefing in which they warned him that Russians were trying to infiltrate the campaign. They asked that the campaign report any contacts or suspicious activity to the bureau. The exact date of this meeting is unclear, but it is assumed to have happened around the time both general election campaigns were receiving their first classified briefings around the middle of August.

It is apparently standard to brief presidential campaigns about the possibility of such threats, but in this case there was a highly specific one. And it was likely explained in some pretty stark terms, since Trump was new to classified briefings and the FBI knew at this point that the Russians had hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s computer system and were behind the WikiLeaks releases that Trump touted on the campaign trail every day.

In fact, a month or so later when Trump met Clinton for the presidential debates and repeatedly claimed that “nobody knew” who had hacked the DNC, saying it might have even been “some guy in his bed who weighs 400 pounds,” the intelligence community was appalled:

A senior U.S. intelligence official assured NBC News that cybersecurity and the Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election have been briefed to, and discussed extensively with, both parties’ candidates, surrogates and leadership, since mid-August. “To profess not to know at this point is willful misrepresentation,” said the official. “The intelligence community has walked a very thin line in not taking sides, but both candidates have all the information they need to be crystal clear.”

We now know that Trump’s team was explicitly told that they needed to be on the lookout for any evidence of attempted infiltration. Since we now know that the FBI also already knew about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, that would be expected. Former CIA Director John Brennan shared the intelligence with the FBI, which began an investigation in July. Nobody on the outside knows whether Trump and his aides shared the warning with other members of the campaign, but they should have. Indeed, any normal person would have known to do so without being told.

So Trump and his top aides were warned and asked to be cautious and aware. Their campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was let go because of his professional involvement with the pro-Russian regime in Ukraine, for heaven’s sake. Yet there is no evidence that any member of the Trump campaign ever mentioned their contacts with Russians to the authorities.

There were other stories about those classified briefings back in the late summer of 2016. They largely had to do with future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who had a security clearance and attended at least some of them. At the first one, on Aug. 17, he allegedly made quite a scene:

Six current and former senior officials said they were aware of friction between retired Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the advisers Trump brought to the briefing, and the officials who conducted the briefing. Four sources with knowledge of the briefing — including two intelligence officials who spoke to people in the room — said Flynn repeatedly interrupted the briefers until New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie intervened.

Flynn and Christie both denied the story at the time, but as we know, Flynn is a liar, and Christie has since said that he was fired from the transition for being dead set against hiring Flynn into the White House. I suspect this scene really happened. We don’t know if this was the specific Russia “warning” meeting, but since the reports said aides were in attendance, it’s likely that Flynn was at all of them.

Keep in mind that the Trump team has been using the excuse that they were new to all this and didn’t know about all this cloak-and-dagger business. But Michael Flynn is a former Army general and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He knew very well how serious it was that the FBI was warning the campaigns about possible Russian infiltration, yet somehow never told authorities about all of his contacts with Russia or anyone else’s in the campaign.

All of this had to seem curious to the FBI, at the very least, if not downright alarming. Certainly, it alarmed one of the investigators, the now-notorious Peter Strzok, who was part of the original investigation and was later fired by Robert Mueller when it was revealed that he had been sending texts about the case to an FBI lawyer with whom he was having a personal relationship. (The current GOP attack on the FBI investigation, regarding a text in which Strzok called the investigation “insurance,” is rebutted here by The Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story.

It should be noted that on Aug. 11, 2016, days before the “insurance” text and before the FBI got a look at the Steele dossier, Strzok sent this:

OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS

I don’t know whether Strzok was one of the FBI counterintelligence agents who briefed Trump and his aides, likely including Michael Flynn, but evidently the agents who did so already knew there were “pervasive connections” between the Trump campaign and the Russians, one of which was the campaign manager. It had to be disturbing to watch this candidate and members of his campaign continue to have connections with Russia and publicly deny the intelligence.

Trump continues to deny that Russians were behind the election interference. He has made numerous moves as president to shut down the investigation, including firing former FBI Director James Comey. Now we know that Trump was warned that Russian actors would try to infiltrate his campaign and that he never reported the dozens of contacts we now know about. Trump’s behavior certainly appears to show what prosecutors call a “consciousness of guilt.” And that is always what leads to a cover-up.

Bride of tax plan
by Tom Sullivan

New Yorker‘s John Cassidy lays out a case that Republicans pushing the tax bill want “the tax base decimated, the I.R.S. crippled, and the federal government forced to slash spending on domestic programs.” If sabotage is their goal, the tax bill they are about to pass is just the ticket:

What isn’t yet fully appreciated is how porous and potentially unstable the rest of the tax code will be after the bill is passed. With a corporate rate of just twenty per cent, and a big new break for proprietors of unincorporated businesses and certain types of partnerships, the new code will contain enormous incentives for tax-driven restructurings, creative accounting, and outright fraud. Every tax adviser and scammer in the country will be looking for ways to reclassify regular salary income as favored types of business income.

The scheme is so unworkable in its current form, Cassidy writes, that tax experts at New York University and the University of Chicago believe it will not long survive as written. Unless fixed, it will cripple the tax system.

Like that’s a bad thing? Destabilizing the tax system may be just the kind of shock believers in government of, by, and for the right people are hoping for. Because having driven through an unstable, Frankenstein-like tax bill, the next order of business will be to assemble its bride.

One doesn’t have to be Naomi Klein to see what comes next. House Speaker Paul Ryan is up-front about it:

“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said on a talk radio show. One of his top spending appropriators echoed the sentiment.

“If someone wants to get serious about debt, come talk to me about entitlements,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) told CNBC. “Tax cuts produce growth; entitlement spending doesn’t.”

Well, that makes a good sound bite. But there are over 2 million active duty and reserve military personnel on the government payroll. Over 1.6 million civilian workers in this country owe their steady paychecks, their cars, their homes, their kids’ education, and their retirements to the sainted private-sector, free-market entrepreneurs of the American defense industry, makers of fine consumer products. That’s government spending that adds to the economy. The Ryan’s and the Coles believe federal dollars spent on Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security do not. There’s a lot of talk about bias lately. How about that?

Adding $1 trillion or more to the national debt isn’t a problem when the deficits advantage the right people. Or the military. Luckily, the problem with Republicans doing anything against the social safety net in the near-term is the 2018 mid-terms.

Tara Golshan writes for Vox, the GOP caucus is split between cutting Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security and spending on infrastructure:

Republicans attempted sweeping Medicaid cuts earlier this year, and ultimately failed — which was largely attributed to robust advocacy efforts. It was a proposal to block-grant Medicaid that would ultimately cut more than $700 billion from the program over the next 10 years. It proved so unpopular that it was one of the leading reasons the Obamacare repeal effort tanked altogether.

Medicare and Social Security continue to stand along Medicaid as some of the most popular federal spending programs. Earlier this year, only 12 percent of Americans said they wanted Congress to decrease Medicaid spending, according to a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. A Pew study found only 10 percent of Republican-leaning Americans wanted to reduce funding for Social Security, and 15 percent wanted to decrease spending on Medicare.

Those numbers may ultimately quash any immediate attempt to slash the safety net. Plus the fact that the White House expects to roll out some sort of $1 trillion infrastructure plan in January. Likely, it will come in the form of public-private partnerships that push fees onto taxpayers and cost them even more on the back end when the ventures fail.

Once upon a time, Republicans believed in stimulating growth directly, as Eisenhower did, by actually building things. The interstate highway system was not only a jobs program, but a way of growing the economy that is still paying dividends today. The FDR-era Central Valley Project still feeds the country. Republicans no longer believe in that America. Now stimulating growth means diverting money, not water. Can they build anything anymore besides legislative Frankensteins?

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

This post will remain at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down for newer material.The war on Christmas is finally over! It’s holiday fundraiser time!by digby

I’ve been writing this little blog for 14 years now, if you can believe that. We must live in very interesting times to say the least if it can keep me blogging every day and keep you reading what I write. But for all the challenges we’ve faced during that period from the Iraq war on, I have to say that the last 13 months have been the most tumultuous and frightening of my adult lifetime. And I’ve been around a while.
There was the presidential inauguration, of course, and from that much else flows. “American carnage” indeed. It seems that every month every week, every day presents some new horror.

His relentlessly reckless rhetoric and behavior is wearying. His third rate staff and refusal to listen to experts is more than worrying.

The overall corruption of his administration and the explosion of all norms and rules that make a civilized system is alarming.

The tax cut he and his GOP millionaire cronies have devised is a perfect illustration of Trump’s credo: “to the victors belong the spoils.”

The destruction of American credibility abroad may be irreparable. The Russia connection and threat of cyberwarfare is downright nightmarish and the existential dread of a North Korean nuclear confrontation between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un is overwhelming.

And on top of the disaster of Donald Trump the US also suffered three devastating hurricanes, one of which the president treated as if it was one of the foreign countries he so despises and which is still barely recovering. And California has been on fire for months.

We had the worst mass shooting in American history this year when some nut with a cache of easily obtained semi-automatic weapons shot 600 people at a country music concert.

And then there was the shock of seeing torch wielding Nazis marching in the streets and the president of the United States issuing the chilling statement that they were “very fine people.”

We are ending this annus horribilis with the revelation of an epidemic of sexual harassment by powerful men across every profession in America.

Like I said, it’s been quite a year.

I still wake up every morning hoping the election of Donald Trump was a bad dream and I have awakened into a world in which I’m at least not terrified that the president of the United States is going to blow up the planet. He has demonstrated over and over again in the past year that he is not only monumentally mendacious, he is completely without understanding of the letter and spirit of the constitution and has an authoritarian instinct that is barely held in check by his own incompetence.

But there is a bright spot. Americans have awakened to the threat and in off-year elections across the country we are seeing a grassroots rebellion of sane, normal Americans who are organizing to elect replacements for the GOP congress that is enabling this lunacy. And in case Trump decides to fire the special prosecutor people will almost certainly peacefully protest in massive numbers.

There is a lot of hope. We will get through this together!

Throughout this difficult year I’ve tried to maintain one simple objective: to call it like I see it with as much clarity as I can muster. It’s more of a challenge than ever to keep your head and resist normalizing this assault on reason and truth but it seems to me that nothing is more important if we expect to come out the other side of this intact as a society and a country.

Soooo, if my writing, as well as that of my wonderful contributors Tom, Dennis, Spocko, Batoccio and others has been of use to you this year, if nothing else to keep you from feeling like the world is gaslighting you on a daily basis, and you would like to put a little something in the Christmas stocking now is the time. The paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.

And I wish all of you very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

The text nobody’s talking aboutby digby

The FBI agent Mueller fired because he texted his girlfriend about the Russia investigation has been dragged for his allegedly mysterious text about the investigation being an “insurance policy” (fully explained here for people with reading comprehension problems.)

But if you want to know why he and his girlfriend were freaking out about Trump, maybe this will clear it up:

Mr. Strzok emphasized the seriousness with which he viewed the allegations in a message to Ms. Page on Aug. 11, just a few days before the “insurance” text. “OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS,” he texted.

He seems to be alarmed by what he’s seen…

Remember Trumplandia? That was how people characterized the FBI during the campaign
by digby

It’s hard to remember in these days of conservatives demanding that the FBI be disbanded because they are a bunch of left wing commies who put their thumbs on the scale for their queen, Hillary Clinton, but four days before the election, this article came out. I wrote about it at the time hitting Comey hard for succumbing to pressure from these Clinton haters, who were characterized as considering her the antichrist:

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”

The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.

At the same time, other sources dispute the depth of support for Trump within the bureau, though they uniformly stated that Clinton is viewed highly unfavorably.

“There are lots of people who don’t think Trump is qualified, but also believe Clinton is corrupt. What you hear a lot is that it’s a bad choice, between an incompetent and a corrupt politician,” said a former FBI official.

[..]

Leaks, however, have continued. Fox News reported on Wednesday that the FBI is intensifying an investigation into the Clinton Foundation over allegations – which both the foundation and the Clinton camp deny – it traded donations for access to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. The Wall Street Journal reported that justice department officials considered the allegations flimsy.

The leaks have not exclusively cast aspersions on Clinton. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, is the subject of what is said to be a preliminary FBI inquiry into his business dealings in Russia. Manafort has denied any wrongdoing.

The Daily Beast reported on Thursday on ties between Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, and the FBI’s New York field office, which reportedly pressed the FBI to revisit the Clinton server investigation after beginning an inquiry into Weiner’s alleged sexual texting with a minor. The website reported that a former New York field office chief, highly critical of the non-indictment, runs a military charity that has received significant financial donations from Trump.

Comey’s decision to tell the public in July that he was effectively dropping the Clinton server issue angered some within the bureau, particularly given the background of tensions with the justice department over the Clinton issue. A significant complication is the appearance of a conflict of interest regarding Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, who met with Bill Clinton this summer ahead of Comey’s announcement, which she acknowledged had “cast a shadow” over the inquiry.

“Many FBI agents were upset at the director, not because he didn’t [recommend to] indict, but they believe he threw the FBI under the bus by taking the heat away from DoJ [Department of Justice],” the former bureau official said.

It is well known that most FBI agents are Republicans and most of those are conservatives. I would guess very few voted for Hillary Clinton. And most of the one’s who did were the people working on the investigation into Russian meddling and were worried about what they saw about Trump.

That, of course, is terrible.Indeed, Fox News is calling it a coup. But hating Clinton with a bitter passion for no reason other than that she is Clinton is just fine. I mean, who doesn’t, right? They were good Americans trying to save the country from a horrible woman becoming president.

And they did. They must be so happy now, right?

Here’s where we are today:

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A floor wax AND a whipped toppingby digby

Big foreign policy initiatives didn’t save Nixon. And he actually knew what he was doing and had credibility. Trump is a toddler with a match sitting in a puddle of lighter fluid. Just saying.

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Not a ban, just a strong suggestion. Until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
by digby

They’re not Orwellian propagandists. They’re just “issuing guidance:“

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Sunday didn’t exactly deny a new Washington Post report that said agency employees had been banned from using certain words in budget documents, including “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.” But she did repeat the agency’s previous statement that the story was a “complete mischaracterization.”

“I want to assure you there are no banned words at CDC,” Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald began in a series of tweets Sunday, without directly addressing the Post’s reporting that a senior leader in the CDC’s Office of Financial Services had told analysts in a meeting “that ‘certain words’ in the CDC’s budget drafts were being sent back to the agency for correction.”

“Three words that had been flagged in these drafts were ‘vulnerable,’ ‘entitlement’ and ‘diversity.’ [Alison] Kelly told the group the ban on the other words had been conveyed verbally,” the Post reported Friday.
[…]

“The meeting did take place, there was guidance provided — suggestions if you will,” the unnamed official told Stat News. “There are different ways to say things without necessarily compromising or changing the true essence of what’s being said.”

They added: “This was all about providing guidance to those who would be writing those budget proposals. And it was very much ‘you may wish to do this or say this’. But there was nothing in the way of ‘forbidden words.’”

Oh good. That’s a relief.

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Whither the House Intelligence Committeeby digby

I wrote last week about Adam Schiff becoming convinced that the House Intelligence Committee is going to close down its investigation. It appears to be true. The House Republicans can’t be bothered to look any further into the Russian interference in the election. They seem to be perfectly comfortable with it and why not? They helped them get elected. They’re hoping for more help in 2018.
Anyway, this report goes into the whole story and it’s vaguely depressing although not surprising. I did find this amusing though:

The panel’s Dec. 6 interview with Donald Trump Jr. seemed to magnify the divisions on the panel. Democrats said Republicans went out of their way to support the president’s son in efforts to avoid answering serious questions. The GOP members say the Democrats needlessly extended the session by asking the same questions repeatedly even if they had exhausted particular lines of inquiry.

“Some of the questions were spot on. They were exactly what you would want to have asked. And then there was the other five hours,” Gowdy said.

Seriously.

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He “genuinely believes he’s innocent?” Yeah right.by digby

This sounds like spin to me. He’s had numerous outbursts on twitter about “Russia, Russia, Russia!!!” recently:

President Donald Trump is privately striking a less agitated tone on the Russia investigation, sources say, even insisting he’ll soon be cleared in writing. But his new approach has some allies worried he’s not taking the threat of the probe seriously enough…

Meanwhile:

President Trump has referred to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller as the special counsel for the Russia probe, as “a threat to his presidency,” according to a report in The Washington Post.

The report, published Sunday, said Trump has referred to Rosenstein as “weak” and made fun of the deputy attorney general’s testimony last week in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

The president has also complained about Rosenstein being “a Democrat,” although the Justice Department official is actually a Republican, the Post said.

Revisiting the massacreby digby

I wrote about special prosecutors and Watergate for Salon this morning:
For some reason I had a yearning to curl up on the couch and binge-watch Watergate documentaries this weekend. I can’t imagine why. Just because every TV talking head was breathlessly talking about the right-wing crusade against special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, and rumors were flying that Jared Kushner is shopping around for a crisis management firm, that’s no reason to think that the scandal may be headed for a new phase. But when news broke on Saturday that a Trump transition lawyer had sent a letter to Congress complaining that Mueller had allegedly obtained transition officials’ emails illegally, it sure felt as if something was going to break.

Trump returned from Camp David on Sunday night and told the press that he isn’t considering firing Mueller. Since he cannot tell a lie, that’s obviously the end of that. The Kushner business, on the other hand, may be true, in light of the news about the emails that the Trump team didn’t know were in the hands of prosecutors until after they had all testified, opening up the possibility that someone may have lied. As Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos can attest, that’s a big no-no.

Trump’s transition lawyer, who doesn’t seem to have any experience in these matters, said that the way the prosecutors obtained the emails is illegal — but also said that Congress should make it illegal. So the nature of Team Trump’s specific complaints is a bit confusing. Evidently they had placed their own man in the General Services Administration, who assured them that emails they sent on government devices with the .gov address would be secured and wouldn’t be turned over without their knowledge.

Unfortunately, their man got sick and died, and the people beneath him were not told about this promise, and when the prosecutors came looking for the emails they were handed over, as would happen in any criminal investigation. Since all such emails are government property and everyone is informed before they are issued the email addresses that they have no expectation of privacy, there’s nothing unusual in any of it. But as we’ve seen before, the Trump team doesn’t really listen or pay attention to the normal rules and regulations. They apparently thought they had this all dialed in. As usual, they didn’t.

Mueller’s office made a rare public comment right after midnight on Sunday morning: “When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process.” Apparently, they had reason to believe something criminal was going on in the Trump transition.

Lawyers from both parties weighed in on Sunday and explained that there’s nothing illegal about a government investigation obtaining emails from a government agency. The Trump attorney referred to “possible” executive privilege and attorney-client privilege, but didn’t really make the claim, mainly because executive privilege doesn’t exist for a president until he takes office, and if there were attorney communications that might be privileged, all it means is that prosecutors couldn’t use those to build their case. Needless to say, if the Trump team wants to argue this, the appropriate venue is a courtroom — which is exactly what the House Oversight Committee chair Trey Gowdy told them.

As I mentioned, Trump says he isn’t considering firing Mueller, but then, he isn’t literally the one who would fire him, is he? That job would fall to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the special counsel investigation since Jeff Sessions recused himself from the case. Trump could direct Rosenstein to fire Mueller; if Rosenstein refuses, the president can fire him and demand that the next person in line do the deed. It’s not as if it hasn’t happened before.

Looking back at the Saturday Night Massacre in the fall of 1973, at the height of the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon was furious that special prosecutor Archibald Cox had gone beyond what Nixon thought should be his mandate. When the president found out that Cox was looking into the financing of his West Coast White House in San Clemente, California, he went ballistic. Nixon probably had a lot less to hide in this regard than Donald Trump does.

But what finally precipitated Cox’s firing was the battle over the tapes of Nixon’s conversations in the White House, which had been described in detail by former White House counsel John Dean when testifying about the cover-up of the Watergate break-in. After the existence of the tapes had been exposed, Nixon refused to turn them over. Cox took him to court, and the court had ruled against the president. Nixon refused. His lawyers came up with a cockamamie plan to have one elderly conservative senator listen to the tapes and attest to the accuracy of White House-prepared transcripts of certain conversations under subpoena. Cox said no — that was in defiance of the court. He planned to take the case back before a judge and would abide by his ruling.

That’s when Nixon called up the Attorney General Elliot Richardson and told him to fire Cox. The president said to Richardson when he refused, “I’m sorry you choose to put your purely personal commitments ahead of the public interest.” To which Richardson replied, “Mr. President, it would appear that you and I have a different perception of the public interest.” Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also resigned, and then Solicitor General Robert Bork finally did the deed.

What happened next was interesting. Nixon wanted to shut down the office altogether and sent the FBI to lock the place down. But prosecutors wouldn’t leave and were giving press conferences. The public was all up in arms, and the media backlash was furious.

Nixon ended up having to appoint another special prosecutor and picked a conservative Republican, Leon Jaworski, who was predisposed to give the president the benefit of the doubt. But after refusing to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, Nixon finally gave up the tapes. When Jaworski heard him talking to John Dean, he said, “can you believe the president of the United States coaching a witness on how to evade the truth?”

That’s when the prosecutors got their indictments of the presidents’ men and delivered their case to the House committee considering impeachment.

Watching Trump and knowing how often he lies, it seems inevitable that there have been more than a few such moments for Mueller in reading some of those emails and listening to testimony from people around the president. The difference is that Nixon had an understanding of the necessity of maintaining stability in the system, even as he abused it terribly. Trump doesn’t even know what the system is and his lawyers don’t seem to have much of a grasp of it either. So far, Republicans in Congress are completely unwilling to do their duty.

Trump might follow the Nixon playbook and fire Mueller, but after that, the whole thing could go off the rails. As strange as this is to say, Nixon knew there were limits to his power. Trump doesn’t. Who knows what he might do?

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