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Month: January 2018

“A monument to Republican complicity in Trump’s jaw-dropping misconduct”

Published by digby on January 11, 2018

“A monument to Republican complicity in Trump’s jaw-dropping misconduct”by digby

Brian Beutler at Crooked did something very useful. He reordered the Glenn Simpson testimony to read the Democratic questioning all by itself and the Republican questioning all by itself instead of alternating as it was done in real time. It makes it much clearer and shows the difference in how the two sides are approaching the issue.

The Democratic side showed this:

The transcript reads in chapters, which alternate hour by hour from questioning by Grassley’s counsel to questions by Feinstein’s and back. It is somewhat tedious, but extremely revealing, to reorder the transcript after first reading, and consume the Grassley half and the Feinstein half as separate, continuous wholes.

From the latter, we learn that by the time Steele reached out to law enforcement, independent sources had already tipped the FBI off to the cooperative relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia. We learn that, using decades of combined experience detecting disinformation, Simpson and Steele scrubbed the raw intel Steele collected, and were convinced that none of it was intentionally planted by Russian counterintelligence. We learn that Steele, with Simpson’s blessing, turned over his information to the FBI as a departure from their political intelligence gathering, expecting no political dividend because, Simpson said, “from my decades of dealing with U.S. elections [as a newspaper reporter] that you can’t expect the government or the FBI to be of any use in a campaign because the DOJ has rules against law enforcement getting involved in investigations in the middle of a campaign.”

We also learn that in shopping the information around (first to the FBI, and later the the press), Simpson and Steele did not cherry pick details, the way opposition researchers do, to depict Trump in maximally unflattering light.

This latter point is crucial, because there has been speculation, based on the way the memos are numbered and on reporting about Steele’s involvement in the operation, that the Steele dossier Buzzfeed published a year ago wasn’t Steele’s complete work product—that it may have been selectively edited for partisan reasons, or to make it seem more incriminating.

We learn, in other words, that Simpson and Steele were doing their civic-minded best to alert authorities, and failing that, the public, to what they believed to be the alarming and dangerous truth.

As humans they were not impervious to bias. Steele believed his sources, who were themselves human, and Simpson by his own admission came to believe Trump was a national security threat, unfit to be president. They also appear to have undermined their own efforts to blow the whistle. Simpson testified that Steele temporarily severed his relationship with the FBI after the New York Times published an infamous story on October 31, 2016 reporting that the bureau had investigated Trump and found no “clear link” to Russia. Between this obvious misinformation, and FBI Director James Comey’s late October intrusion into the campaign, Steele and Simpson, wondered whether or not Trump and his sympathizers had compromised the FBI.

There was likely some merit to their suspicions, but it now seems just as likely that the FBI waved the New York Times off the story because Simpson and Steele were drawing too much reportorial heat in their direction. Late in the campaign, they began briefing reporters from multiple outlets on the contents of the memos. Perhaps for that reason, after Comey wrote his fateful letter to Congress about Hillary Clinton’s emails, Simpson says, “we began getting questions from the press about, you know, whether they were also investigating Trump and, you know, we encouraged them to ask the FBI that question.” At about the same time, Democrats in Congress revealed they too were aware of Steele’s work. Faced with this partisan pressure, and specific inquiries from multiple reporters about the very leads Steele had given its agents to pursue, the FBI would have had decent reasons for trying to throw reporters off the scent.

In that telling, Trump may well have won the election thanks to a comedy of errors starring multiple actors (in law enforcement, in the media, in the Democratic Party, at Fusion GPS) each doing the best they could, with incomplete and unverified information, to find and reveal the truth.

Interesting, no? Simpson and Steele were not trying to smear Trump. Things got a little crazy toward the end with nobody trusting anyone else, but they did the right thing. The Trump people — and the GOP leadership did not.

Beutler continues:

That’s what we learned from the half of Simpson’s testimony driven by Feinstein’s staff.

The other half is a monument to Republican complicity in Trump’s jaw-dropping misconduct.

Click over to read it. It’s even worse than I thought. The years of conservative movement extremism, tea party hypocrisy and late stage political dissipation have taken their toll. The party is lost, unpatriotic, decadent, broken.

This is about Donald Trump and the Russian government interfering in the election. And they are all in on the cover-up.

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Trump’s closed-door, back-room slimy deal to kill people

Published by digby on January 11, 2018

Trump’s closed-door, back-room slimy deal to kill people
by digby

I don’t know how they justify trying to make it harder for people to get insurance to their constituents. I guess they just say: “tough shit.”

They have nothing to replace these plans. What are people supposed to do?

Early last year as an Obamacare repeal bill was flailing in the House, top Trump administration officials showed select House conservatives a secret road map of how they planned to gut the health law using executive authority.

The March 23 document, which had not been public until now, reveals that while the effort to scrap Obamacare often looked chaotic, top officials had actually developed an elaborate plan to undermine the law — regardless of whether Congress repealed it.

Top administration officials had always said they would eradicate the law through both legislative and executive actions, but never provided the public with anything close to the detailed blueprint shared with the members of the House Freedom Caucus, whose confidence — and votes — President Donald Trump was trying to win at the time. The blueprint, built off the executive order to minimize Obamacare’s “economic burden,” that Trump signed just hours after taking the oath of office, shows just how advanced the administration’s plans were to unwind the law — plans that would become far more important after the legislative efforts to repeal Obamacare failed.

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) obtained the one-page document from the Trump administration last month after blocking three of the administration’s health nominees to get it. Casey, who shared it with POLITICO, called it a list of options for “sabotage.”

“The primary problem here is government officials, government agencies, were taking steps that would lead to fewer people having coverage and erecting barriers to people having coverage,” he said. “In addition to that, you have kind of a closed-door, back-room slimy deal here that should trouble anyone.”

Here’s what they planned:

The document lists 10 executive actions the Trump administration planned to take to “improve the individual and small group markets most harmed by Obamacare.”

Those include calling for stricter verification of people who try to sign up outside of the open enrollment period; cutting the sign-up period in half; and giving states authority to determine whether insurers had to cover the full range of benefits required by Obamacare and whether their networks of doctors were sufficient.

it’s purely a way to stop people from getting health insurance or pay money for insurance that doesn’t provide decent coverage and will bankrupt you if you get sick. There’s no other reason for it. They want people to suffer.

People like this:

It makes me crazy that anyone would try to sabotage people’s ability to get health care when they need it. I can’t fathom what kind of people these are. There’s something deeply broken in all of them.

She was for windmills

Published by digby on January 11, 2018

She was for windmillsby digby

At the press conference with the Norwegian Prime Minister, same day:

And when you talk about interviews, Hillary Clinton had an interview where she wasn’t sworn in. She wasn’t given the oath. They didn’t take notes. They didn’t record. And it was done on the 4th of July weekend. That’s perhaps ridiculous. And a lot of people looked upon that as being a very serious breach and it really was.

Hillary was not for a strong military. And Hillary, my opponent, was for windmills. And she was for other types of energy that don’t have the same capacities at this moment, certainly.

He just can’t quit her.

Here’s how he answered the question about whether he will speak with Mueller :

Well again John, there has been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians or Trump and Russians.

No collusion.

When I watch you interviewing all the people leaving their committees, the Democrats are all running for office and they’re trying to say this.

But bottom line, all say there’s no collusion. And there is no collusion.

And when you talk about interviews Hillary Clinton had an interview where she wasn’t sworn in. She wasn’t given the oath, They didn’t take notes, They didn’t record, And it was done on the 4th of July weekend. That’s perhaps ridiculous, And a lot of people looked upon that as being a very serious breach and it really was. But again I’ll speak to attorneys, I can only say this.

There was absolutely no collusion.

Everybody knows it. Every committee. I’ve been in office now for over 11 months, For 11 months they’ve hat this phony cloud over this administration,over our government. And it has hurt our government. It does hurt our government, It’s a Democrat hoax that was brought up as an excuse for losing an election that, frankly, the Democrats should have won, because they have such a tremendous advantage in the electoral college. So it was brought up for that reason.

But it has been determined that there is no collusion and by virtually everybody.

So we’ll see what happens.

And that was one of the more intelligible of his answers. Mostly because he just rattled off the words no collusion over and over again.

You can say there’s nothing wrong with him. Maybe he doesn’t have cognitive deficits. Maybe there is no psychological diagnosis. I think that’s probably true. He’s just dumb.

Here, watch the whole embarrassing thing.

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Even dumb authoritarians are dangerous

Published by digby on January 11, 2018

Even dumb authoritarians are dangerousby digby

I wrote about Trump’s little tantrum yesterday for Salon this morning:

Donald Trump held his little televised negotiation pageant on Tuesday, in an attempt to prove he hasn’t lost his marbles. Since he didn’t robotically repeat the words “no collusion” over and over again, he received some good reviews from the media in the immediate aftermath. On Wednesday he undid all that with another early morning tweetstorm, as well as a photo op with his cabinet in which, instead of talking about the agenda as planned, he whined about the media and forgot to address any issues. His “stable genius” tour collapsed in less than 24 hours.
But it’s not wise to chalk all this up to Trumpian craziness and forget about what he’s saying. He is still the president of the United States, the most powerful job on the planet, and he’s backed by a party that is increasingly willing to cater to his whims to keep him happy. He was not a happy president on Wednesday morning:

In the first he once more demeans the justice system, calling it broken and unfair because it issued a ruling he doesn’t like. Recall that he was livid last year when his Muslim ban was halted, reading his order at one of his raucous post-inauguration rallies:

Courts seem to be so political and it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right. … A bad high school student would understand this. Anybody would understand this. It’s as plain as you can have it. I was a good student. I understand things. I comprehend very well, better than I think almost anybody.

He particularly loathes the more liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and hates the fact that its judges can issue injunctions. When a Ninth Circuit judge temporarily blocked an order on sanctuary cities last spring, he went ballistic and said he “absolutely” wanted to break that court up.

Presidents often disagree with court decisions. Only Trump has used the occasion to personally insult judges and rhetorically assault the institution of the judiciary itself. His disdain for an independent judiciary has been obvious since he first started campaigning, but it’s only become more fervent as president.


His other Wednesday morning tweets pertained to the release of testimony by Glenn Simpson, the owner of Fusion GPS, who commissioned former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to investigate Trump. (That work produced the now-infamous “dossier.”) Evidently this release angered Trump and it’s fair to ask just what he meant by demanding, “Republicans should finally take control!”

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he didn’t know:

“I don’t know what the president has in mind, and I don’t think I better comment until I have a discussion with the president on that,” Grassley said, when asked by reporters.
Then, seemingly catching himself, Grassley added: “And I don’t intend to have a discussion with the president on that point, and I hope he doesn’t call me and tell me the same thing that you said he said.”

Grassley’s response raises the question of whether the president is still in the habit of calling senators and pressuring them to end the Russia investigation, as he reportedly did throughout the summer. That’s entirely inappropriate, but as we have seen, Trump has no understanding of the duties and responsibilities of the Congress or respect for the rule of law. This is, after all, a man who believes the attorney general’s job is to “protect” the president. (“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he supposedly lamented.)

He certainly believes the job of Republicans in Congress is to serve as his personal lackeys. And increasingly, we see that many are willing to do so.

Trump’s morning tweetstorm just got him started. He completely lost the thread at the cabinet meeting later in the day, where he once more made clear that he spends hours each day watching cable news:

It was a tremendous meeting. Actually, it was reported as incredibly good, and my performance — some of them called it a performance; I consider it work — but got great reviews by everybody other than two networks who were phenomenal for about two hours.

He claimed he had gotten “letters” from anchors who said it was “one of the greatest meetings they’d ever witnessed.” He continued to brag for several more minutes. Then, obviously still smarting from the fallout resulting from Michael Wolff’s book, he declared:

We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws, so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness.

Trump is currently being sued for defamation by one of the women he publicly called a liar during the campaign, implying she was too ugly for him to assault. Here’s a convenient, up-to-date, list of all the people, places and companies he has insulted on Twitter alone. Here is a list of the nearly 2,000 lies he told in 2017. He is one of history’s most prolific liars and legendary gutter fighters and is completely without shame, so such a threat would be mordantly funny if it weren’t coming from the president of the United States.

Trump has been threatening to change the libel laws since before the election. He told rally-goers back in 2015 that he wanted to make sure that “when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money,” saying that when he became president news organizations like the New York Times and The Washington Post would “have problems.” Last summer he took another tack, threatening to use executive power against NBC:

President Nixon did that to the Washington Post and the publisher Katherine Graham said it cost millions for the company to defend and was the single most destructive action he took against the press.

So yes, Trump is an embarrassing fool with all of his whining about the media. But he’s also showing that his authoritarian tendencies are being indulged on a number of different levels. The institutions have held up pretty well so far. But the pressure is increasing and some of the people we expect to defend them are abdicating their responsibility.

All you have to do to see the danger is ask yourself what Trump will do if we have a major terrorist attack or a war. We already know the answer and it’s not good.

Surgical here, blunt instrument there by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 11, 2018

Surgical here, blunt instrument there
by Tom Sullivan

There is seemingly no limit to the lengths to which politicians will go to game the system that placed them in power. Once comfortably ensconced, erecting bulwarks against being pried loose is de rigueur.

North Carolina’s gerrymandering of districts with “surgical precision” faced another defeat in court Tuesday. Wisconsin’s “unconstitutional political gerrymander” awaits a decision by the Supreme Court on whether gerrymandering of any sort is unconstitutional.

There is also seemingly no limit to the lengths believers in the myth of widespread voter fraud will go to disenfranchising voters, reduce the voting pool, and (presumably) gain some electoral advantage from it.

On Wednesday, challenges to Ohio’s voter purging system reached the Supreme Court. Charlie Pierce explains:

At issue in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph was a state policy by which voters could be “purged” from the voter lists if they failed to vote in several consecutive elections, and then failed to respond to one notification sent out to them by the Ohio secretary of state’s office. The plaintiff was a veteran named Larry Harmon, who was purged after he didn’t vote in 2012 or in the 2014 midterms. Ultimately, this was a fight over a provision of the 1993 National Voting Rights Act, also known as the “Motor Voter” Law. Proponents of the Ohio system argued that the law permitted the kind of purge they conducted, as did the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, while opponents argued that the use of non-voting as a “trigger” to start the process of disenfranchisement was expressly forbidden by that same law.

Yes, states have a duty to maintain accurate voting lists, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether Ohio’s approach wasn’t a blunt scalpel that twists laws passed to make voting easier to keep eligible voters from voting:

General, could you tell me, there’s a 24-year history of solicitor generals of both political parties under both — Presidents of both political parties who have taken a position contrary to yours. Before the amendment and after the amendment. In fact, the Federal Election Commission, when it wrote to Congress with respect to the Help America Vote Act, took the position the old solicitor generals were taking. Everybody but you today come in and say the Act before the clarification said something different. Seems quite unusual that your office would change its position so dramatically. I might accept it if you thought the Help America Vote Act, in fact, clarified something that was ambiguous, but you’re taking a very different position. You’re saying even before that Act, it was clear you could do it this way.

On the steps of the court, a disenfranchised voter confronted Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted:

Gerrymandering “with almost surgical precision” to maintain power: good.

Voter roll maintenance with a blunt instrument to maintain power: also good.

Just so we’re clear, two legs better!

* * * * * * * *

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

The collapse of rigor

Published by digby on January 10, 2018

The collapse of rigorby digby

The former GOP strategist made a good observation about Trump’s ridiculous little immigration “negotiation” pageant on MSNBC this afternoon:

This is an urgent issue it’s a moral imperative to fix it and it deserves more than cheap stunts. The leadership of both parties ought to get their noses to the grindstone and fix this, give relief to these people who have known no other country as their own but the United States of America and what you saw yesterday was the total collapse of rigor around the policy making process and it explains perfectly how you get a health care bill put forward by the Republican congress that no one understands that no one has any idea what’s in it and a tax cut bill that no one has any idea what’s in it, nobody knows what it costs and who is affects. And this is a continuation of that collapse of rigor in what should be the serious business of making public policies for a great nation of 330 million people.

Many people on TV went on and on about how thrilling it was to see a “real” legislative negotiation on television and it occurred to me too that if this is what passes for negotiation in the current congress it explains why everything they’ve come up with looks like it was thrown together during a drunken night at frat house kegger. After eight years of Tea Party and Breitbart they no longer know how to even write serious legislation. They have majorities in both houses and a president who is so clueless they can shove anything in front of him and he’ll sign it. And yet, their process is totally chaotic and the result is political suicide. They got their tax cuts, but there was a time when they could have finessed it to at least seem to be responsible.

Donald Trump isn’t sui generis. They’re all like him.

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A new prosecutor signals that Mueller is far from finished

Published by digby on January 10, 2018

A new prosecutor signals that Mueller is far from finishedby digby

This passed under the radar in the furor over Michael Wolff’s book but it was probably important:

The digital director of the Trump campaign said Friday that the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and son Eric Trump “were joint deputy campaign managers” whose “approval” was required for every decision before the 2016 election.

“Nobody else. Not one person made a decision without their approval,” the digital director, Brad Parscale, tweeted. “Others just took credit for this family’s amazing ability. I’m done with all these lies. They will be embarrassed!”

Kushner was Parscale’s “patron,” according to a person familiar with the campaign’s inner workings, which could explain their closeness.

Kushner got Parscale hired, the person said, “despite the fact that a number of people in the campaign wondered whether he had any idea what he was doing.”

“He’s Jared’s boy,” the person added. “I had [campaign] deputies telling me they couldn’t question anything the guy did or said, and they were unhappy about that.”

In recent days, an explosive new book about the Trump campaign and the president’s first year in the White House has rocked the administration. The book, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” features the former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon lambasting Trump and members of his family.
But Parscale’s tweet also raises new questions about how involved Kushner and Eric Trump were in episodes that have drawn the most scrutiny from investigators probing the campaign’s ties to Russia.

He was trying to boost Jared and Eric with that comment, saying they were large and in charge.

He may regret that comment now. The Washington Post just reported that Mueller has hired a new prosecutor:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has added a veteran cyber prosecutor to his team, filling what has long been a gap in expertise and potentially signaling a recent focus on computer crimes.

Ryan K. Dickey was assigned to Mueller’s team in early November from the Justice Department’s computer crime and intellectual-property section, said a spokesman for the special counsel’s office. He joined 16 other lawyers who are highly respected by their peers but who have come under fire from Republicans wary of some of their political contributions to Democrats.

[As Mueller builds his Russia special-counsel team, every hire is under scrutiny]

Dickey’s addition is particularly notable because he is the first publicly known member of the team specializing solely in cyber issues. The others’ expertise is mainly in a variety of white-collar crimes, including fraud, money laundering and public corruption, though Mueller also has appellate specialists and one of the government’s foremost experts in criminal law.

[…]

Mueller’s work has long had an important cybersecurity component — central to the probe is Russia’s hacking of Democrats’ emails in an effort to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system and help Trump win. The original FBI counterintelligence probe was launched in part because a Trump campaign adviser was said to have told an Australian diplomat that Russia had emails that could embarrass Democrats, and in July 2016, private Democratic messages thought to have been hacked by Russia began appearing online.

Mueller also is in possession of information from Facebook about politically themed advertisements bought through Russian accounts.

Legal analysts have said that one charge Mueller might pursue would be a conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, if he can demonstrate that members of Trump’s team conspired in Russia’s hacking effort to influence the election.

Mueller is not just investigating obstruction of justice as much as people want to believe that. He’s got a lot of balls in the air. And he’s far from being done.

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It’s about work

Published by digby on January 10, 2018

It’s about workby digby

I know it’s hard to feel sorry for any rich, white woman being economically exploited and I don’t. But this is a perfect illustration of the way Hollywood’s system benefits men financially as well as culturally. It tilts the power balance so strongly that it enables this culture of toxic machismo.

Mark Wahlberg was paid $1.5 million for reshooting his scenes in All the Money in the World, three people familiar with the situation but not authorized to speak publicly about it tell USA TODAY, while Michelle Williams was paid an $80 per diem totaling less than $1,000.

That works out to Williams being paid less than 1% of her male co-star.

Ridley Scott’s Getty kidnapping drama was hastily reshot the week of Thanksgiving after a cascade of sexual misconduct allegations were made public against Kevin Spacey, who previously starred in the drama as billionaire J. Paul Getty.

Scott transfixed the film world by quickly assembling his actors over the holiday break in Europe, reshooting Spacey’s scenes with Christopher Plummer — and still making his Christmas release window.

The wave of publicity that followed made All the Money in the World, distributed by Sony and financed by Imperative Entertainment, roll into the Sunday’s Golden Globes as a relative triumph.

But new information reveals ugly math behind the Hollywood victory. The reshoot cost $10 million (a fee put up by producing arm Imperative). In December, Scott told USA TODAY that the undertaking was aided by the fact that “everyone did it for nothing.”

And get a load of this:

Wahlberg and Williams are both represented by the William Morris Endeavor agency.

I really hope the #MeToo moment will extend to the pay and opportunities inequities in the workplace at some point. The power imbalance is at the heart of this whole mess.

As Rebecca Traister said in this important piece: This moment isn’t (just) about sex. It’s really about work.

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“Republicans should finally take control!”

Published by digby on January 10, 2018

“Republicans should finally take control!”by digby

What do you suppose he means by this?

He also said today that he wants to “strengthen” the liberal and slander laws to stop people from telling lies and defaming people.

Donald Trump said this.
Trump has told 2,000 lies since he took office. Seriously.

Republicans protect their own

Published by digby on January 10, 2018

Republicans protect their own

by digby

Image result for howard baker what did the preident know

I wrote about the release of the Fusion GPS testimony today for Salon:

One of the most misunderstood quotes from the Watergate scandal is also one of the most famous: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” That was uttered by Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, and it’s often assumed it was a tough question hurled at a recalcitrant witness, seeking to implicate Richard Nixon. In fact, it was the opposite. Baker asked that question repeatedly, early in the Watergate hearings, in an attempt to wall off the president from the suspected criminality of his staff. Of course, Nixon actually ran the coverup, as the committee holding those hearings was about to find out.

Baker has always been seen as something of a hero in the Watergate story, and it’s really overblown. In the beginning, he met secretly with Nixon to keep him informed about the course of the Watergate committee’s investigation. Baker told the president that the plan was to start with public testimony by the smaller fry and move up to high-ranking White House staff. Nixon wanted to make a deal with the committee to have the witnesses testify in private. Since the Democratic majority controlled the committee, that was a non-starter anyway. But much as Baker wanted to help out his president, and may have even believed in the beginning that Nixon was not implicated in criminal misdeeds, Baker was also smart enough not to help Nixon obstruct justice.

Those hearings, held by what was officially called the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, where Baker was the ranking Republican under Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., the chair, were vastly important in unraveling the scandal. First came former White House counsel John Dean’s dramatic testimony that implicated the president, and then the revelation by former presidential aide Alexander Butterfield that Nixon had extensive tape recordings of everything that happened in the Oval Office. Presidential aides H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson all testified, lied to the committee under oath and were subsequently convicted and went to prison. The congressional investigations worked on parallel tracks with two special prosecutors and the press, all of which were vital to the public understanding of the scandal and the scope of the president’s crimes.

If Nixon were around today, he’d be able to see how it might have gone if the Republicans had held a congressional majority. and supporters like Baker had labored to keep the investigations under wraps. The only dramatic public hearings we’ve had in the Russia investigation so far involved the testimony of former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former FBI Director James Comey, and that was more than six months ago. All the important players, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, have testified in secret, with members of the committees more or less under a gag order and only able to comment on what’s already in the press. Nixon understood that keeping testimony secret, rather than giving the public the ability to judge the witnesses for themselves, is a real advantage in a cover-up. Having a partisan majority running interference in the Congress is priceless.


The investigation by the House Intelligence Committee under Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has been a farce from the beginning. Nunes has conspired with the White House from the beginning, was caught red-handed and promised to remove himself from any involvement with the Russia probe. (He should have recused himself from the beginning since he served on the Trump transition team, which is a subject of the investigation.) He’s still interfering in the investigation and has lately taken to creating elaborate diversions with baseless new fishing expeditions into alleged FBI corruption during the presidential campaign. Nixon would have loved to have such a devoted toady on his team.

The Senate Intelligence Committee seems to be working a bit more professionally, but, one gets the feeling, under some pressure. The Democratic ranking member, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, took to the Senate floor just before Christmas to warn the president against firing special counsel Robert Mueller. But so far the committee has hung together and whatever differences its members may have are not spilling into the public domain. They too are interviewing witnesses in private.

This week, the real action happened on the Senate Judiciary Committee when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., decided to release the secret testimony of Glenn Simpson, owner of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that employed former British spy Christopher Steele, compiler of the famous “dossier.” Feinstein said she felt compelled to do it because “the innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice.” She believed this was the only way to set the record straight.

The innuendo Feinstein refers to includes the disproved assertions that the dossier was the impetus for the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s strange association with dozens of Russians, along with the request by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the Justice department consider prosecuting Steele for lying to the FBI. Lying about what? The senators declined to say. This hostile action, done without consulting other senators on the committee, was clearly meant to smear Steele’s reputation and by association the whole investigation. (In fairness, Graham seems to be the main actor here — Grassley, the committee chair, is extremely confused.)

Simpson had asked that his testimony be released, so there was no question of violating anyone’s confidentiality. Since Grassley and Graham had apparently decided to act unilaterally as partisan hit men, Feinstein realized that she would have to reciprocate in kind. After all, Democrats had been asking that the testimony be released since August.

The released transcript of Simpson’s testimony contains a good deal of interesting information, all of which will be gone over with a fine-toothed comb in the press. But the upshot is that Simpson says Steele (who was effectively his subcontractor) went to the FBI because he learned in the course of his investigation that Russian agents were attempting to conspire with the campaign of the Republican candidate for president. 

Republicans in Congress have been trying to cover that up for obvious reasons: It’s not only damning information on its own, it’s also an indictment of every Trump associate who remained silent or played along.

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