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Month: January 2018

They’re not even trying to hide it anymore

They’re not even trying to hide it anymore
by digby

Courtesy Daily Beast

The Trump administration has decided not to enforce the Russian sanctions required by law (passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses and Trump only reluctantly signed because they had the votes to override him.) This was done because the congress wanted to codify some kind of punishment for the Russian interference in the election in 2016.  Now the Trump administration claims these sanctions aren’t necessary and they’ve decided not to impose them. Well ok then. The GOP congress doesn’t give a damn.

Another requirement of that law was similarly disregarded:

For months, Russian higher-ups had been shaken by the prospect of being named by the U.S. as a close confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As stipulated by the unwieldy 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), the Trump administration had some 180 days to detail those voices who held sway with the Kremlin – and who would suddenly face the prospect of individual sanctions. And all of them, according to the Moscow Times, were “doing everything possible to keep their names off the list.”

The deadline for the White House’s findings came yesterday – as did, late at night, the administration’s final list of politicians, oligarchs, and industrialists deemed of importance.

But instead of any concern rippling through Moscow, there now seems, at first blush, a sense of relief. Because while there are some 114 officials and 96 business figures named, it appears that the administration put little research into their list, and effectively outsourced their work to both Forbes and the Kremlin website.

According to the released list – a separate, related memo remains classified – U.S. officials determined who would be on the list “based on objective criteria related to individuals’ official position in the case of senior political figures, or a net worth of $1 billion or more for oligarchs.” But as a Treasury Department official told BuzzFeed, the unclassified list stemmed directly from Forbes’ ranking of the richest businessmen in Russia. And per the Washington Post, the list of officials “appears copy-pasted from … the Kremlin directory of officials available on its English-language website.”

Sure. This is just normal behavior for an administration under suspicion of having been in cahoots with Russia to win the election in 2016.

Trump’s CIA Director said yesterday that they expect the Russians to intervene in the 2016 election. The administration and Republicans in congress are working overtime to ensure that nobody stops them.

They’re not even trying anymore. It’s just all out in the open. As long as they benefit it will continue.

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Haggling over the price by @BloggersRUs

Haggling over the price
by Tom Sullivan


Sport (Harvey Keitel) haggling over price in Taxi Driver.

The president should require all his staff, departmental and congressional enablers to make public obeisance — kiss his ring, kowtow, whatever. Americans would have a public record of who among them has decided they no longer want a republic. Royalists want a monarch.

It is what President Trump wants, clearly, and he has clumsily set about extracting informal fealty oaths from those below him. Publicizing the process would separate the vassals from patriots. We will have established what kind of men and women they are. Indeed, we have already established that about many of Trump’s men. Let us move on to inquiring of their price.

His move to oust FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on Monday is not an attempt to curtail inquiry into what kind of a man Trump is. Trump has made that abundantly clear.

After he had fired James Comey, Trump saw TV coverage of Comey boarding an FBI plane for his return to Washington from Los Angeles. He called the acting director McCabe to find out who authorized the flight:

McCabe told the president he hadn’t been asked to authorize Comey’s flight, but if anyone had asked, he would have approved it, three people familiar with the call recounted to NBC News.

The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.

McCabe replied, “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.

Nor is Trump’s move on McCabe an attempt to stop Special Counsel Robert Mueller from establishing guilt (of something), but to stop investigation into what Trump’s price was. The great unanswered question Mueller has yet to reveal is What is Trump so desperately hiding?

Starting with James Comey’s firing, Trump and his vassals have undertaken a slow-motion purge of Justice officials and a propaganda campaign against the FBI. Slowly, he is sweeping away nonbelievers who stand between him and his goal of quashing Mueller’s Russia investigation. Forcing out McCabe puts Trump one domino closer to accomplishing that. Paul Waldman fleshes out why:

And here’s something you might have missed: When Comey began taking detailed notes about his meetings with Trump and sharing information about Trump’s behavior with colleagues so a contemporaneous record of Trump’s appalling behavior could be established, one of the people he reached out to was, you guessed it, Andrew McCabe. You might have missed it, but I’ll bet President Trump didn’t.

But wait, there’s more. You may have heard about the secret memo that Trump lickspittle and House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has been circulating among his Republican colleagues, supposedly showing anti-Trump bias at the FBI. The New York Times reports that it singles out Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for approving the continuation of surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page, whom law enforcement and intelligence officials suspect may have been acting as an agent of the Russian government. “The reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo,” the Times notes, “indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the [Russia] inquiry.”

Because only Rosenstein can fire Mueller.

Release of the Nunes memo is designed to give Trump the pretext he wants to order Attorney General Jeff Session to fire Rosenstein. He could gun him down in the middle of 5th Avenue and his cultish base would applaud. Trump stopped short last year when Don McGahn, the White House counsel, threatened to quit rather than carry out an order to instruct Justice to fire Mueller.

But this isn’t the Bush-Cheney White House. There will be no dramatic hospital showdown where the White House backs down from doing something illegal because a group of top Justice officials threaten to resign. Team Trump’s response would be good riddance. Revoke their pensions.

The Tony Perkins Caucus has demonstrated there is no bottom to what they’ll do in his service. They might as well formalize it for the cameras, declare their fealty on their knees, and drop the affectations of republicanism.

Incidentally, “Mess of pottage” is now a favorite dish with House Republicans eating at the Longworth Cafeteria. With Senate Republicans eating in Dirksen too.

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

Whew

Whewby digby

The 20 week abortion ban failed in the Senate today. But it’s hard to believe that it even came this close:

There’s a reason why these bills don’t make it: because one third of American women have had an abortion and it’s a vitally necessary procedure for women’s equality and freedom.

Here are a couple ore of those amazing first person stories from Bill Moyers and company:


No Choice: Lynne Hanley from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

When Lynne Hanley was studying English at Cornell, she fell in love. When she tried to get contraception, she was told she had to be married to get it. After she realized she was pregnant, she went to a local doctor who lectured her, telling her she would be punished if she tried to end her pregnancy. This is her story.


No Choice: Valerie Peterson from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
When Valerie Peterson became pregnant with her third child, her doctor told her the child wasn’t developing properly. The grim diagnosis meant Valerie had a choice to make. She could carry the pregnancy to term and deliver a stillborn baby, or she could have an abortion. Living in Texas, Valerie faced access and scheduling restrictions that made her decision to end the pregnancy much more difficult than she anticipated. This is her story.

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So much for that recusal

So much for that recusal
by digby

Obviously, that concept is no longer operative. The presidents henchmen are all working with him, recusal or not:

President Donald Trump’s frustrations with the Russia investigation boiled over on Air Force One last week when he learned that a top Justice Department official had warned against releasing a memo that could undercut the probe, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

Trump erupted in anger while traveling to Davos after learning that Associate Attorney General Stephen Boyd warned that it would be “extraordinarily reckless” to release a classified memo written by House Republican staffers. The memo outlines alleged misdeeds at the FBI and Justice Department related to the Russia investigation.

For Trump, the letter was yet another example of the Justice Department undermining him and stymieing Republican efforts to expose what the president sees as the politically motivated agenda behind Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

Trump’s outburst capped a week where Trump and senior White House officials personally reproached Attorney General Jeff Sessions and asked White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to speak to others — episodes that illustrate Trump’s preoccupation with the Justice Department, according to two of the people.

Trump warned Sessions and others they need to excel at their jobs or go down as the worst in history, the two people said.

The incidents — and the extraordinary level of Trump’s personal involvement with Justice Department officials on the matter — are the latest signs of the growing pressure on Trump as a federal investigation into him, his campaign and his administration stretches into its second year.

Trump met with Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray at the White House last Monday to discuss missing text messages sent between two FBI agents who had expressed anti-Trump views. One of the agents later left his investigation and Mueller removed the other after learning of the texts.

Kelly held separate meetings or phone calls with senior Justice Department officials last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to convey Trump’s displeasure and lecture them on the White House’s expectations, according to the people. Kelly has taken to ending such conversations with a disclaimer that the White House isn’t expecting officials to do anything illegal or unethical.

After Trump’s strong reaction on Air Force One over the Boyd letter, White House officials, including Kelly, sprang into action again, lashing Justice Department officials Thursday over the decision to send the letter, according to the people. Sarah Isgur Flores, director of public affairs at the Department of Justice, declined to comment.
[…]
Several people close to Trump insist he isn’t preparing to fire Wray, Sessions or other senior officials. But the Justice Department’s decision to send the Boyd letter to the House Intelligence Committee last week has intensified Trump’s concern that his own department is undercutting him, several people familiar with the matter said.

The president is frustrated that Justice Department officials keep getting involved in issues related to the probe when they don’t need to, leading him to wonder if anyone was trying to protect people implicated in the GOP memo, according to one person familiar with the matter.

Kelly called Sessions directly to complain about the letter, and several other White House officials chided officials at Justice as well. Sessions was also at the White House Monday for an immigration meeting and for a discussion Tuesday of the department’s goals for the coming months.

It appears that the White House leaked this because they are under the impression that the president meeting privately with the allegedly recused Attorney General and the new FBI director is a good thing and that having the Chief of Staff call Justice Department officials to tell them the White House was angry and had expectations but ended them with a “disclaimer” saying they don’t expect them (the DOJ!!!) to break the law.

These people are unbelievable. And yet, I will not surprised if they succeed. Much of the security of our government depends upon a president and his appointees having some respect for the rule of law and if he doesn’t then the congress has to step in.

That’s not looking good at the moment. Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz are in charge. And they are more than willing to win by any means necessary.

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Good God what an asshole

Good God what an assholeby digby

This jackass is so ugly in so many ways. This is just another one, but man …

The day after President Donald Trump fired James Comey, he became so furious watching television footage of the ousted FBI director boarding a government-funded plane from Los Angeles back to Washington, D.C. that he called the bureau’s acting director, Andrew McCabe, to vent, according to multiple people familiar with the phone call.

Trump demanded to know why Comey was allowed to fly on an FBI plane after he had been fired, these people said. McCabe told the president he hadn’t been asked to authorize Comey’s flight, but if anyone had asked, he would have approved it, three people familiar with the call recounted to NBC News.

The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.

McCabe replied: “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.

Yes, we know Trump had a problem with McCabe’s wife. But seriously, who over the age of 8 years old would say “ask your wife what it’s like to be a loser?” My God.

McCabe is going to be free to speak now. I wonder if Trump realizes this.

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The Purge continues apace

The Purge continues apace
by digby

Always projection. Always.

Congressman Ted Lieu:

As a Member of the House Judiciary Committee, I read the partisan, classified Nunes House Intel memo. I can’t talk about it. However, here’s an analogy.

Remember Geraldo Rivera and the infamous Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults? It’s like that, but Geraldo Rivera has more integrity.

They are setting up the firing of Rosenstein as part of their “purge.” They will probably get away with it. The question will be if the people they replace them with are Trump gangsters or honest citizens.

A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it.

The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent. But the reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo — a much-disputed document that paints the investigation into Russian election meddling as tainted from the start — indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the inquiry.

The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Democrats who have read the document say Republicans have cherry-picked facts to create a misleading and dangerous narrative. But in their efforts to discredit the inquiry, Republicans could potentially use Mr. Rosenstein’s decision to approve the renewal to suggest that he failed to properly vet a highly sensitive application for a warrant to spy on Mr. Page, who served as a Trump foreign policy adviser until September 2016.

A handful of senior Justice Department officials can approve an application to the secret surveillance court, but in practice that responsibility often falls to the deputy attorney general. No information has publicly emerged that the Justice Department or the F.B.I. did anything improper while seeking the surveillance warrant involving Mr. Page.

Mr. Trump has long been mistrustful of Mr. Rosenstein, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, who appointed the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and now oversees his investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign and possible obstruction of justice by the president. Mr. Trump considered firing Mr. Rosenstein last summer. Instead, he ordered Mr. Mueller to be fired, then backed down after the White House counsel refused to carry out the order, The New York Times reported last week.

Mr. Trump is now again telling associates that he is frustrated with Mr. Rosenstein, according to one official familiar with the conversations.

Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, who is close to Mr. Trump and House Republicans, signaled interest in Mr. Rosenstein this month as news of the memo’s existence first circulated, asking on air if Mr. Rosenstein had played a role in extending the surveillance. “I’m very interested about Rod Rosenstein in all of this,” he said.

I think it’s obvious what’s going on. But I would just remind people of what happened after Nixon fired Cox and hired a hard right Texas prosecutor named Leon Jaworski who by all accounts went into it thinking the president was being railroaded. I wrote about how that went in this column for Salon a month or so ago. Here’s the relevant piece of it:

Nixon ended up having to appoint another special prosecutor and picked a conservative Texan, 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.

I don’t know what the replacements for Rosenstein, McCabe and the rest of the “purged” members of the DOJ might think of the evidence when they see it. But it’s always possible that whoever it is might just respect the constitution and the rule of law and recognize this Geraldo Rivera put-up job for what it is. Or not. But the way it’s going it appears we’re going to find out.

Trump is purging the department of anyone who worked on the Clinton email case so that he can instruct his henchmen to lock her up. Nothing will thrill his base more than deporting Mexicans, building a wall — and putting that woman in her place at long last. It is the essence of his re-election strategy.

The other part of the purge is to get rid of Mueller however he can. Since firing him outright would upset some Republicans, they are going about it in a more roundabout way. They want to replace his boss with someone who can rein in the investigation and also, hopefully, keep the White House apprised of all developments so they can get ahead of the cover up.

Trump wants his Roy Cohn and he’s going to keep firing people until he gets him.

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The creatures from the fever swamp are busy

The creatures from the fever swamp are busyby digby

So Andrew McCabe has stepped down and the whole world is acting as thought it’s the biggest news since Pearl Harbor. But the reality is that we already knew this. It was announced last year that he would be stepping down. Unfortunately it appears that the mainstream media has been seduced by this wingnut madness:

An “alt-right”-affiliated outlet and fake news purveyors are pushing a highly dubious conspiracy theory from a fringe blog that acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe is a “ringleader” in a plot against President Donald Trump.

Big League Politics, a fringe blog founded by former Daily Caller writer Patrick Howley, cited an “inside source” to claim that McCabe was the “ringleader” behind a collaboration “against” Trump by McCabe, former FBI Director James Comey, and Russia probe special counsel Robert Mueller. According to Howley, the source also called the three men “creatures of the swamp.” The blog also employs “alt-right” figure Cassandra Fairbanks, and it previously helped revive a fringe smear that Comey was biased in his investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server due to his brother’s supposed connections to the Clintons. The McCabe article has drawn slightly more than 100 Facebook engagements so far, according to social media analytics website BuzzSumo. 

Soon after it was published, the report was picked up by “alt-right”-affiliated blog The Gateway Pundit, which wrote that the revelations showed that Mueller is “in bed” with McCabe and Comey, that the three are working to “undermine” Trump, and that McCabe is the “real treat” of this “swamp fiasco.” Though The Gateway Pundit regularly pushes false stories, Fox News and Trump have regularly cited its content, the White House has given its correspondent press credentials, and the site is currently trying to get congressional press credentials. The Gateway Pundit’s McCabe article has received at least 6,200 Facebook engagements, according to BuzzSumo. 

Thanks to the Gateway Pundit article, fake news purveyors then spread this dubious claim. Before It’s Newswrote that the report meant “FBI directors past and present apparently have it in for” Trump, and The Political Insider said that it showed “the deep state is preparing for war.” Mad World News and Washington Feedwrote that McCabe was “execut[ing]” Comey’s “treacherous” “backup plan” and that Trump needs to “get rid of” these “deep state hacks.” Freedom Daily called the report a “bombshell” that showed a “treasonous plot” that “shady” McCabe was “execut[ing],” and that Trump needed to “act quickly” to “get rid of” him. The Political Insider, Mad World News, and Freedom Daily articles have received at least 2,000, 1,600, and 5,500 Facebook engagements, respectively, according to BuzzSumo. 

The “alt-right”/fake news ecosystem pushing this dubious new charge has essentially been a propagandamachine for Trump, and the network continues to target Comey and Mueller as they become potential threats to the president. Mueller is leading the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, and Comey has testified that he believes Trump fired him due to the probe. The new claim also comes as Trump tweeted that he is “being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director” and that he is the target of a “witch hunt.”

They’ve always done this. Whitewater and Paula Jones travel office and birtherism and the IRS scandal and the rest were all hatched by right wing media and carried forward by partisan gangsters in the congress. Today they have a much more efficient media eco-system (and may even be helped by foreign agents) to effect these smear campaigns. But it always starts in the fever swamps just like this.

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Fascist creep

Fascist creepby digby

I wrote about the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump administration for Salon this morning:

Last week we learned that months ago President Trump ordered his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. McGahn said he would quit rather than carry out the order, and Trump backed down. Since then there has been a lot of discussion about the president’s pattern of obstructing the Russia investigation and his persistent lying and interference. There seems to be a consensus that over the course of the last few months Trump has shown an alarming propensity to abuse his power, but it’s still unclear whether there is a clear case that he broke the law. If it can be proven that he has abused his power or broken the law, the one remedy everyone can agree upon — as with any president — is impeachment.

Because the Republican majority in Congress is acting as Trump’s accomplices rather than a co-equal branch of government with oversight responsibility and an obligation to defend the Constitution, however, impeachment is highly unlikely. The GOP caucus in both houses is barely keeping up the pretense of investigating Russian interference in the election, and one group of powerful members is trying to create an alternative scandal, accusing top officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice of conspiring to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign and destroy the Trump administration. According to The Washington Post, Trump himself has been pushing this operation, telling Chief of Staff John Kelly and supposedly recused Attorney General Jeff Sessions to aid in the effort.

Today those of us who consider ourselves civil libertarians find ourselves in the unusual position of defending law enforcement institutions about which we have deep skepticism, due to their secretiveness and the tremendous power they hold over average Americans. But in this case they’re the ones under assault by a rogue group of equally powerful lawmakers and the president of the United States. These elected officials are deeply authoritarian by instinct, ideology and temperament. They are clearly using their authority to undermine the rule of law and democratic norms and practices, not uphold them.

This president and his henchmen could create an authoritarian regime within the rough boundaries of the Constitution and the imprimatur of democratic legitimacy. It would hardly be unprecedented. It’s the way it happens in the modern world. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have written a new book, “How Democracies Die,” which surveys how democratic nations can slide into authoritarianism when they lose their willingness to live by two specific norms: mutual toleration and forbearance.

The first is the belief that the opposition is operating in good faith and with a common love of country. The other is the forbearance not to push the boundaries of power, something that all the players in our system have more of than the law can possibly constrain on its own. The authors describe how other democracies like Chile became authoritarian when these basic principles were stripped away.

In their view, America is in danger of going down that road, having weakened its system going back to the 1980s, when the back-benchers of the Republican Party, led by Newt Gingrich, began to attack democratic norms that had been in place since the end of the Civil War — the last time American democracy went sideways.

They describe the current polarization of the two parties as part of a societal and cultural split, rather than an ideological division.

In this article in The New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt note that 50 years ago, only 5 percent of Americans said they’d be unhappy if their child married someone of the opposite political party. Today, 33 percent of Democrats and a whopping 49 percent of Republicans say they would be displeased with that eventuality. An equal number of Republicans say they are afraid of Democrats, while 55 percent of Democrats feel that way about Republicans. It’s fairly obvious that this is about race, secularism and modernity. Both parties used to be predominantly white and now we have one that is almost entirely white and Christian, while the other is a diverse and largely secular mixture of religions, races and ethnicities.

The authors point out the nub of the problem:

White Christians are not just any group: They are a once-dominant majority in decline. When a dominant group’s social status is threatened, racial and cultural differences can be perceived as existential and irreconcilable. The resulting polarization preceded (indeed, made possible) the Trump presidency, and it is likely to persist after it.

Conservative politicians like Gingrich, Dick Cheney and more recently Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, started to abandon democratic norms a long time ago, starting with the slash-and-burn politics of the ’90s and through the Bush and Obama years. They eventually evolved into something more closely resembling an organized gang dedicated to protecting their turf by any means necessary than a recognizable American political party. Today, Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, says:

Of course the president ought to be able to expect loyalty. He is the chosen president of the United States by the American people, and he is the chief executive. If they’re not loyal to him, who the hell are they supposed to be loyal to?

Every American used to know that the answer to that was “the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Trump knows nothing of norms and wouldn’t understand the concepts of toleration and forbearance. He is a primitive creature trying to survive, and he will use whatever means at his disposal unless someone can convince him that it’s more dangerous to use it than not to. Even then, he sees himself as a risk-taker and could very well decide that it’s worth gambling everything to stay in the game. There’s every reason to believe that his party will back him up.

So far, Trump’s administration has been a chaotic mess, and for the most part, the institutions are holding, even if they are starting to fray at the seams. But authoritarianism can happen by accident as much as design. As Jeet Heer writes in this piece in the New Republic, precisely because Trump “is a weak president who doesn’t know how to achieve his agenda, he’s given to strident rhetoric attacking the legitimacy of his political foes and the institutions that stand in his way.”

Every such attack undermines the stability of our democratic system, giving succor to those who are anxious to use the opening for their own gain and emboldening those who applauded the dark American world Trump promised back on the campaign trail. It’s entirely possible that we are sliding backwards into a new authoritarian system one tweet at a time without even knowing it.

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His own worst enemy by @BloggersRUs

His own worst enemy
by Tom Sullivan

The “perjury trap” President Trump’s allies worry about is the president’s own mouth. Jonathan Swan reports at Axios there is high anxiety in the White House after Trump told the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman last week he was willing and eager to speak under oath with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. (Careful readers know already any falsehoods told to federal investigators, under oath or not, can draw an perjury obstruction charge.*) Swan writes:

What I’m hearing: One source, who knows Trump as well as anyone, told me he believes the president would be incapable of avoiding perjuring himself. “Trump doesn’t deal in reality,” the source said. “He creates his own reality and he actually believes it.” (The president’s attorney, Ty Cobb, did not respond to a request for comment.)

But White House aides know Mueller doesn’t have to set any trap. Trump only has to open his.

Someone with experience in seeing Trump testify under oath is Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien. Trump sued O’Brien (IIRC) for libel for questioning the size of his worth in the 2006 biography, “TrumpNation.” Trump lost.

Trump came to the deposition characteristically overconfident and underprepared to face a former federal prosecutor representing O’Brien:

Trump ultimately had to admit 30 times that he had lied over the years about all sorts of stuff: how much of a big Manhattan real estate project he owned; the price of one of his golf club memberships; the size of the Trump Organization; his wealth; his speaking fees; how many condos he had sold; his debts, and whether he borrowed money from his family to avoid going personally bankrupt. He also lied during the deposition about his business dealings with career criminals.

And because he is ruler of all that he sees, Trump “couldn’t resist saying that his minions at the Trump Organization and elsewhere were just following his orders, a boast that also raised the legal stakes for himself (even if he didn’t realize that’s what he was doing).”

He cannot help himself. Psychologically or legally.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) tells Politico “end-of-the-year document dumps” raised “a lot of new questions” one assumes the public has not yet seen. These add to why the president’s defenders are working feverishly to discredit the FBI and the Mueller probe:

“Mueller is getting closer and closer to the truth,” Warner tells me, and “closer and closer to the truth is getting closer and closer to the president.”

* h/t reader @realbillms

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