Month: January 2018

Senators do have power. They just refuse to use it to stop Trump.by digby

Oh look. A Senator discovers he’s a constitutional officer too:

This morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced changes to Obama-era marijuana policy guidelines that had in effect allowed several states to move forward with pot legalization even though it remains illegal under federal law. Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican from Colorado, one of the legalizing states that has benefited from Obama’s approach, immediately objected.

And in doing so, he reminded the world of what so many people in Washington seem to have forgotten in the era of Trump: United States senators have actual powers of office that they can (and frequently do) use to try to get their way on issues that are important to them.

I am prepared to take all steps necessary, including holding DOJ nominees, until the Attorney General lives up to the commitment he made to me prior to his confirmation.— Cory Gardner (@SenCoryGardner) January 4, 2018

Good for him. Maybe some of these guys could step up to stop the addled chief executive from starting a nuclear war. You’d think that would be as important to the nation as legal pot.

By the way, Cory Gardner was on CNN today being a good little lapdog, defending Trump against Bannon.

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Yes, they are going to re-investigate her emails. For real..by digby

The Justice Department is re-opening the Clinton email case. Nobody’s reporting on it because there’s so much other news, but this is actually happening:

An ally of Attorney General Jeff Sessions who is familiar with the thinking at the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters described it as an effort to gather new details on how Clinton and her aides handled classified material. Officials’ questions include how much classified information was sent over Clinton’s server; who put that information into an unclassified environment, and how; and which investigators knew about these matters and when. The Sessions ally also said officials have questions about immunity agreements that Clinton aides may have made.

A former senior DOJ official familiar with department leadership’s thinking said officials there are acutely aware of demands from President Donald Trump that they look into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State—and that they lock up her top aide, Huma Abedin.

For instance, Trump tweeted on Dec. 2, “Many people in our Country are asking what the ‘Justice’ Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and ‘acid washed’ 33,000 Emails? No justice!”

“If the White House asks you to look into it… The answer is to tell the White House to stay out of investigations and prosecutions, especially when it comes to your political opponents.”
— Matt Miller

The former official said tweets like this present two challenges for department leadership: looking into the matter in a way consistent with normal Justice Department approaches, and trying to avoid the appearance that they are trying “to put Huma in jail.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

It’s an open question as to whether Justice Department officials would have the same level of interest in Clinton’s server without a political directive from the White House, the former official said.

I don’t know if they will follow through but don’t be surprised if they do. One way to prove they aren’t biased against Trump is to put that woman behind bars, amirite?

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The Butterfield Effectby digby

Let me just say upfront that I have never been a fan of Michael Wolff. (If you don’t believe me, read this.) I have quoted from his article in the Hollywood Reporter from 2016 in which he portrayed Trump clearly having no idea what Brexit was and living on Haagen Dazs ice cream. As far as I know Trump never denied any of it and, indeed, welcomed Wolff into the White House which always surprised me.
Anyway, Wolff isn’t a writer into whom I put a lot of stock but even if only half of what he says in the book is true, it validates what most of us have seen about Trump from the beginning, just adding the observations of people who know him up close.

As for whether or not the quotes are true, via Axios we learn that Wolff has tapes:

For all their grenades over Michael Wolff’s bombshell book, Steve Bannon and President Trump have something stunning in common: 

Each helped create a monster he can’t control.

To hear Bannon tell it, there’d be no President Trump without him. That’s probably not true, but he did provide some intellectual fabric to Trump’s loose ideas. Oh, and coverage by his media company, Breitbart, was an in-kind contribution to Trump Inc.

And without Trump, Bannon would still be a colorful but little-known media executive and radio gadfly. Trump not only gave him national prominence and relevance, he smuggled him — for a time — onto the National Security Council.

The two men are actually a lot alike: They both have grandiose views of themselves, play to the base instincts of voters, and obsess about reporters — and regularly feed them on the sly.

How’s this for palace intrigue? Despite knowing his trashing of President Trump was coming in Wolff’s bombshell of a book, Bannon had continued talking to the president, and had even been telling friends he wanted to run Trump’s reelection in 2020.

Bannon has described himself to friends as a “revolutionary” and not in an ironic way. He genuinely views himself as a transformational figure of history, who belongs in the history books. A source who knows Bannon well — and is mostly sympathetic to him — told us he thinks Bannon is even more narcissistic than Trump.

And how’s this for a twist? Bannon has also told friends he’d run for president in 2020 if Trump does not, knowing the same book would include his on-the-record argument that Mueller could topple Trump.

He wants to be Trump’s heir — and has a plan for positioning himself to pick up the president’s unusual coalition. Bannon has been traveling the country, building his own base and name ID with his campaign to support insurgent Republicans who would run in primaries against Mitch McConnell’s handpicked candidates.

The travel has had the double effect of putting Bannon in all the right places for a future run at office.

It’s no secret Bannon is a mischief-maker and fancies himself a Machiavellian operative. But this is some out-there behavior, and arguably the craziest episode of the Trump show:

The man who helped elect Trump last year, seemingly trying to destroy all of those around him, including the president’s son and son-in-law, 12 months later.

Wolff’s book was known internally as the Bannon book, because he opened the door to the author’s extraordinary access. Jared Kushner, in particular, feared it would be used to settle scores.

Damn, was he right.

And, damn: He’s a lot like the man who made him.
Flashback … Axios’ Jonathan Swan, Aug. 12: “Trump suspects Bannon of leaking, putting job in jeopardy.”

How Wolff did it:

Part of Wolff’s lengthy index entry for Bannon

Michael Wolff has tapes to back up quotes in his incendiary book — dozens of hours of them.
Among the sources he taped, I’m told, are Bannon and former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh.

So that’s going to make it harder for officials to deny embarrassing or revealing quotes attributed to them.

In some cases, the officials thought they were talking off the record. But what are they going to do now?

Although the White House yesterday portrayed Wolff as a poseur, he spent hours at a time in private areas of the West Wing, including the office of Reince Priebus when he was chief of staff.
The White House says Wolff was cleared for access to the West Wing fewer than 20 times.

Wolff, a New Yorker, stayed at the Hay Adams Hotel when he came down to D.C., and White House sources frequently crossed Lafayette Park to meet him there.

Some reporters and officials are calling the book sloppy, and challenging specific passages.
How could Wolff possibly know for sure what Steve Bannon and the late Roger Ailes said at a private dinner?

It turns out Wolff hosted the dinner for six at his Manhattan townhouse.

We have always been at war with East Bannonby digby

This happened today:

Today's 1984/Wizard of Oz hybrid is off to a wild start …. pic.twitter.com/yJT8hC6JV5— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 4, 2018

The president is in the White House. He could have comedown to the briefing room and addressed the press directly. He undoubtedly didn’t want to take questions. And he also didn’t want anyone to record questions being asked.

This is where we are, people.

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A racist from Central Castingby digby

This is an excellent catch by Think Progress:

On Tuesday, the New York Post published an extraordinary leak about the grand jury impaneled by Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia.

The piece — written by Richard Johnson, a Page Six gossip columnist — quoted a source discussing the nature of the jury, even though the composition and activities of the grand jury are supposed to be secret.

“The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally,” my source said. “Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley [Calif.]”

Of the 20 jurors, 11 are African-Americans and two were wearing “peace T-shirts,” the witness said. “There was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.” Mueller was not present.

The quote drips with racism — suggesting that, unless there is a minimum number of white people in a jury room, the process is illegitimate.

And whoever leaked this tidbit to the New York Post sounds an awful lot like Donald Trump.
“Central casting” is a Trump signature

The most telling aspect of the anonymous quote provided to the New York Post is the source’s use of the term “central casting.”

This term, which originated in the entertainment industry to describe someone whose appearance matches the stereotypes associated with an acting role, is a favorite phrase of Trump’s.

“[Pence] has been so wonderful to work with. He’s a real talent, a real guy. And he is central casting, do we agree? Central casting,” Trump told the National Governor’s Association in February in reference to his vice president.

“This is central casting. If I was doing a movie, I pick you, general,” Trump said of his Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, last January.

Trump has also used the phrase to defend his plan to discriminate against certain immigrants. “But, you know, they want you to look at a woman who’s in a wheelchair, that’s 88 years old, and barely making it, and let’s say, comes out of Sweden. She’s supposed to be treated the same way as a guy that looks just like the guy that just got captured, who is central casting for profiling,” Trump said in September 2016.

Trump’s use of the phrase “central casting” is so pervasive that multiple articles have been written on the subject over the past year.

MSNBC took on the topic last February, reporting that the president is “preoccupied” with the term.

There are more examples at the link. I wrote about it myself when he talked about “casting” his cabinet. It’s exactly how he thinks. It doesn’t prove it was him but I’m hard pressed to think of anyone but Trump who still uses that term.

There is also this:

Although Richard Johnson is now a columnist, he served as editor for Page Six from 1993 to 2010 — a publication that is famously revered by Trump. Susan Mulcahy, who served as Page Six editor in the 1980s, wrote last June that Trump “loves Page Six and used to have it brought it to him the moment it arrived in his office.” She described speaking to him on a regular basis during her tenure.

Johnson is on record about his close relationship to Trump. Last month, he detailed their connections in a column entitled “Richard Johnson’s life with the Donald.”

I would guess that Trump heard this from one of his toadies who’s been before the Grand Jury. And then he decided to leak it to his pal because he’s just that dumb. Insulting the jury before any charges are filed isn’t a great idea.

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Following the moneyby digby

I wrote about what I think is the most important thing we’ve heard so far about the Wolff book in Salon:
Was it just last week that Donald Trump was strutting confidently around the golf course at Mar-a-Lago, chatting incoherently with New York Times reporters about his big tax cut victory and assuring everyone that he had no worries about the Mueller investigation? He’s was on top of the world. Then he went back to Washington and everything changed.

In the course of 24 hours, Trump posted a dizzying number of provocative tweets that seemed to come out of nowhere. He jumped into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, called for the prosecution and imprisonment of a top aide to Hillary Clinton along with former FBI Director James Comey, rebuked Pakistan out of the blue, went after The New York Times’ new publisher and took credit for the fact that there were no American airplane crashes in 2016. And, as you may have heard, he got into a nuclear “button” measuring contest with Kim Jong-un:

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

Trump suddenly seemed agitated and angry, looking for a fight. Word is that he was upset about his lawyers’ shifting timelines for the Mueller case, but if he had a heads up about the firestorm that was about to hit the White House on Wednesday with the release of excerpts of Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury,” it certainly didn’t lift his mood.

The book features sensational observations by various players in the Trump administration, ranging from crude, sexist comments by the president about women in the Trump orbit to the explosive charges by former campaign CEO and Senior Policy Adviser Steve Bannon that animated the news all day on Wednesday.

Bannon had a lot to say to Wolff about everyone in the White House, which really shouldn’t be all that surprising since he also spilled his guts to Joshua Green for his book “Devil’s Bargain” and has often spoken frankly to Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair. He’s a talker. In this book, he says some things that were guaranteed to cause serious heartburn in the White House, not least of which is what he told Wolff sometime after the infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 2016 was revealed in The New York Times last summer:

Memoriesby digby

There are many things in the Wolff book which, if true, are extremely disturbing. But this may be the big revelation:

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something…

Donald Trump’s small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

and this:

Fox News primetime star Sean Hannity was allegedly willing to provide questions to President Trump in advance of their interview this year, Michael Wolff reported Thursday. In a column excerpting Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Wolff explained that—through conversations with top Trump advisers—he discovered that many in the administration view the president as mentally “incapable,” with frequent lapses in memory becoming a cause for concern. Per Wolff, Trump comms aide and confidant Hope Hicks, “attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged [Trump] to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season.”

Instead, Wolff reported, “the interview went to Fox News’ Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions.” Through a Fox News spokesperson, Hannity disputed that account, saying, “I never provided questions ahead of time to any candidate and never said I was going to quit my longtime, successful TV and radio career to work for Trump.” Noting Hannity’s curious use of the word “candidate,” The Daily Beast followed up, clarifying that Wolff’s report alleged the question-feeding occurred during the presidency and not during the Republican campaign. Fox has not yet responded. The White House additionally did not respond to a request for comment.

If any of you have ever gone through the progression of Alzheimer’s disease with a relative, you recognize this as a common symptom. His father had the disease.

On the other hand, according to people who’ve known him for decades, he’s always been this way. He’s a repeater and isn’t good with faces. So who knows?

There is something wrong with him but I’m not convinced that it’s a physical problem. He’s psychologically unfit for the presidency, obviously. That was clear during the campaign. He’s emotionally and psychologically unfit and Wolff’s book is only confirming this from people who have worked with him closely in the White House that he is as he appears.

But everyone knew this. And he won anyway. Indeed, many people voted for him because of these characteristics.

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The circus on Pennsylvania Avenue
by Tom Sullivan

Buckle up.

Former White House advisor Steve Bannon tells all to author Michael Wolff in his unreleased “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” In incendiary quotes in the Guardian, Bannon describes the Trump Tower meetings between the president’s son and top campaign officials as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” Of the ongoing investigation, Bannon says, “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

Bannon adds that the Russia investigation is “all about money laundering” involving Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner. Says Bannon, “It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

It is important to note, as Slate news blogger Ben Mathis-Lilley does with a flurry of links, that quotes from Michael Wolff may not have the provenance they claim:

A 2004 New Republic profile of Wolff meanwhile noted that “the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events.” The same piece quoted an editor who worked with Wolff as saying “his great gift is the appearance of intimate access. He is adroit at making the reader think that he has spent hours and days with his subject, when in fact he may have spent no time at all.” A 1998 article about Wolff’s book Burn Rate surfaced Wednesday by writer Brad Plumer notes that several of the subjects of the book say Wolff “invented or changed quotes” that were attributed to them.

Accurate or not, Cokie’s Law applies. Jonathan Swan at Axios observes that in attacking family “Bannon touched the third rail of Trumpworld .”

Thus, reports of Bannon’s comments took the sitting president’s mind away from comparing Nuclear Button size with Kim Jong Un. In a statement too coherent for the boss, the White House responded, saying:

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

“We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.”

Why, yes, America.

Washington DC is in a bit of a meltdown tonight.— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 3, 2018

The White House issued the statement before Trump’s attorney sent Bannon a cease and desist letter:

Trump attorney Charles J. Harder of the firm Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, said in a statement, “This law firm represents President Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. On behalf of our clients, legal notice was issued today to Stephen K. Bannon, that his actions of communicating with author Michael Wolff regarding an upcoming book give rise to numerous legal claims including defamation by libel and slander, and breach of his written confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement with our clients. Legal action is imminent.”

That would have to be an agreement with Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., since an NDA covering a White House employee would seem to be null and void, at least as it pertains to White House gossip.

While all that was going on, Trump found time yesterday to dissolve the voter fraud commission he set up to prove massive voter fraud had cost him the popular vote in 2016:

“It’s a s–t show,” said one White House adviser to CNN, adding that the commission went “off the rails.”

Spoken from the center of the three-ring show that opened yesterday at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. To give Trump credit, the show is a spectacular.

But amidst the growing chaos and incoherence, speculation grows that, as we say down South, “He ain’t right.”

James Hamblin at The Atlantic surveys some of the controversy surrounding the “Goldwater rule” discouraging analyzing public officials from afar. Nevertheless, Trump’s recent speech patterns indicate cognitive decline compared with past interviews. Hamblin worries:

The idea that the president should not be diagnosed from afar only underscores the point that the president needs to be evaluated up close.

If he does have dementia, a medical condition, pointing it out would be politically incorrect in more polite circles. But since the occupant of the Oval Office objects to being politically correct, which would he think worse, blasting it out in tweets, or not?

* * * * * * * *

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

QOTD: the craziest crazy
by digby

It’s been quite a day for wild quotes from Trump world. So, I’ll just share a couple from the Wolff book and then the craziest of crazy.

First this:

Trump would speculate on the flaws of his staff after hanging up the phone with them. “Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short — a midget),” Wolff recalls Trump’s reflections. “Kushner was a suck-up. Sean Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.”

sounds like him

Trump asked Hope Hicks, the White House communications director who had dated former campaign manage Corey Lewandowski, why she was worried about Lewandowski’s bad press after he got fired. “You’ve already done enough for him,” Trump apparently said. “You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have”

Hicks and Trump had a very close relationship, and Trump’s inner circle saw her as something of a daughter to the president. “[Hope] Hicks was in fact thought of as Trump’s real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife,

yikes…

Trump used derogatory language to express his anger toward Sally Yates. “Trump conceived an early, obsessive antipathy for Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates,” the book reads. “She was, he steamed, ‘such a c—.’”

That figures. He fired her the first chance he got. And he didn’t believe her about Flynn which got him into big trouble.

But he gets by with a little help from his friends. This is looney tunes Alex Jones commenting on Trump’s tweet that he has a bigger “button” than Kim Jong Un:

ALEX JONES (HOST): Now the media went into conniption fits and the headlines from MSNBC are Trump’s sexual obsessions may destroy the earth.

They’re the ones saying hey we got a bigger nuclear button than you, we got a bigger arsenal, more powerful, and it works.

Nothing to do with the media trying to say the president has small genitals.

And by the way he doesn’t even have small hands, and by the way that’s a cliche, and a wives’ tale, and not even true as well.

Medical doctors will tell you it’s the feet size. But the point is — that it’s more comparable.

And that’s not even an exact metric.

So sweet…

Trump’s top adviser is … Fox Newsby digby

Before it gets lost in the shuffle of White House gossip from Wolff’s new book, it’s important to note that President Trump tweeted this insane statement on Tuesday night:

What’s weird about it is that the news of Kim’s speech where he said he had a button on his desk was given a few days ago. Trump was still playing golf down in Florida but one would have assumed it would be part of his intelligence briefing. So what set him off days later?

Well, this:

That story came at 7:37 pm. Trump’s tweet came at 7:49.

Of course that wasn’t the only freaky twitter behavior:

The tweet was just one of many inflammatory statements by Trump over a long day of bizarre tweeting that included everything from fanning the flames of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to attempting to take credit for airplanes being safe, calling for the prosecution of a top aide to Hillary Clinton, attacking the new publisher of the New York Times, and plugging Lou Dobbs’s show on the Fox Business Network. Along the way, he also reiterated a New Year’s Day dig at Pakistan. 

It’s a puzzling array of topics that at first glance appears to defy any explanation as a communications strategy or a set of policy priorities.

It’s Fox:

Everything from Trump’s alarming suggestion that the Justice Department prosecute former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin to his absurd contention that he deserves credit for an aviation safety streak that dates back to 2009 had its origins in a Fox News segment.

This was supposed to be his first day back at work.  He spent most of it watching Fox News.

Of course he probably had to take his mind off of the Wolff book which he undoubtedly knew was going to be published in excerpts this week.

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