Month: February 2018

Can they lock everybody up? by digby

I wrote about the ongoing GOP plan to prosecute everybody in sight for Salon this morning:
Apparently the stock market felt left out of the Trump roller coaster ride so it decided to go a little bit crazy on Monday: The Dow Jones average dropped by 1,500 points before climbing back just a bit to settle at a loss of 1,100 for the day. Whee! We have had many such days that were more significant in terms of percentage, but it was the largest single-day point drop in history.

What made it even more dramatic than usual was the fact that President Trump, who has repeatedly taken credit for the market’s steady rise, was giving a televised speech on his glorious economic success while the stock ticker in the corner of the screen told a dire tale. There are myriad factors behind the plunge, but one possible contributor is that tax-cut euphoria is wearing off and investors are realizing the freak show in Washington might just be a little bit destabilizing.

The Nunes Memo and all the congressional shenanigans may be a nice distraction for the president, but there is a little matter of another possible government shutdown this week and a budget that doesn’t seem likely to come together, largely because the GOP leadership doesn’t want anyone to see the new debt projections. In other words, the mess is getting messier.

In the midst of all this excitement, the House Intelligence Committee voted to release the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes Memo — if Trump approves the release, that is. Cable news pundits all seem to believe that part is a slam dunk, because the White House has said it wants transparency. I have to wonder if they’ve been watching the same Trump administration as I’ve been watching. I think it’s entirely possible that Trump will refuse to release it, if only for the chance to demand the arrest of Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., if it were to leak. Don’t think he wouldn’t do that:

Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, right up there with Comey, Warner, Brennan and Clapper! Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018

As I mentioned yesterday, House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (whom Trump recently declared on Twitter was an American hero) has announced that he plans to produce more memos exposing people within the Department of Justice, FBI and State Department for vague acts of partisan wrongdoing. Nunes is calling this “Phase Two” of his operation, although Schiff wryly corrected the record in a press conference, pointing out that it’s really Phase Three of Nunes’ pro-Trump skulduggery, the first phase being the congressman’s harebrained “midnight run” last year.

A bit more information emerged Monday about just what Nunes has in mind. Accordingto Natasha Bertrand at the Atlantic, Republicans are now homing in on a State Department official named Jonathan Winer, who was the Obama administration’s special envoy to Libya and a longtime aide to former Secretary of State John Kerry. Bertrand reports that “Winer received a memorandum from political activist Cody Shearer and passed it along to Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence official who had compiled his own dossier on Donald Trump.”

It appears that Nunes will have some company in this phase because Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., are also involved, having previously referred Christopher Steele to the FBI for allegedly failing to tell them about all the journalists he spoke to. Those two are also pretending to be in a tizzy about this contact between Winer, Shearer and Steele — as if it had any bearing on anything. All of this is likely happening because Steele stuck a handwritten Post-it note on the Shearer document saying that the author was a contact of longtime Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal, whose name is guaranteed to set off a collective primal scream among right-wingers.

This obviously has no real bearing on anything, since it doesn’t matter where information comes from during an investigation if it turns out to be true. As has been pointed out a thousand times, the Russia investigation now overseen by Robert Mueller was not precipitated by anything in the Steele dossier. It was all the other evidence of attempted Russian infiltration and coordination with the Trump campaign, along with the hacking of the Democratic Party computer system by Russian agents and their subsequent deployment of propaganda in many forms. If there had never been a Steele dossier, it wouldn’t make much difference.

As ridiculous as this obsessive focus on Steele may be, there actually is a method to the Republican madness, which I saw coming some months ago when I wrote a Salon column about Hillary Clinton’s “real Russia scandal.” Monday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, Devin Nunes came right out and said it:

We have a clear link to Russia — you have a campaign who hired a law firm, who hire Fusion GPS, who hired a foreign agent, who then got information from the Russians on the other campaign. It seems like the counterintelligence investigation should have been opened up against the Hillary campaign when they got ahold of the dossier. But that didn’t happen, either.

This would be known in intelligence circles as the “I know you are but what am I” strategy. But Republicans aren’t stopping at that. Axios also reported Monday that Trump’s lawyers have “approved the idea of appointing a second special counsel to investigate the FBI and Justice Department’s actions during the 2016 presidential campaign.” I’m not sure why their “approval” would be sought or required, but there you have it. As wacky as that is, it’s nothing compared to this nugget reported by Howard Fineman at NBC:

Trump is even talking to friends about the possibility of asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to consider prosecuting Mueller and his team. “Here’s how it would work: ‘We’re sorry, Mr. Mueller, you won’t be able to run the federal grand jury today because he has to go testify to another federal grand jury,'” said one Trump adviser.

Basically they are building a case that Hillary Clinton, along with top leadership of the Department of Justice, the FBI and the State Department, colluded with the Russian government — and all of them, along with special counsel Mueller, should be locked up. That sounds extreme. But consider what the president said on Monday about Democratic members of Congress who didn’t applaud him at the State of the Union address last week:

They were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, “treasonous.” I mean, yeah, I guess. Why not? Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country that much.

With a leader like that, is it such a stretch to believe that his Attorney General might actually appoint special counsels to investigate the FBI and the State Department to ferret out the Democratic traitors? Would we really be that shocked to see them try to prosecute Hillary Clinton or Bob Mueller? I’m afraid it’s getting easier to believe every day.

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What do we call this political atrocity?by digby

This piece by James Fallows in the Atlantic is as characteristically insightful as his work always is. But I’m struck by the fact that this calm, thoughtful, common sense writer has come to some of the same conclusions as this hyperbolic blogger.
We all know that Trump is unusual is just about every way. But Fallows notes a specifically unique characteristic:

Donald Trump’s first official State of the Union address—which seems as if it happened back in the 19th century, but in reality is five days in the past—highlighted something that was implicit in his campaign and increasingly significant through his time in office: Trump virtually never praises or speaks about, and gives no evidence of respecting or even comprehending, the strengths of the United States as a system, or as an idea.

The United States occupies a particular (very favorable) geographic location, and it has a particular demographic mixture (which has continually changed through its history), and has other traits that make Americans identifiable as a people. For Americans who have lived overseas, one of the most obvious of these tribal traits is the impulse to gather on Thanksgiving Day, which for everyone else is just another Thursday. Another is the sporting festival that some 160 million people, mostly Americans, watched last night.

But from its Founders’ era onward, the country’s leaders have stressed that America the nation is also America the idea. This was an invented nation, in the late 1700s the first of its type the world had seen. And for all of its evident injustices and failings and hypocrisies, in principle it was based on the open-ended quest to become a more “perfect union.”

At the level of high theory, this meant learning about the checks and balances of the Constitution, and the discussions in the Federalist Papers about the intricate machinery of a lasting democracy. In practice it meant respecting the rules of American interaction at least as much as the results, and understanding that those rules included both written strictures and long-established norms. Respecting the process of trial by jury, despite disagreement with a particular verdict. Respecting the followup process of judicial review and appeal. Respecting open elections, even when they go against you. Respecting the obligations of long-term treaties and compacts, even when it would be more convenient to shirk them. Respecting the importance of unfettered debate and criticism, even when you feel—as most politicians do when being criticized—that the people doing the complaining have got it all wrong.

My assumption has been that he’s simply uneducated about any of this. But it’s clear that it’s uninteresting to him as well. Everything in life is about him, not anything else.

Fallows wonders what to call this phenomenon and mentions four different possibilities:

… Trumpocracy? This is the name of an excellent new book by The Atlantic’s David Frum, related to—but much broader than—his “How to Build an Autocracy” cover story, published just after Trump was sworn in. David describes the interlocking brands of corruption that together keep an autocrat in power, from straight-out financial payoffs (like Trump real-estate deals linked to Trump-administration policies) to the corrosion of law-enforcement standards to the abasement of an entire political party. What I observed when living in China is what the book says is becoming true of this era’s America: “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.” …

… A “dying” of democracy? That is the implication of the new book How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard. Like Frum’s book, this one works against an “it can’t happen here” complacency about the durability of American institutions…

… Perhaps this is “tribalism,” a term I’ve discussed in a series of posts last year, especially for the current Republican pattern of converting any judgment about “right” or “wrong” into whether it helps or hurts Trump…

… Or it is time to call this era flat-out a return to fascism. This is the argument of another brand-new book, by the Dutch writer (and friend of mine ) Rob Riemen. Its title is To Fight Against This Age; it’s a combination of two long essays that received wide attention in Europe; and for American readers its central importance will be Riemen’s contention that it matters to call today’s political disorders by their real name. For him that is not “populism” (or the U.S. version, “economic anxiety,”) nor garden-variety corruption nor even longer-term democratic distress. Instead it is the reawakening of the force that began destroying Europe a century ago, outright fascism:

The term populism, being the preferred description for a modern-day revolt of the masses, will not provide any meaningful understanding concerning that phenomenon … The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting our societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy.

Fallows notes in the piece:

I don’t know whether Trump has encountered the phrase l’etat, c’est moi, but he is showing us just what it means. Except for that odd passage in his inaugural address, there’s no evidence I can think of that he recognizes the claims, validity, or importance of a set of rules beyond his personal interests or aggrandizement.

Well:

Pres. Trump says Democrats not applauding at the State of the Union were "un-American…can we call that treason? Why not." https://t.co/O9IQkjnRq7 pic.twitter.com/Z6CbTSajgL— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) February 5, 2018

He literally suggests that failing to applaud him is un-American, treasonous and shows that the Democrats “don’t love their country.” His adoring subjects agree.

Louis the IV would be proud.

So would someone else:

The salute is performed by extending the right arm from the neck into the air with a straightened hand. Usually, the person offering the salute would say “Heil Hitler!” (Hail Hitler!), “Heil, mein Führer!” (Hail, my leader!), or “Sieg Heil!” (Hail victory!). It was adopted in the 1930s by the Nazi Party to signal obedience to the party’s leader, Adolf Hitler, and to glorify the German nation (and later the German war effort). The salute was mandatory for civilians.

Fallows concludes:

In the latest New York Times Book Review, Damon Linker explained why he respected the book but disagreed with Riemen about “fascism.” Linker argues that it is a distracting and inflammatory rather than clarifying term. Judge for yourself; the argument, again, has parallels to criticism of Ta-Nehisi Coates for insisting on terms like “white supremacy.” Linker also has a deeper difference with Riemen, over “universal” versus particularistic values in politics. (“Politics is about more existential issues: this bounded community in this place with this history and heritage, determining its own character for itself, deciding who is and who is not a citizen, who will rule and in the name of which vision of the good life.”) Again, consider it for yourself. I am on Riemen’s side of that argument, and I find that his case for considering today’s developments “fascist” is, in fact, useful in thinking about responses.

Me too.

I urge you to read the whole thing. This is just a small part of the argument.

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The anti-George
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump cannot tell the truth. He always sounds as if he’s trying to bluff his way through an oral report on a book he never read. The last thing his lawyers want him doing is sitting for an interview with Robert Mueller’s investigators. Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported last night that was their advice in spite of Trump’s statements he would welcome the interview, even under oath.

Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo:

Let’s be candid about what this means. The President is pleading the 5th while trying to avoid saying that’s what he’s doing. Let’s call it the de facto 5th. The constitutional law is clear cut. It’s not at all hypothetical. A sitting President has no blanket right to refuse to cooperate with a criminal investigation. Different dimensions of this question were litigated under Presidents Nixon and Clinton. The Courts were clear each time. The President has to comply with the law and with criminal investigations just like everyone else, though there may be certain areas of privilege. Presidents have been interviewed by special prosecutors, special counsels and independent counsels in numerous cases. The President is obviously guilty of obstruction of justice. He’s likely guilty of criminal conspiracy with a foreign power, though what if any statutes this would implicate is not clear to me. It makes perfect sense to refuse to talk. Perps do that all the time. It’s their right.

The Times reports, that his lawyers worry that Trump, with “a history of making false statements and contradicting himself, could be charged with lying to investigators.”

The sitting president’s longtime personal attorney, Marc E. Kasowitz, as well as Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who led the Trump transition team, reject the notion of the president agreeing to an interview. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, knows the risk better than most.

Marshall thinks it unlikely Mueller would indict a president. That doesn’t mean he might not indict members of the president’s family if evidence warrants. Trump has the power of the pardon, of course. But one can’t help but wonder, depending on circumstances, whether Trump would sacrifice his sons to save himself? Is he that base?

* * * * * * * *

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

“I am non-braggadocious”
by digby

Yes, Trump actually said that:

“I am non-braggadocious,” @POTUS says on his effort to bring jobs back to the U.S. “Wait until you see what's happening…with what we are doing to countries that have treated us so unfairly. In many cases so-called 'friendly' countries — I don't call them friendly." pic.twitter.com/qnTEmG71Aj— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 5, 2018

Yes, we are through the looking glass. But you knew that.

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They have shame?by digby

Talking Points Memo wonders what in the world it could have been:

What went a step too far for the far-right wing website that used to have a “Black Crime” tag, has asserted that young Muslims living in the West are a “ticking time bomb,” falsely claimed a 1,000-man Muslim mob had set fire to the oldest church in Germany, and proclaimed two weeks after Dylann Roof committed a massacre in a black church that “the Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage?”

It’s nice that they have finally decided that they have something called “editorial standards” they still have a lot to answer for. Remember that their forme chief executive Steve Bannon once declared that Breitbart is “the platform for the alt-right.” Well:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called “alt-right” — a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.

On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and began firing a handgun, killing two students before taking his own life.

At the time, the news of the shooting went largely ignored, but the online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, bore all the hallmarks of the “alt-right”—the now infamous subculture and political movement consisting of vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.

But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed six in Isla Vista, California, after uploading a sprawling manifesto filled with hatred of young women and interracial couples (Atchison went by “Elliot Rodger” in one of his many online personas and lauded the “supreme gentleman,” a title Rodger gave himself and has since become a meme on the alt-right).

Including Rodger’s murderous rampage there have been at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes, leaving 43 dead. And more than 60 injured in these incidents (see list). Nine of the 12 incidents counted here occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year for the movement.

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Devin’s WHbffby digby

Josh Marshall has the goods:

As I noted last week, at the end of the ‘Memo’ drama Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) asked Nunes whether he’d worked with the White House on producing the memo. Nunes evaded the question. He has not followed up with any denial. Yesterday Rep. Adam Schiff said he thinks “it’s very possible his staff worked with the White House and coordinated the whole effort with the White House.” I think he’s right. I’d say it’s highly likely. But who and how?

You don’t need to look long to find the probable point of contact between Nunes and the White House. Michael Ellis is Senior Associate White House Counsel, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Council Legal Advisor. He’s an intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve. Before he went to work at the White House Counsel’s office he served as Nunes’ General Counsel on the House Intelligence Committee.

That’s a pretty good clue to who Nunes might be in contact with at the White House. But we don’t need to rely on that professional connection. Ellis and Nunes have already done something just like this at least once before. You’ll remember that in early 2017, Mike Flynn directed his protege Ezra Cohen-Watnick to start reviewing what counter-intelligence investigators were finding in the Russia probe. Flynn was one of the primary targets of that probe. So this was highly irregular and not at all legit. That ‘review’ continued after Flynn was fired. Cohen-Watnick eventually took his findings to Don McGahn at the White House Counsel’s office. McGahn told him to stop immediately. Rather than doing so, he went around the Counsel’s office by having Nunes come to the White House in the middle of the night to share their findings. He and a colleague in the Counsel’s office called Nunes late one night and asked him to come to the White House immediately.

This was the origin of the “unmasking” conspiracy theory. H.R. McMaster tried to fire Cohen-Watnick when he arrived at the White House. But Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner asked President Trump to prevent McMaster from doing so. Cohen-Watnick was finally fired in August. So who was that colleague in the Counsel’s Office he worked with on his ‘review’ and his work with Nunes? Michael Ellis. Nunes bizarrely referred to Cohen-Watnick and Ellis as “whistleblowers” and refused to divulge their identities. But they were finally identified in press reports.

In other words, Ellis already did close to the exact same thing with his former boss Nunes. It’s a pattern of conduct if you will. In that earlier instance, Nunes was a conduit for bogus findings meant to discredit the Russia probe – findings Don McGahn was able to recognize as potential obstruction and quickly shut down. They took it to Nunes. It seems quite likely that something like this happened in this case too.

Of course they did. They seem to have run it by Hannity as well. This is the Nunes M.O.

While he was talkingby digby

It got worse. At this point I don’t know where it’s going to end up. But it was down 1500 points at one point.

Obviously, this had nothing to do with his speech. But he’s been talking up the market as the perfect illustration of his Yuge Hands, and then the real world intrudes.

Keep in mind that while this is the biggest point decline in history, it far from being the biggest percentage decline in history. The 1987 crash lost 23% in one day …

Still, this makes you feel jittery.

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by digby

Trump and his henchmen obviously believe that anyone who isn’t kissing his Royal Highness’s ring is  traitor and must be purged. Sadly, I’d guess that means that the people in this piece at Lawfare are not long for the department:

When President Trump fired James Comey as FBI director last May, the special agent in charge of the Detroit field office, David Gelios, wrote an email to his staff:
I just saw CNN reporting that Director Comey has been fired by President Trump. I have no notification from HQ of any such thing. If I receive any information from HQ, I will advise. I’d ask all to stand by for clarification of this reporting. I am only sending this because I want everyone to know I have received no HQ confirmation of the reporting. I hope this is an instance of fake news. 

In the Knoxville field office, Special Agent in Charge Renae McDermott wrote to the staff she leads: “Unexpected news such as this is hard to understand but I know you all know our Director stood for what is right and what is true!!! . . . He truly made us better when we needed it the most.” 

The following day, in an email with the subject line “Follow up with your squads,” she followed up: “I need for all of you to make sure our/your folks are doing OK. Check with them today, tomorrow ….you get the idea.”
McDermott sent that latter email as the White House was launching its public broadside against Comey’s performance. In a May 10 press conference, the same day McDermott was asking her staff to make sure one another were “doing OK,” then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the president had “lost confidence in Director Comey” and that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.” She stated that the president had “had countless conversations with members from within the FBI” in the course of making his decision to fire Comey. The following day, Sanders stated that she personally had “heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president’s decision” and that the president believed “Director Comey was not up to the task…that he wasn’t the right person in the job. [Trump] wanted somebody that could bring credibility back to the FBI.”

There’s more at the link. It’s nice that this shows Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a liar (oh no!) but I’m not sure it’s worth it. In this climate anyone in the government who expresses anything but deep, unalloyed fealty to President Trump is going to be a target.

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Republicans are complaining about partisan oppo now? 
by digby

I wrote about the GOP’s laughable handwringing over opposition research being used in an investigation for Salon this morning:

It’s been 72 hours or so since the Devin Nunes Memo was released, and it’s clear that despite wall-to-wall coverage, the entire spectacle changed nothing. For Fox News pundits and their associates in the GOP, it proves there was a conspiracy among FBI and Department of Justice leadership to destroy Donald Trump. For everyone else, it shows that the rationale for the Russia investigation was a legitimate line of inquiry.

Sean Hannity said that this memo makes clear that charges must be dropped against Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn — for some reason, even though the latter has already pleaded guilty to a crime. Donald Trump Jr. ranted inanely that Democrats were both McCarthyites and “commies,” which is a neat trick. He also said something truly reckless:

There is a little bit of sweet revenge in it for me and certainly probably the family in a sense that if they wouldn’t have done this, this stuff would be going on. This would be going on at the highest levels of government. They’d be continuing doing it to my father, trying to undermine his actions.

And here we all thought the president’s decision to declassify the memo was all in the interest of transparency and national security.

On the other side of that argument is everyone else, even including some heavy-hitting Republicans like the scourge of Benghazi, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who went to great lengths to explain that the memo had nothing whatsoever to do with special counsel Robert Mueller and the Russia investigation. This obviously came as news to the president, who tweeted this:

This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2018

Gowdy’s deviation from the Trumpian line on this, echoing Paul Ryan’s from last week, is a perfect case of trying to have it both ways. Ryan was the ultimate enabler of this farce, signing off on the Nunes crusade, and Gowdy is the guy who read the underlying FISA warrant application documents on which the memo was based. So nobody should get too excited about their supposed “independence” on this. They were primary facilitators.

It’s true that a few others have joined that chorus, signaling that at least a handful of Republicans don’t want to be associated with the notion that this memo “vindicates” the president. (Notably, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not among them.)

Chairman Nunes is undeterred. Axios reported on Sunday:

The House Intelligence chair and his team have told members and associates they’ve found other examples of politically motivated “wrongdoing” across various agencies, including the FBI, the broader Justice Department, and the State Department . . . Republicans close to Nunes say there could be as many as five additional memos or reports of “wrongdoing.”

One wonders if Nunes has any knowledge of that time in 1950 when a senator named Joseph McCarthy pulled out a “list” he claimed had the names of 200 people in the State Department whom he accused of politically motivated wrongdoing. It didn’t end well.

Apparently, the Nunes team think they have more “evidence” of political interference having something to do with longtime Clinton associate and right-wing punching bag Sidney Blumenthal, as well as a man named Cody Shearer, who traveled in Clinton circles 20 years ago.

I have no idea what Blumenthal (who was once the Washington editor of Salon) is accused of doing this time. The Guardian recently reported that Shearer, a former journalist, had evidence pertaining to the Russia investigation which the FBI had been looking at since October 2016. Shearer’s “dossier” was turned over to the FBI by the former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who didn’t vouch for his information but noted that it dovetailed with what some of his own sources had told him. Whether the FBI has verified any of Shearer’s information remains unknown.

It’s easy at this point to imagine the high-pitched howls of outrage spilling forth from the mouth of Sean Hannity over this news. The case right-wingers seem to be building here is that the FBI and the Department of Justice (and apparently other departments as well) are thoroughly corrupted by associations with Democrats and must be purged of the taint. Indeed, the central thrust of the Nunes Memo is that the FBI used information from a source (i.e., Steele) who had been paid by Democrats, which renders the information useless.

Over the course of the last few days, legal experts patiently explained that the motivation of informants and sources is not relevant to the question of whether the information they provide is true. Cases are made every single day on the basis of testimony and evidence provided by people whose motives are anything but pure: gangsters, jailhouse snitches, angry spouses, whatever. It’s not as if the authorities just take their word for it. Information has to be corroborated, and apparently the FISA warrant application process is particularly demanding in that regard.

Nonetheless, Trump and his loyalists are arguing that any Democratic member of the government bureaucracy is automatically suspect, and any information that comes from a Democratic partisan must be immediately discounted as unreliable. This is very interesting, considering Republicans’ partisan history of feeding information to law enforcement and special counsels.

Most recently, we had the FBI open a case to investigate the Clinton Foundation partially on the basis of charges in the book “Clinton Cash,” a partisan hit job by right-wing journalist Peter Schweizer, who is co-founder and president of Steve Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit funded by right-wing mega-donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer. After President Trump repeatedly expressed his anger and frustration that the FBI was not “going after Hillary Clinton,” it was announced just this month that the Little Rock office has re-opened the case. The recently exhumed Uranium One “scandal” sprang from the same partisan poison pen.

This Republican practice goes way back. The Whitewater scandal was a product of a coordinated partisan campaign called “the Arkansas Project,” financed by a right-wing millionaire named Richard Scaife. The Department of Justice, the FBI and the independent prosecutors of that era chased their tails for years running down all the “tips” they got from anti-Clinton sources, from the so-called “elves” who set up the Paula Jones case to the malevolent Lucianne Goldberg, who encouraged Linda Tripp to trap Monica Lewinsky into talking about her affair with Bill Clinton on tape.

The idea that right-wingers are “projecting” their own disorders onto others is probably overdone, but in this case it holds up. Republicans who claim that because the Steele dossier was (partially) paid for by Democrats it is therefore a completely unreliable partisan attack against the president are simply reflecting their own patterns and practices — which continue as we speak. It’s absurd for anyone to take their criticisms seriously. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be a deterrence to Devin Nunes and his lieutenants. They’ve got memos lined up from here to Election Day. Their boss will be so pleased.

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