Month: February 2018

Hobgoblins everywhere
by digby

Michelle Goldberg makes an important point in her New York Times column today. She notes that this latest bad faith attack on the FBI and the DOJ is just the latest in a long line of self-serving, right wing assaults on American norms, rules and institutions.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American right set about undermining trust in the mainstream media, which it saw as dangerously infected with liberal assumptions. Later, in debates over evolution and the environment, some on the right attacked the validity of modern science. By the turn of the millennium, it was an article of faith among conservative ideologues that whole realms of human expertise were in fact intricate structures of propaganda that trapped the unwary in a matrix of deceit. 

In an invaluable 2017 Vox essay titled “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology,” David Roberts quoted a 2009 Rush Limbaugh rant: “Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It’s all lies!” With Trump, this ethos reached the White House. And now, to protect Trump, the right has expanded its war on empiricism to that most conservative of institutions, the F.B.I. 

That’s the best way to understand the farce surrounding the infamous classified memo written by aides to Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which Trump reportedly believes will help discredit the Russia investigation. The events involved in the creation of this memo, and the multifront political battle over efforts to make it public, are so absurd and convoluted that they’re difficult to summarize, and in some ways that’s the point.
In their attempts to undermine the Russia probe, Republicans aren’t presenting a coherent theory — even a coherent conspiracy theory. They’re just sowing confusion and distrust toward the nation’s premier law enforcement agency in order to protect the president. In December, conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that, under the influence of the “poisonous” liberal establishment, the once-proud F.B.I. had become “just another suppurating bureaucratic pustule.” That’s exactly how Nunes is treating it. 

She goes on to outline the “memo” scandal and the alleged concern these Republicans now purport to have about transparency with respect to none other than Carter Page, a man actually named by convicted spies as someone they were trying to recruit. She concludes:

If and when it’s released, the Nunes memo will probably only vindicate Trump among people who already share right-wing assumptions. But it will put the F.B.I. in a difficult position, since to defend itself against accusations that it relied solely on Steele’s findings to get a warrant on Page, it would have to release additional classified evidence. (CBS News reported on Thursday that, if the memo is released, the F.B.I. is prepared to issue a rebuttal.) 

To some commentators, it is ironic that liberals are now defending the F.B.I., long a left-wing bête noire. But liberals recognized the dangers of the campaign to broadly discredit the mainstream media even though they had their own passionate criticisms of it. The right’s war on the F.B.I. is a sign of how far some are willing to go to subvert any checks on Trump’s power to create his own reality. 

This is important. I’m far less concerned about “Russia” than I am about what these Republicans, led by Trump, are doing to our government, our culture and our society. There is a reason that Russians are backing the GOP to the hilt and understand that the way to “sow discord” is to target Republican voters with misinformation. They are primed for it.

This is a long term problem. The Russia thing is just a symptom of a much deeper rot in the Republican party and with the emergence of an energized white nationalism welcomed into its midst and the election of this cretin it’s now reached the point of existential threat.

Anyone who reads my writing knows that I’m not a big flag waver. I’m not a defender of the FBI or the Intelligence services and I am a harsh critic of the mainstream corporate media. But as Goldberg points out, it is possible to hold two ideas in your head at the same time — you can be a critic of all those things and understand that the assault on them from the right is even more dangerous. Their handwringing over “transparency” is clearly being done in bad faith. Beyond bad faith.

The Republican Party had been degrading our political process for at least 25 years. Today,  led by the man in the White House and his henchmen in the congress they are in the process of destroying any institution that has the capacity to stop them. You don’t have to be an FBI apologist to see that. You just have to open your eyes.

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I wonder about this in my Salon column today:

As I write this, reports have it that Rep. Devin Nunes’ legendary “memo” will be released today, perhaps not by the White House but rather by the Congress, as Trump plays Pontius Pilate and pretends to wash his hands of the matter after giving the go-ahead. The White House now fears the memo will be “a dud,” according to Jonathan Swan at Axios, and CNN has reported that officials there are now worried that FBI Director Christopher Wray may resign over its release. The good news is that the tedious saga of Memogate is about to be over one way or the other. You may be reading it over your coffee right this minute. I hope so. It is my fondest wish to never to have to talk about it again.

This does not mean that the Russia investigation is slowing down. In fact, some people are whispering that the dramatic rending of garments over the memo is actually in service of sweeping something more significant under the rug. I don’t subscribe to the “distraction” theory, under which the cunning Donald Trump acts like a clown so that we don’t notice the “real story” happening under the radar. He’s not that good. But one Russia story broke this week that probably didn’t get the attention it normally would have, thanks to all the hoopla over the memo. Considering the players involved, I would guess that’s not an accident.

The prey bite back
by Tom Sullivan

After November 2016, Democratic centrists urged the party to abandon “identity politics.” Mark Lilla suggested a conservative politics that rejects the existence of a common good is not best countered by one that “fetishizes our individual and group attachments.”

He may have a point up to a point. But either/or arguments always raise red flags for me. The counterargument from centrists here is a rejection of competing stances that throw babies out with the bathwater.

A discussion Rebecca Traister hosts for New York magazine looks instead for synthesis. Felicia Wong, the head of the Roosevelt Institute in New York, plus Institute fellows Dorian Warren and Andrea Flynn, three of the authors of Rewrite the Racial Rules: Building an Inclusive American Economy, addressed how economic fixes fail to address unwritten rule sets that perpetuate inequality.

Wong tells Traister, “Democrats need to figure out how to combine issues linked to gender, race, and immigration — identity politics — into a more coherent economic framework that reduces the sense that one group wins at another group’s expense.”

The three suggest that the populist push to increase working people’s paychecks may boost their incomes while still leaving them unable to build wealth. The barriers to home ownership Ta-Nehisi Coates addressed in his reparations piece for Atlantic touched on some of that. But the Roosevelt fellows find:

… in order to understand racial and economic inequality in America today, we must look below the surface and understand the web of rules and institutions that lead to unequal outcomes. While those unequal outcomes are very clear to the vast majority of Americans, many still believe they are the result of personal ambition and individual choices, and that the solution is for individuals to take more “personal responsibility.” This belief is incorrect, and a rules-based analysis will illuminate how and why: Our rules and institutions are rarely colorblind, and even when policymakers intend on race-neutral results, policies are refracted through historical institutions, current rules, and societal norms, resulting in disparate impacts on black and white Americans. 

A surprising example both of how those rules privilege one group over another and how economic policy and identity issues intersect is in the collapse of anti-trust enforcement. Felicia Wong explains (emphasis mine):

FW: Anti-trust is a super-hot topic these days, but also seems abstract and technocratic. But across almost every piece of the economy — the health sector, the banking sector, the airline industry — you’ve seen more and more corporate concentration. In every sector of the economy you’re seeing fewer and fewer companies as incumbents. And they are squeezing out new businesses and squeezing out the growth of innovation at medium-sized businesses. So there is a kind of sclerosis of the economy at the top and fewer and fewer corporate structures controlling more and more. Why is this important to our race lens? Because you see fewer black and brown Americans and women in ownership and executive positions; they just don’t have the opportunity because there are fewer corporate strongholds. Look at the Fortune 500 list; it really is white men, almost exclusively. If you’re gonna be all-American about the importance of healthy capitalism, it is not healthy to see this kind of corporate concentration at the top.

This is also a rules story, because the reason you see so much corporate concentration is because you saw a relaxation of all of the merger rules starting in about 1980, starting with the Bork Doctrine, which said all you should really look at when you judge whether a company should be allowed to either merge or grow bigger is whether there is a price effect on the consumer. What was ignored was what that merger would do to wages, to the structure of the whole market, and whether new businesses would be able to start. It’s a very narrow consumer-focused lens that ostensibly is supposed to be better for the consumer and a new liberal mind-set, but has all these other ancillary effects, including race effects for workers and even executives. If people aren’t owning grocery chains and insurance chains and midsize businesses, they aren’t growing wealth; they become task acceptors, not task definers, in a way that is going to keep them trapped in low-wage work.

This view shifts the left-populist conversation from “corporate oligarchs are bad” to why corporate oligarchs are bad for your American Dream. It is a message that blends class analysis with race analysis in a way that joins the economic interests of the Democrats’ diverse, urban base to those of voters in paler areas of the country where they once drew more support. Their fates are linked.

From the introduction to the report:

As noted, many progressives consider economic policy alone to be a sufficient remedy for these issues. But for black Americans, higher incomes or more education do not remove the threat of injustice. Indeed, the continued shooting of unarmed black Americans underscores the limits of economic policy in addressing systemic racism. A progressive economic agenda that seeks to raise the minimum wage, for example, will benefit black Americans, but it will not change the fact that a dollar of income in black hands buys less safety, less health, less wealth, and less education than a dollar in white hands. Nor will it address the underlying structures of racial exclusion and discrimination that cause black Americans to be overrepresented among unemployed and low-wage workers and underrepresented in the middle class, let alone the 1 percent.

One solution, the Roosevelt team agrees, is changing who writes the rules. Rules reflect the sensibilities and interests of those who draft them. Dorian Warren explains:

I believe social movements matter more than representation. I believe that social movements then lead to representation. One could argue that the big changes in this country have always been some result of social movements taking hold of the political system and either reforming it or seizing it or capturing it.

Which is why Traister leads by observing that our tradition of electing “a certain kind of person — the white male kind” leads to rule sets that reflect their interests to the exclusion of others’. With unprecedented numbers of women running for office in 2018, we are in a moment in which a seismic shift in power could begin to rewrite them. “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu,” as Sen. Elizabeth Warren likes to say.

This year perhaps, the prey bite back.

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

“We’re history’s actors” 

by tristero

As I write this, the Nunes memo is likely to be made public and possibly already is by the time this gets published. To point out that the memo is one of the most outrageous attempts to manipulate the opinions of the American public since the drunken heyday of Joseph McCarthy is to understate Nunes’ cynicism – and the the opportunism of his colleagues.

I was reminded of two things. The first is this quote from Ron Susskind, quoting a W. Bush official (likely Karl Rove):

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.

Many of us laughed at the arrogance and sheer stupidity of this remark. We dismissed the notion that reality can be constructed exclusively by American power as naive at best, insane at worst.

Now, we’re about to learn how naive and crazy we are. Because unless we are very lucky – that is, unless the memo is so incredibly incompetent that no one including Trump partisans take it seriously – it is likely that the Republicans will fully create their own reality once this is released. It will be a bizarro world, one where the integrity of patriots becomes treason and where those who sold out their country to a Russian thug and lied shamelessly about it are treated as if they are paragons of decency.

But little will it matter. We’ve lost the moment the discourse becomes, “the memo is correct in reporting [whatever].” Nobody cares about the “but” that follows. If the memo is framed as partially correct, we’re just arguing on Trump’s turf – and he’s won.

I was also reminded of Borges’ amazing short story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. I won’t spoil it for you (the link’s to a pdf; enjoy!) other than to say it’s about the discovery and adoption of alternative facts as a preferred reality.

Yes, reality sucks sometimes and we all would love things to look and go our way. But as sucky as reality has gotten, it’s nothing compared to what it will be like when the Republicans’ attempt to construct an alternative reality crashes and burns.

And it surely will.

Adding… For those of us in the reality-based community, some sobering facts that further impact our ability to keep America reality-based:

 Only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed by an independent polling firm for the study identified slavery as the primary reason for the Civil War. Almost half identified tax protests as the main cause. 

Think about that for a moment. Half of all high school seniors think the South was protesting taxes. Think about the implications for discussions of taxes and racism today.

My god.

Joan Walsh FTWby digby

There may be Trump supporters who can make an honest argument on behalf of the president. Former Trump adviser Steve Cortes isn’t one of them. In this Erin Burnett segment on CNN she and Joan Walsh take him downtown on the issue of purported bias of FBI agent Peter Strzok.

From Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

Burnett: “Here’s what Republicans have said about what Peter Strzok personal text messages meant about his professional behavior.

” ‘I believe that Mr. Strzok was a political hack.'”

“‘That is a level of bias that is stunning among law enforcement officers.'”

“‘This is not a distraction. Again, this is bias, potential corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.'”

“‘Individual part of that process has already been shown to be extremely biased against the president. and was involved in what seems to be some very inappropriate behavior.'”

“Certainly that narrative changes a bit tonight. Doesn’t it, Steve?” Burnett said, referring to the breaking news that Strzok wrote the memo urging the re-opening of the Clinton email investigation.

“You know, Erin, maybe a bit. But doesn’t mean it changes entirely. Look, somebody can be biased but it doesn’t mean they are utterly evil,” the disingenuous flack said.

“He can at times do the right thing. By the way, before we canonize him for this decision, FBI learned that Anthony Weiner, an absolute creep, a child sex predator, someone who is now in prison and belongs there, had highly classified information on his laptop. For Peter Strzok to know that and to then ignore that and not say this is worth investigating, how did Hillary’s emails end up on that laptop?”

“But he did saying we should reopen the investigation, he did say it was worthy,” Burnett said.

“For him to ignore that would be criminal, certainly evil. So let’s not laud him. Let’s not canonize him because we have to look at this,” he said.

“There was no classified information. it was not classified. and they were duplicates of emails that the FBI had already seen,” Walsh said. “It was stuff that Huma stupidly transferred to home computer.”

Watch as she methodically dismantles the rest of his arguments.

He really is the worst. He speaks gibberish with a smile. But it IS gibberish.

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He’s not even trying to hide itby digby

At the GOP retreat today Paul Ryan said this about The Memo:

“What this is not is an indictment of the FBI, Department of Justice. It does not impugn the Mueller investigation”

Somebody forgot to tell Trumpie:

President Donald Trump continues to tell his associates he believes the highly controversial Republican memo alleging the FBI abused its surveillance tools could help discredit the Russia investigation, multiple sources familiar with White House discussions said. 

In recent phone calls, Trump has told friends he believes the memo would expose bias within the agency’s top ranks and make it easier for him to argue the Russia investigations are prejudiced against him, according to two sources.

As the debate rages about whether the GOP memo is inaccurate and misleading — and whether it’s appropriate to reveal such classified intelligence at all — Trump appears to be more preoccupied with the political calculus. He views the memo as proof the intelligence community was unfairly targeting him and fodder for his ultimate goal of bringing an end to the Russia investigation that he has dubbed a “witch hunt,” sources said.

Trump himself has reviewed and read the memo, as well as discussing it with chief of staff John Kelly and the White House counsel’s office, a White House official told CNN. 

The White House said this has nothing to do with Russia at all and is just part of the president’s commitment to transparency. Also, they have nothing to do with it, it’s all on Nunes. They claim this is a legislative matter which they really don’t have anything to do with.

Meanwhile:

The President continues to seethe over the Justice Department’s handling of nearly everything Russia-related, sources said. Recently, much of that anger has been directed toward his Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees Mueller and the Russia investigation.

But on Wednesday Trump was also upset in the wake of the FBI’s statement challenging the release of the controversial memo crafted by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes, a Trump ally.

The FBI’s harshly worded statement was a rare public rebuke, all the more stinging now that the bureau is led by Director Chris Wray, who Trump handpicked after he fired James Comey last May […]

People familiar with the President’s thinking say the fate of Rosenstein remains in question amid the expected release of the Nunes memo.

One person suggested if Rosenstein merely submitted an application to renew a FISA warrant (one granted under previous leadership and based, in part, on information from the infamous Steele dossier) that probably wouldn’t be a damning enough revelation for Trump to move to fire Rosenstein.

But another person said Trump is so frustrated with the Russia investigation and, in turn, Rosenstein that he may look for any opportunity to build a case for Rosenstein’s firing. He could argue that Rosenstein failed to scrutinize the information initially used to request the warrant and therefore didn’t do his due diligence. These discussions are ongoing within the White House, one of the sources said[…]

Republicans, especially those closely aligned with Trump in the House, have argued the memo must be released because it details abuse of power by law enforcement officials. But Democrats have said that memo is nothing more than an attempt by Nunes — who was a member of the executive committee leading Trump presidential transition team — and other Republicans to undercut special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

If this happens, it appears the FBI will fight back:

FBI director Christopher Wray is prepared to issue a rebuttal if the White House releases Rep. Devin Nunes’s classified memo alleging inappropriate surveillance of the Trump campaign by the FBI and Justice Department, according to CBS News senior national security analyst Fran Townsend. The FBI issued a statement Wednesday that they have “grave concerns” about the memo and the “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

I’m going to guess if this happens Trump will explode. He expects Wray to be his loyal henchman. Look what he did to Jeff Sessions simply for recusing himself. Imagine how he’ll react to someone openly questioning him.

The White House now says that they will give the memo back to the congress tomorrow and tell them the president has “no objection” to releasing it. They say it will not be redacted.

This is being done in order that the WH can pretend they had nothing to do with it. Nobody who is sentient believes that. Which means that millions of his followers and all of his GOP henchmen do.

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Yes, that kooky Carter Page has been on the radar for yearsby digby

I don’t usually do this because it’s just whining, but that headline is annoying since some of us have been pointing this out for a very long time. Why is this only now getting headlines as if these organizations just discovered it?
Anyway, here’s the story on Carter Page from the New York Times last April. The idea that the FBI and Rosenstein needed to depend on the Steele dossier to get a warrant on this guy is patently absurd:

Russian intelligence operatives tried in 2013 to recruit an American businessman and eventual foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who is now part of the F.B.I. investigation into Russia’s interference into the American election, according to federal court documents and a statement issued by the businessman.

The businessman, Carter Page, met with one of three Russians who were eventually charged with being undeclared officers with Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the S.V.R. The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Page in 2013 as part of an investigation into the spy ring, but decided that he had not known the man was a spy, and the bureau never accused Mr. Page of wrongdoing.

The court documents say that Mr. Page, who founded an investment company in New York called Global Energy Capital, provided documents about the energy business to one of the Russians, Victor Podobnyy, thinking he was a businessman who could help with brokering deals in Russia.

In fact, Mr. Podobnyy was an S.V.R. officer posing as an attaché at the Russian mission to the United Nations.

Court documents do not identify Mr. Page, but the details in a statement he emailed to reporters on Tuesday match the individual described as “Male-1” in the court case. Mr. Page’s contact with the Russian spy was first reported on Monday by BuzzFeed News.

The disclosure is the latest to shed light on Mr. Page’s extensive contacts with Russian businessmen and government officials. A former Moscow-based investment banker for Merrill Lynch, Mr. Page joined the Trump campaign last year and traveled to Russia in July to deliver a speech to the New Economic School, a Moscow university.

The trip caught the attention of United States intelligence agencies. Later that month, the F.B.I. opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian attempts to influence the presidential election and whether any of Mr. Trump’s associates were involved in that effort. American businessmen who visit Russia, even those who are not advising a presidential campaign, are frequently targeted by Russian operatives trying to collect information about the United States.

Mr. Page has given few specifics about whom he met with on that trip. In an interview with The New York Times last month, he said he had met with “mostly scholars.”

According to the court documents filed in 2015, the F.B.I. secretly recorded Mr. Podobnyy and another Russian operative named Igor Sporyshev discussing efforts to recruit Mr. Page, who was then working in New York as a consultant.

To record their conversations, the F.B.I. inserted a listening device into binders that were passed to the Russian intelligence operatives during an energy conference, according to a former United States intelligence official. The Russians then took the binders into a secure room where they thought they could evade American intelligence eavesdropping attempts.

In a transcript of the conversation included in the court documents, Mr. Podobnyy tells his Russian colleague that Mr. Page frequently flies to Moscow and is interested in earning large sums of money. Mr. Page was apparently interested in striking a deal with Gazprom, the Russian state-run oil firm, according to the transcript. Mr. Podobnyy called Mr. Page an “idiot” but said he was enthusiastic.

Russian intelligence officers had been given the task of gathering information on potential United States sanctions against their country, according to the F.B.I., and the three men were focused on economic issues in particular. The third Russian spy, Evgeny Buryakov, posed as an employee of a Russian bank. Mr. Sporyshev worked as a trade representative of the Russian Federation in New York.

Mr. Podobnyy promised through his contacts with Russian trade officials to steer contracts to Mr. Page.

“I will feed him empty promises,” he was overheard saying, according to the transcript.

In June 2013, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Page, who said he had first met Mr. Podobnyy at an energy symposium in New York earlier that year. Mr. Page said that he had exchanged emails with Mr. Podobnyy about the energy business, that they had met in person once to talk about the energy industry, and that he had also given Mr. Podobnyy documents about the energy business.

In his emailed statement, Mr. Page said, “as I explained to federal authorities prior to the January 2015 filing of this case, I shared basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents with Podobnyy who then served as a junior attaché at the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.”

Mr. Page, who at the time was also teaching a course on energy and politics at New York University, said in his statement that he had given the Russian “nothing more than a few samples from the far more detailed lectures I was preparing at the time for the students.”

Though charged, Mr. Podobnyy and Mr. Sporyshev were protected by diplomatic immunity from arrest and prosecution while in the United States, but Mr. Buryakov, who was working under what is known as “non-official cover,” had entered the United States as a private citizen and did not have diplomatic immunity. Mr. Buryakov was arrested in 2015 and later pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. Last year, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

“Evgeny Buryakov, in the guise of being a legitimate banker, gathered intelligence as an agent of the Russian Federation in New York,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan at the time, said in a statement after Mr. Buryakov’s sentencing.

So then Carter Page turns up in a presidential campaign and travels back and forth to Russia while he’s serving in it. And the campaign is weirdly crawling with with Russians all over the place.

Sure, maybe it’s nothing. All of this is total coincidence and there’s nothing to see. We will find out in due course. But these Republicans who want to pretend that Trump can fire Rosenstein for approving a FISA warrant on this guy because he didn’t have any evidence beyond the Steele dossier are testing how insanely stupid our country has become.

They may very well get away with it. Our country has, in fact, become insanely stupid.

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Poor Dean Heller, he tries so hardby digby

Via Jen Hayden at Daily Kos who captioned the above photo “I am Reek” which made me laugh out loud:
Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) is facing a a tough re-election fight in 2018. The one-time Trump foe eventually lowered his moral and ethical standards to line-up behind Trump in the name of tax breaks for his wealthiest constituents. After publicly swallowing his pride, Senator Heller lined up with his colleagues to greet Donald Trump after the State of the Union address and the snub was epic. Wicked. Vicious. Watch as Donald Trump warmly greets one co-conspirator after another and then delivers an arrow of embarrassment straight to the heart of Dean Heller:

Video of #Trump snubbing #DeanHeller at #SOTU … cue the curb your enthusiasm music? pic.twitter.com/5QFYCrMfIc— dan michalski (@danmichalski) January 31, 2018

This isn’t the first time Trump the alph-asshole has publicly put *Reek in his place:

Looks like he’s following through on his promise.

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*For those who don’t watch Game of Thrones, you can look it up.

How desperate is this memo?

Kiss of death: he’s boring too
by digby

Trump’s initial SOTU, the third longest in history, is now also the least watched address in nearly a quarter of a century.