Month: March 2018

Bolton’s North Korea agenda

by digby

If anyone thinks that there’s a good possibility that Trump might stumble into an agreement with North Korea to give up their nukes, think again. The united States has made it quite clear that such deals with the US aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. The fault is bipartisan.

But there are some people who have bragged about making fools of anyone who believes the US will hold up its end of the bargain:

[John Bolton] recently made news by appearing to support the idea of negotiations with North Korea, comparing it to the deal that the Bush Administration struck with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2003.

Don’t fall for it. The agreement with Libya, and how its relates to North Korea, is actually one of the least well-understood episodes in recent diplomacy. But it is important, because it demonstrates how Bolton plies his trade, and the danger he poses.

After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration faced a delicate situation: There were no weapons of mass destruction! Saddam had, in fact, abandoned his programs and the United States had invaded Iraq anyway. This looked, well, bad. How could Bush convince other world leaders, including North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, to give up their nuclear weapons aspirations if it looked like the U.S. would just turn around and topple them, just as it had Saddam?

Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, hit on an ingenuous solution. The United States had also struck a disarmament deal with Libya. Why not have Gaddafi vouch for Bush?

“North Korea will be surprised to see how much will be possible (if it abandons its nuclear programs),” she reportedly told the South Korean Foreign Minister in 2004. “I wish Kim Jong-Il would talk to Gaddafi.”

Rice likely presumed the message would leak, but just to be sure Bolton—at the time, an undersecretary of state—gave a speech emphasizing that “Kim Jong Il could follow the advice of Dr. Condoleezza Rice. She was serious when she expressed several days ago her hope that Kim Jong Il would talk to Colonel Gaddafi.” A few days later, Bolton was asked whether the U.S. would “arrange a meeting between Kim Jong-Il and Colonel Gaddafi” and Bolton agreed that “it would make for an interesting conversation.”

Of course, we know how that worked out. In 2011, Libyan opposition forces backed by U.S. airpower overthrew Gaddafi. It was, in fact, NATO aircraft that struck the Gaddafi convoy as it was attempting to flee Sirte, forcing Gaddafi out of his vehicle and into the hands of the rebels who brutally murdered him.

As Libya collapsed into civil war, the very same John Bolton, by then a television pundit, openly advocating killing Gaddafi. Asked how this squared with his support for the 2003 disarmament deal, Bolton was nonplussed.

“Nobody at the time thought it was a get-out-of-jail-free card in perpetuity,” he explained.

“It was fully exposed before the world that ‘Libya’s nuclear dismantlement,’ much touted by the U.S. in the past,” North Korea’s state media noted, “turned out to be a mode of aggression whereby the latter coaxed the former with such sweet words as ‘guarantee of security’ and ‘improvement of relations’ to disarm itself and then swallowed it up by force.”

States pursue nuclear weapons for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is that the bomb is, in fact, a get-out-of-jail-free card in perpetuity—or at last as close to one as there is. A lot has been made of the fact that Kim Jong Un reportedly told a visiting South Korean delegation that would consider denuclearization. It’s worth looking at precisely what Kim allegedly said:

“There is no reason for [North Korea] to possess nuclear weapons as long as military threats to the North are eliminated and the regime’s security is guaranteed.”

Kim is doing isn’t offering to give up his nuclear weapons, he’s explaining why he needs them.

If there is some kind of “agreement” it will be one of these faux deals that Trump is known for (much like the trade deals he’s currently negotiating.) Kim is not an idiot. He knows exactly what he would be getting into.

Bolton ultimately wants to show that Kim will not give up his nukes so that he can justify regime change. There are a number of ways he can make that happen.

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The dangling pardons

by digby

I wrote about the latest in the Russia probe for Salon this morning:

Until Wednesday it was a weirdly slow news week in this high-energy Trump era, with no more than a few desultory tweets from the president and almost no public appearances. The most obvious reason for Trump’s unwillingness to address the press was that the Stormy Daniels story had dominated the news cycle and he didn’t want to have to answer questions about that. Trump also got bad news this week on the emoluments lawsuit that alleges he’s improperly profiting from his Washington hotel as president. Or maybe he’s just come down after his manic run of the past couple of weeks.

On Tuesday, Trump’s silence took on a more ominous tone, however, when senators on both sides of the aisle sent letters to various members of the Justice Department, more or less begging them not to cooperate with any move to shut down Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. For no obviously discernible reason, Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Chris Coons, D-Del., authors of a bill introduced more than a year ago to protect Mueller, issued a joint statement urging Trump “to allow the Special Counsel to complete his work without impediment, which is in the best interest of the American people, the President, and our nation.” Later, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and the eight other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee released a letter to five DOJ officials asking them to commit to protecting Mueller.

Blumenthal went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show and explained:

Sen. Blumenthal is leading Senate Judiciary Committee members in calling on DOJ officials to not interfere in the Mueller probe.

“The reason I led this letter was my increasing alarm … that the President may attempt to fire Bob Mueller.” – @SenBlumenthal pic.twitter.com/S54I3vCvp7

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 28, 2018

Meanwhile, the reasoning behind the letters to the Justice Department was spelled out in this Slate article by Blumenthal and historian Rick Perlstein, looking to the Watergate precedent.

A couple of stories have broken over the last couple of days in the Russia investigation, and they may shed light on the “swirling” rumors in the capital. On Tuesday night, Mueller’s office filed a sentencing brief for Alex van der Zwaan, the London attorney who recently pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with former Trump campaign official Rick Gates and a person identified in the sentencing document as “Person A.” Person A appears to be Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of Gates and Paul Manafort who reportedly was once a Russian intelligence agent and is still suspected of some affiliation with the GRU, Russia’s spy service.

Mueller is arguing for jail time for van der Zwaan, who looked at first like a bit player in this saga, and apparently the Kilimnik connection was particularly important in making that recommendation. It’s not entirely clear why this should be so, and analysts spent the day speculating about the underlying narrative. Perhaps this is a warning to former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, who is currently under indictment, that the special counsel has this information connecting the campaign to Russian intelligence. Or perhaps the substance of the conversations between Gates, van der Zwaan and Kilimnik is relevant to the conspiracy case. The document makes it very clear that these conversations took place in 2016, which indicates they were related to the Trump campaign. Either way, this was a bombshell dropped into the middle of what should have been a routine sentencing recommendation document, and it sent some shock waves through D.C.

That was nothing compared to The New York Times report on Wednesday afternoon that Trump’s former attorney John Dowd had been discussing the possibility of presidential pardons with the lawyers for Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, during the period when they were being pressed to cooperate with Mueller.

The discussions came as the special counsel was building cases against both men, and they raise questions about whether the lawyer, John Dowd, who resigned last week, was offering pardons to influence their decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigation.

This happened at the same time as reports in the press suggested that Trump was grilling advisers about his pardon power, including his power to pardon himself. He even tweeted this:

While all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.FAKE NEWS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017

Dowd has denied that he dangled possible pardons before Flynn and Manafort, and it’s not clear whether the president was aware of such offers, if they were made. The Times reporters have emphasized that they felt sure of their sources on this story.

Would anyone be surprised if the president had authorized his lawyer to offer pardons to the two men if they refused to cooperate with the Mueller investigation? Whether it was because he’s trying to cover for his own misdeeds or simply feels that the situation is unfair to his friends, it’s right in line with Trump asking former FBI Director James Comey to let Flynn go and his complaints that the whole investigation is just a hoax and a witch hunt. It’s not as if he has ever ruled it out.

Q: Would you consider a pardon for Micahel Flynn?

President Trump: “I don’t want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet. We’ll see what happens.” pic.twitter.com/jSf9mtp50f

— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 15, 2017

Any discussions of a pardon with the attorneys for Manafort and Flynn were clearly an offer of a quid pro quo. Everyone knows the president has the power to pardon. There would be no need to mention it in advance of making a deal with the prosecutor, unless there was an expectation that they would not cooperate.

Manafort has not yet flipped on Trump, but both Flynn and Rick Gates have, indicating that Mueller successfully convinced them that was in their best interests, regardless of any presidential promises. (Would you trust Donald Trump to follow through on any bargain?) Dowd’s abrupt resignation as the president’s counsel has led to speculation by people like Neal Katyal, the former solicitor general under President Obama, who told Ari Melber on MSNBC that Dowd himself might be in some danger of being charged with obstruction of justice. It’s not as if the Mueller team is unwilling to target lawyers. They called Manafort’s attorney before the grand jury and are now demanding jail time for van der Zwaan.

Dowd gave an interview this week in which he said, “We had a terrific relationship with Mueller — the best that I can recall in my 50 years of practice. It was terrific, completely open, people trusted each other, and we had no misunderstandings.” That’s laying it on a little thick, but this is a man who spent the last year dealing with Donald Trump, so perhaps he’s forgotten that this sort of buttering-up doesn’t work with normal people.

Legal experts don’t agree about whether or not Trump can be held liable for obstruction of justice by offering to pardon people to keep them silent. The president’s pardon power is understood to be absolute. (Yes, he can probably pardon himself, although that’s never been tried.) So this is unlikely to be the basis of an indictment all on its own. But it certainly adds to the mountain of evidence that Donald Trump is desperate to thwart the investigation into Russian interference in the election and is prepared to do anything in his power to stop it. Once again, you have to ask why an innocent man would do such a thing.

Census question: How many guns in your house?
by Tom Sullivan

Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” album sleeve.

Imagine the tantrums and rent garments on the right if instead of asking about citizenship status, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross inserted a question on the 2020 census that asked how many guns people keep in their homes.

A plot, I tell you! Why, it will lead to tyranny! It will keep white males from answering, resulting in an undercount and their underrepresentation in Congress.

But adding a question that might result in browner-skinned neighbors not responding? No problem. A few NRA members might even utter the phrase in pseudo-Spanish.

The Trump administration has decided to weaponize the census, writes Vann R. Newkirk II at The Atlantic:

On Monday evening, the Commerce Department announced that it would make a controversial change to the next Census that the Trump administration has signaled for months: the addition of a question asking participants about their citizenship status. While citizenship is currently a field in a major interstitial supplemental survey to the Census, the last time it was asked to the entire United States population during the decennial main event was in 1950. But, during the current administration’s crusade against unauthorized immigration and a related campaign against the specter of voter fraud, the Department of Justice in December sent a letter to the Census Bureau asking for the question’s reinstatement, calling it “critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”

Uh-huh.

Paul Waldman pushed back on the move at The Week:

“If you’re a citizen, what do you have to worry about?” some might ask. Or even if you aren’t — after all, it isn’t like the Census is going to be arresting undocumented immigrants on the spot. But the truth is that it’s already difficult to get even legal immigrants in many communities to trust a Census-taker enough to fill out the form, even without that question. “I worked the Census in 2000,” said Salon‘s Amanda Marcotte on Twitter. “Getting immigrants to talk was really hard as it was. I had to assure them up front that I was not interested in citizenship status. This is a deliberate attempt to terrify and erase people.”

That’s even more true in the current environment, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has, it is no exaggeration to say, been terrorizing immigrant communities around the country. The agency has a newly aggressive spirit under President Trump, who came into office promising to build a wall, cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and round up supposed criminal aliens. The result is that even legal immigrants are already reluctant to talk to someone from the government taking down their information; start asking about citizenship status, and they’ll be even more afraid.

Which is why if terrifying and erasing people is a policy goal, make it ecumenical. Ask residents how many guns they have. If for no other reason than seeing if NRA spokesweapon Dana Loesch’s outrage amp goes up to eleven.

You’ve got to give the GOP points for creativity if not for ruthlessness and duplicity. Republicans have deployed every means of retaining power they can think of short of poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress the votes of those they dislike: gerrymandering, photo ID laws, citizenship requirements, curtailing voting hours, siting early voting locations in some neighborhoods and not others, eliminating Sunday voting, shorting voting machines in certain precincts, etc. Now the census.

Cheaters have their avatar in the White House. The Seven Deadly Sins walks on two legs.

E.J. Dionne calls out the cheating in the Washington Post, arguing that “when elected officials use their power to make it ever harder for their opponents to win elections — exactly what’s happening with the census and gerrymandering — the courts have an obligation to serve as democracy’s last line of defense.”

Except the GOP is working feverishly on rigging those as well. In North Carolina. In Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin.

I hate to disagree with Dionne, but the last line of defense for democracy is not the courts. It’s you.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail. (If you are already on my email list, check your in-box.)

Hoping Mueller’s Made Contingency Plans 

by tristero

Rumors are abounding that Mueller is about to get sacked.  As someone who remembers quite well Nixon’s infamous Saturday Night Massacre , I certainly hope that isn’t the case. It was a time of genuine political unrest at the highest level and it was far from certain that Nixon would fall.

Mr Mueller, if you have not considered seriously how to ensure that your investigation’s research will not deep-sixed, dispersed or destroyed… well then, Bob, may I suggest you do so – like right now, like today?

They actually have the chutzpah to talk about a balanced budget amendment


by digby

Nothing, nothing, will ever change this insane, hypocritical narrative.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS will take up a balanced-budget amendment when they return from recess, several sources tell us. This follows on the heels of their $1.3-trillion budget bill and their massive tax bill.  

WHY DO THIS NOW? Here’s what we think: It’s almost election season, and it would be helpful if GOP lawmakers could go home and be able to say they voted to support balancing the federal budget, even though they voted to boost discretionary spending by a ton, and have not touched entitlement spending, which, they have said for years, is the driver of U.S. budget deficits.

I’ll let Martin Longman at Washington Monthly speak for me:

It’s only one little paragraph but it contains enough effrontery to make me see red. And I think it’s unique in the sense that it should make everyone spitting mad no matter where their beliefs lie on the ideological spectrum. Anyone with even a modicum of policy chops knows that the balanced budget amendment is the dumbest idea ever devised. It would take one of America’s greatest advantages, that we have great credit and can borrow almost unlimited amounts of money because we print our own money and always have customers for our bonds, and make it illegal for Congress to utilize it in times of economic peril. If we could not use debt to stimulate a down economy, we’d be as vulnerable as Greece or Argentina to downward spirals, and considering the importance of our economy to the world economy, this would be a very dangerous development for everyone.

But it’s true that deficit spending comes with problems. The most consequential of them is that money spent financing the interest on debt is money that cannot be spent on real things like Social Security checks, college loans, nutrition assistance, research and development, or even ill-advised wars in Asia. This is why giving out an enormous tax cut to the wealthy doesn’t trickle down the way it is supposed to. Half the point of these tax cuts is to deny the federal government money to spend on programs that people like and find useful, or, in the words of Grover Norquist, to shrink the government down to a size small enough that it can be drowned in a bathtub. Partly this is done by taking in less revenue to begin with, and partly this is done my making us spend an ever-increasing percentage of our revenues on interest payments. If you go into debt to stabilize a cratering global economy, you are saving people from losing their businesses or their jobs and perhaps helping to ensure domestic tranquility and keep the peace between nations. If you go into debt for no particular reason at all other than to enrich your donors, you’re weakening the nation and hurting the vast majority of its people.

Still, if you’ve bought into the idea that the government should be smaller and that deficit spending is always a bad thing, then you should be outraged to see the Republicans in Congress completely disregard all their deficit hawkery with their tax cut and their huge appropriations omnibus bill, and then turn around and pretend that they’re really concerned about deficits. And it’s even worse than it seems.

Read on for just how much worse.

I will just note that the writers at Politico also leave the idea that “entitlements” are the “drivers” of the debt on the table. This is the perfect time to challenge that since the GOP has just cut taxes on rich people to the bone which means that the “driver” of the debt is actually the fact that deadbeat rich people refuse to pay their share of the expenses. 

This may be the worst case of “I know you are but what am I” that we’ve seen yet. And I have yet to see a response from Democrats that adequately exposes it for the fatuous hypocrisy it is.

*And yes, I understand that MMT does say that interest on the debt is as irrelevant as debt itself but the politics of this are very difficult to overcome and I wouldn’t expect that to happen any time soon.

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QOTD: a xenophobic wingnut

Politics and Reality radio: Joan Walsh: Dems Are Finally Fighting for State Houses; Affirmative Action for Reactionaries; Antifa Has Nazis on the Run


with Joshua Holland

We kick off this week’s show with Joan Walsh, national correspondent for The Nation and contributor to CNN, to talk about how, after years of neglect, progressive groups and the Democratic Party are finally contesting state legislative races across the country.

Then we’ll be joined by David Klion, a Brooklyn-based writer, to discuss The Atlantic’s decision to hire Kevin Williamson — a right-wing provocateur of questionable talent –in order to bring “ideological diversity” to the prominent magazine’s lineup of opinion writers. Williamson is the latest anti-Trump conservative to get a prominent platform in the supposedly liberal media despite a history of some highly offensive rhetoric.

Finally, we’ll speak with Dartmouth historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, about what the media miss in their coverage of the movement.

Trump’s personal crusade against the media

by digby

He’s figured out that he might be able to use anti-trust laws to destroy his enemies in the press:

Capitol Hill wants Facebook’s blood, but President Trump isn’t interested. Instead, the tech behemoth Trump wants to go after is Amazon, according to five sources who’ve discussed it with him. “He’s obsessed with Amazon,” a source said. “Obsessed.”

What we’re hearing: Trump has talked about changing Amazon’s tax treatment because he’s worried about mom-and-pop retailers being put out of business.

A source who’s spoken to POTUS: “He’s wondered aloud if there may be any way to go after Amazon with antitrust or competition law.” 

Trump’s deep-seated antipathy toward Amazon surfaces when discussing tax policy and antitrust cases. The president would love to clip CEO Jeff Bezos’ wings. But he doesn’t have a plan to make that happen.

Behind the president’s thinking: Trump’s wealthy friends tell him Amazon is destroying their businesses. His real estate buddies tell him — and he agrees — that Amazon is killing shopping malls and brick-and-mortar retailers.

Trump tells people Amazon has gotten a free ride from taxpayers and cushy treatment from the U.S. Postal Service.

“The whole post office thing, that’s very much a perception he has,” another source said. “It’s been explained to him in multiple meetings that his perception is inaccurate and that the post office actually makes a ton of money from Amazon.”

Axios’ Ina Fried notes: The Postal Service actually added delivery on Sunday in some cities because Amazon made it worthwhile. 

Trump also pays close attention to the Amazon founder’s ownership of The Washington Post, which the president views as Bezos’ political weapon.

Trump never talks about Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook: 

He isn’t tuned in to the debate over how they handle people’s data, and thinks the Russia story is a hoax, sources say.

Axios’ Kim Hart points out: “Trump told Axios last year he doesn’t mind Facebook because it helps him reach his audience. He’s an old-school businessman who sees the world in terms of tangible assets: real estate, physical mail delivery, Main Street, grocery stores. It reminds me of the story Jim wrote a while back about Trump’s fixation with 1950s life. Amazon takes direct aim at some of the core components of mid-century business.”

I’m all for breaking up these big behemoths but you’ll notice that Trump only focuses on those like Time-Warner and Amazon which have press outlets that don’t toe his line. And I’m sorry, I don’t believe for a minute that Trump is hearing from his “friends in business” that Amazon is destroying the American way of life. The shopping malls are hurting for sure and the mom and pop local businesses have been destroyed by the big box stores like Walmart and the online businesses like Amazon for years. But these people all know that there will be no going back even if Amazon and Walmart are completely destroyed.

Let’s not kid ourselves, he’s just hit on this argument in order to use the power of the government to silence his critics.

Amazon took a huge hit to its stock price today so Trump got some satisfaction … Maybe he figures that Bezos will tell the Washington Post to back off now.

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Russians, Russians everywhere…

by digby

We worked on two presidential campaigns at high levels and there weren’t any Russians around. I don’t think there were Russians around the Obama campaign or the Kerry campaign either. This campaign had Russians all over the place! – Republican strategist Steve Schmidt  8/4/2017

And here’s another one:

In a Tuesday night court filing, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office revealed that it has linked a Trump campaign official who is cooperating with the special counsel’s investigation to a person who “has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.”

According to Mueller’s office, Rick Gates — a longtime associate of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort — was “directly communicating” with a “Person A” who Gates identified to associates as “a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU.” Those contacts occurred “in September and October 2016” and are “pertinent to the investigation.”

A GRU agent is believed to be responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee emails that were published by WikiLeaks. According to a recent Daily Beast report, Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for supply WikiLeaks with the emails, “was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU)… an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.” In its declassified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Director of National Intelligence assessed “with high confidence” that the GRU “used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.” Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone exchanged Twitter direct messages with Guccifer 2.0 during the 2016 campaign.

During the same months Gates with allegedly in touch with the former GRU officer, Trump was exploiting the stolen emails on the campaign trail. The future president mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times during the month of October 2016 alone — but then preposterously claimed after the election that WikiLeaks had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”That

This might be part of why they are so worried about Gates:

Though it is a virtual given that Gates will sell out his business partner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, less understood is the direct threat Gates could pose to President Donald Trump.

That’s the conclusion of several lawyers involved in the Russia case and more than 15 current and former Trump aides and associates interviewed by POLITICO to determine how much danger Gates’ guilty plea could pose to the president and his inner circle, and how alarmed they might be by his testimony.

While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower.

“He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said Gates’ plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.

Manafort may have struck a larger public profile, but Gates spent more time in Trump’s orbit. Manafort left the Trump campaign under a cloud of scandal in mid-August 2016. Gates, his right-hand man, stayed on through the election before assisting the Trump inauguration and Trump’s early presidency.

Worst of all for the White House, Gates lacks hard-wired loyalty. He is not family, like Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nor is he among true Trump believers like Corey Lewandowski and Brad Parscale.
[…]
Trump aides and associates understand that Mueller is sure to ask Gates not just about Manafort but also about his interactions with Trump, his family members and his 2016 campaign team.

“They’ve been very concerned about it,” said the defense attorney. “It’s something they’re worried about.”

Yeah, I’ll bet.

Check this out from the Daily Beast about Carter Page, China and Russia’s state owned oil company.

Then take a walk and meditate for a few minutes. This is cray-cray.

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Mitt the hardcore wingnut