Month: April 2018

From the man who invented truthiness

by digby

…. comes the best Comey interview ever:

When late-night host Stephen Colbert sat down with former FBI Director James Comey on “The Late Show” Tuesday night, he naturally asked Comey for one thing: devout loyalty.

Colbert’s joke was met with a long, blank stare from Comey, until the late-night host poured a glass of Pinot Noir into paper cups, a nod to what Comey drank on his private flight home after he was fired by President Donald Trump.

“I thought maybe we could recreate that happy moment for you right now,” Colbert said as he prepared the toast. “To the truth.”

It was the former FBI head’s first late-night appearance, and while he was there to promote his new tell-all, “A Higher Loyalty,” it wasn’t long before he began cracking some jokes of his own. Colbert asked him about the relentless insults Trump has hurled at him on Twitter and whether he had any rebuttal.

“In the last few days, he has called you ‘Slippery Jim,’ and he has called you a slimeball,” Colbert noted. “Anything to say back?”

“No. He’s tweeted at me probably 50 times. I’ve been gone for a year. I’m like a breakup he can’t get over,” Comey replied, as the crowd roared. “I’m out there living my best life. He wakes up in the morning and tweets at me.”

Becoming more serious, Comey explained the importance of not normalizing Trump’s infamous Twitter tirades.

“Does that mean we’ve become numb to this? It’s not OK for the president of the United States to say a private citizen should be in jail,” he said. “It’s not normal, it’s not acceptable, it’s not OK. But it’s happened so much, there’s a danger we’re now numb to it, and the norm has been destroyed. And I feel that norm destroying in my own shrug. So we can’t allow that to happen. We have to talk about it and call it out. It’s not OK.”

Over the course of the 30-minute interview, Comey offered some public assurances of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s job, and more importantly, the overall investigation Mueller’s leading into alleged Trump campaign ties to the Russian government.

“I think most likely it goes on. I think you would need to fire everyone in the Justice Department and the FBI to stop that investigation,” Comey said when asked what he thought would happen if Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were fired. “I could imagine U.S. attorney’s offices picking it up, FBI field offices picking it up. I think it would be very hard to shut that down by firing.”

Colbert also pressed Comey quite a bit on his decision to speak out about the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

“What was the consideration to sending a letter to Congress saying you were reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails after Anthony Weiner’s laptop was found to have 100,000 emails on it?” Colbert asked. “Again, the norm and the standard was that the FBI does not discuss anything having to do with a political campaign 60 days out from the election.”

But Comey shot down that so-called 60-day norm. “That’s not true — the 60-day thing, I don’t know where that comes from.”

He added, “You take no action, if you can avoid it, that might have an impact on any election.”

Colbert shot back, “Well, you had to imagine this would have an effect.”

The two went on to debate back and forth over Comey’s decision to speak out just 11 days before the election, but they eventually moved on, as Colbert wanted to address the salacious allegations in the Steele dossier.

“How did you tell him that there was a — and I want to put this delicately — pee-pee tape?” Colbert asked.

“I spoke about information, unverified, that related to an allegation that he was with prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow, and that the Russians had videotaped it,” Comey answered. “I didn’t go into the rest of it.”

“So you didn’t mention the salacious detail of the two prostitutes getting up on the bed that the Obamas had stayed in — because it was the presidential suite — and, you know, engaging in some water play?” Colbert asked.

Comey, consistent with his recent interview with ABC New on Sunday, confirmed he did not get too explicit and told Colbert that the president denied all of the allegations profusely.

However, Colbert couldn’t help but mention that he actually rented the room used by Trump when he traveled to Moscow last summer.

“Would you like to ask me anything about that room?” Colbert said to Comey.

Comey asked, “Is it big enough for a germaphobe to be at a safe distance from the activity?”

“The bedroom is very long,” Colbert quipped. “You’d definitely be out of what we call at Sea World, the splash zone.”

.

He didn’t mean what he said

by digby

Here is what he said:

There’s a lot of talk about intent these days. Here’s is a comment that perfectly illustrates Trump’s intent in firing Comey. He says it right out — no matter what Rosenstein said in his letter, Trump was going to fire him anyway because the Russia “thing” was unfair. I don’t think it gets any more explicit than that.

Also, he said this the next day to the Russian Ambassador and foreign minister in an unpublicized meeting in the oval office:

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off. I’m not under investigation.”

He lives in his own world, we know that. But this is downright delusional. He seriously think people will believe he fired Comey for being unfair to Hillary Clinton? Or maybe he wants us to believe that he fired Comey for failing to lock her up, which just proves he’s the fascist he pretends to be. But none of that is true, we know that because he said in his own words that he was thinking about Russia and wanted to fire him and then bragged to the Russians the next day that he’d gotten rid of the man who was investigating him, pretty much signaling to Vladimir Putin that the coast was clear!

.

Two cases of massive hubris facing off

by digby

I wrote about Donald and Jim for Salon this morning:

Donald Trump is spending the next few days at Mar-a-Lago (which he erroneously claimed on Tuesday was always meant to be the “summer White House,” except that Jimmy Carter was too cheap to keep it up). He’s officially there for a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but Trump’s staff reportedly gets nervous whenever he spends time at the Florida estate: He watches too much TV and gets too much input from outsiders who have no idea what they’re talking about. Right now, he’s apparently more agitated than they’ve ever seen him about the legal mess his consigliere Michael Cohen finds himself in.

Mike Allen at Axios quoted a source who told him:

The guys that know Trump best are the most worried. People are very, very worried. Because it’s Michael [effing] Cohen. Who knows what he’s done? People at the Trump Organization don’t even really know everything he does. It’s all side deals and off-the-books stuff. Trump doesn’t even fully know; he knows some but not everything. Cohen thinks he’s Ray Donovan [the Showtime series starring a fixer for Hollywood’s elite]. Did you see the photos of him sitting outside on the street with his buddies smoking cigars? Makes it look like a Brooklyn social club. I’ll tell you who’s worried. The principal.

By all accounts, Trump is more concerned about this than about the Russia investigation, although he reportedly sees it as an end run by Robert Mueller’s office to try to take him down by any means necessary. In the president’s mind it’s all connected — and now that the feds have all of Cohen’s records, even pardoning him wouldn’t solve the problem. They will know everything.

I’ve been writing here at Salon about Trump’s corruption and possible criminality ever since he burst on the scene in 2015, as have many other observers. There is a tremendous amount of evidence right out there on the record that he has been involved with known criminals like the Russian-born Felix Sater (a longtime friend of Michael Cohen) who has ties to the Mafia and was reportedly at various times a government informant. Trump’s casinos were cited for money laundering more often than any others in the country and were known to be frequented by members of the Russian mob. Many of his overseas ventures in places like Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Brazil are linked to criminal enterprises and were brokered or arranged with the help of his trusty fixer, Michael Cohen.

The question that must be asked is this: What would possess a man with such a shady track record in business to expose himself to the kind of scrutiny that comes with being president of the United States? Did he truly believe that third-rate operators like Michael Cohen could successfully cover his tracks?

Well, this is Trump we’re talking about, so yes, he probably did. He is a narcissistic fool. He is also defined by one of the greatest of all character flaws: hubris, which in classical Greek tragedy is when overconfidence leads the hero to overstep the boundaries of human limitations and assume a godlike status. The gods are not amused and put the hero in his place by reminding him of his mortality.

It’s somehow inevitable that as Trump draws near this denouement, he would be facing off against another person who has made some disastrous choices due to an overweening confidence in his own judgment. I’m speaking of former FBI director James Comey, who would undoubtedly be tremendously insulted to have his character compared to his nemesis Donald Trump. But the fact is that Comey too has exhibited tremendous hubris in the way he went about his job at the FBI and how he has tried to explain the momentous decisions that led to his own downfall.

Comey’s overconfidence doesn’t stem from simple narcissism, as Trump’s does. He is afflicted with a vain self-regard for his moral and intellectual superiority. On the interviews for his book tour he has explained that he alone understood the complexity of the political situation involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. So he took it upon himself to break the longstanding rules that governed such situations, in order to preserve the integrity of the Department of Justice and the legitimacy of Clinton’s imminent victory. The gods certainly got their revenge on him — and on all the rest of us — for that arrogant presumption.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted that Comey still has not admitted that he was influenced by the media cacophony about Clinton’s emails or that his judgment was flawed when he took it upon himself to ignore the normal rules against discussing closed cases or making any kind of politically charged moves in the days before an election.

He is as unbowed and unrepentant as Trump is, even now rendering his judgment that the constitutional remedy of impeachment would be wrong, without even knowing what the president might end up being charged with:

I think impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office would let the American people off the hook and have something happen indirectly that I believe they’re duty bound to do directly. People in this country need to stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values. And so impeachment, in a way, would short circuit that.

That’s a nice sentiment. But the president of the United States may very well be a criminal who has betrayed the country, and his term is not up for nearly three years. That situation is exactly what the remedy of impeachment is designed to address. One is sorely tempted to tell Saint James Comey to please stop helping.

Pitting a flamboyant conman against a moralistic lawman in a battle for American democracy sounds like a clichéd movie plot. But it turns out to be deeper and more complex than we might have assumed. In this tale, our hero and villain are both afflicted with the same character flaw and we really don’t know who is going to come out on top.

Scorch? Meet earth.
by Tom Sullivan

Scorched Earth. Credit: Tim Orr, U.S. Geological Survey. Public domain.

Premature talk of the “end stage” of the Trump administration has begun to circulate. Adam Davidson writes at The New Yorker, “This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth.” Money laundering, bank fraud and evidence of “rampant criminality” lie waiting to be uncovered in Michael Cohen’s files and elsewhere federal investigators now peek.

Davidson continues:

It has become commonplace to say that enough was known about Trump’s shady business before he was elected; his followers voted for him precisely because they liked that he was someone willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, and they also believe that all rich businesspeople have to do shady things from time to time. In this way of thinking, any new information about his corrupt past has no political salience. Those who hate Trump already think he’s a crook; those who love him don’t care.

The Republican caucus, however, can read the tea leaves. Legislators are stuffing their pockets with whatever they will hold before, as Gordon Lightfoot sang, “the skies of November turn gloomy.”

Politico reports they plan to use an unusual maneuver to sweep away a host of federal regulations:

As soon as Tuesday, GOP senators, backed by President Donald Trump, will use the Congressional Review Act to topple safeguards issued by the CFPB in 2013 that were intended to discourage discrimination in auto lending.

While Republicans in the Trump era have already taken advantage of the 1996 law to remove more than a dozen recently issued rules, this would be the first time that Congress will have used it to kill a regulatory policy that is several years old.

Now, actions going back to President Bill Clinton’s administration could be in play under the procedure GOP lawmakers are undertaking, forcing numerous agencies to reconsider how they roll out new regulations.

The maneuver requires leveraging provisions of the CRA that enables them to eliminate regulatory rules by a simple majority and avoid a filibuster. They plan to redefine what was previously regulatory guidance as regulatory rules under the Administrative Procedure Act, making them eligible for elimination via the CRA.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) leads the effort and considers it “potentially a big, big opening.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday, “Our whole economy is getting a tune-up. And now it’s time for the front end of the auto industry to come along for the ride.”

Toomey tells reporters:

“When regulators regulate by guidance rather than through the process they’re supposed to use, which is the Administrative Procedure Act and do a proper rulemaking, they shouldn’t be able to get away with that,” Toomey said. “If we can get a determination that the guidance rises to the significance of being a rule, then from that moment the clock starts on the CRA opportunity.”

Amit Narang, regulatory policy advocate at Public Citizen, said it “is really going to open up a Pandora’s box.” Public Citizen and 60 other advocacy groups covering the gamut of finance, the environment, labor and gay rights are calling on Congress to oppose the CFPB rollback, saying it would set a dangerous precedent.

They warned it would put at risk not only protections for workers, consumers, minorities and the environment, but also regulatory certainty for businesses.

Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal responded in a series of tweets:

This may end up being the most vicious hardball escalation and norm-breaking of Trump's first two years: retroactively declaring that guidances are suddenly rules. Then, since guidances aren't submitted to Register like rules, ripping them out via CRA. https://t.co/fkGaIwoJDW— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) April 17, 2018

If you told me 3 years ago they'd try this I wouldn't have believed it, nor would most disinterested regulatory observers. It's telling that conservatives, at the height of their power, are only capable of making change through ratfucking guidances, not putting forward a vision.— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) April 17, 2018

The notion that regulators in the 1990s forgot to submit a guidance for 25 years (they just didn't get around to it!) and nobody in any Republican Congress noticed until January 2017 (because they were busy too?) is so obviously bad faith courts shouldn't buy this hardball.— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) April 17, 2018

But then, Mitch McConnell should not have been able to stonewall Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, either.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guideline first onto the scaffold is one meant to discourage discriminatory “dealer markups” in auto lending. Writing for Vox, Emily Stewart elaborates:

Research shows high dealer markups often disproportionately affect nonwhite people — in other words, car dealers charge black and Latino buyers higher interest markups than they do white buyers. The CFPB tried to curtail this by introducing the guidance, a sort of notice of how to apply and interpret a law, in 2013.

The CFPB then targeted multiple dealers for discriminatory lending.

Consumer advocates and anti-discrimination groups have come out in fierce opposition to the loan discrimination guidance rollback. A group of 64 organizations, including the Consumer Federation of America, the NAACP, and United Steelworkers, signed on to a letter opposing the resolution, warning that it could set a “dangerous precedent” and that it “sends a message to the public that Congress is more interested in giving narrow handouts to special interests” than helping American workers and families.

“This is an attempt by auto lenders and auto dealers to prevent the CFPB from monitoring fair lending issues and enforcing them, and to tie the hands of future CFPBs on discrimination issues,” Debbie Goldstein, who heads the federal policy team at the Center for Responsible Lending, told me.

On Saturday, I mentioned a study from Mercatus, the free-market think tank. The research paper contradicts conservative conventional wisdom that regulations hold back the economy, not that Toomey et. al. have seen it. But as with proof of Trump Organization criminality, it will have no political salience. If their assumptions are proven wrong, they won’t care. What matters to the Republican caucus is control, and Republicans are headed for losing it. After the Trump administration meets its fate, maybe permanently.

So pending a hasty retreat, it’s time to loot, slash and burn.

Returning home about twelve or one
Thinking “Lord, what a deed I’ve done?”
I killed the girl I love, you see
Because she would not marry me
— “Banks of the Ohio,” traditional

If they can’t have America for their very own, no one else can.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Wingnut convergence

by digby

I think this is an interesting insight into how the right is converging into overt white nationalism:

Anti-abortion groups are distancing themselves from a prominent writer, activist and thought leader in the movement who has leaned into white nationalism since Donald Trump’s election.

Kristen Walker Hatten, former vice president of the anti-abortion group New Wave Feminists and a contributor to The Dallas Morning News, has spoken at universities and events around the country about the need for mainstream feminism to embrace women who oppose abortion rights. She has written articles for Live Action News, the organization behind the heavily edited “sting” videos that inspired Republicans in Congress to investigate Planned Parenthood, and gained media attention in early 2017 when New Wave Feminists was ousted from a partnership with the Women’s March.

Hatten wrote in late 2016 that she found Trump to be so “creepy, gross and tacky” and such a “repugnant chauvinist” during his campaign that she quit the internet for a while to avoid reading about him. But after he won, something changed. Hatten began sharing white supremacist content on social media. She self-identified on Twitter as alt-right and “ethnonationalist” ― the same term used by white nationalist icon Richard Spencer. She mused on Facebook that immigrant “invaders” are replacing white Europeans in their own countries, and shared a post imploring Trump to grant “asylum” to white South Africans.

“She basically pulled a complete 180 from anything we had ever seen,” said Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder and president of New Wave Feminists and a former close friend of Hatten.

Hatten told HuffPost in an email that she doesn’t consider herself to be a white supremacist or even a racist.

“I admit to being racist by today’s standards, but I also think almost everyone is racist by today’s standards,” she wrote. “Is it racist to live in a majority white neighborhood? Send your kids to majority white schools? When I was a kid ‘racism’ meant hatred for another race and/or acting on that hatred. Now you’re a racist if you touch a black person’s hair because you think it’s pretty.”

Hatten added that while she is proud to be white, she does not identify as a white nationalist or a white supremacist because she believes all races have a right to their own homelands.

“I do see that Europe and the US are becoming… well, not European,” she wrote. “This concerns me not because I hate anyone, but for the same reason Japan would be concerned if the Japanese were becoming a minority in Japan. No people should be excited to become a minority in their homeland. It is contrary to human nature. I wouldn’t expect it of any race and I don’t think it should be expected of whites.”
[…]
Today, white supremacists emboldened by Trump’s election are a lot more explicit about their political fellow-traveling. Neo-Nazis have been showing up at March for Life rallies around the country. A Rewire analysis found that the Family Research Council, a powerful evangelical anti-abortion group, is also deeply influential among white supremacists on social media.

I don’t personally find this to be surprising.  The factions of the right are all fundamentally authoritarian and in our culture that authoritarianism expresses itself most vividly in the ideology of white supremacy.

White supremacists are anti-abortion, for instance, because they believe that (white) women should be be forced to be child-bearing vessels to re-populate the white race. Anti-abortion zealots believe that women should be forced to be child bearing vessels to reinforce patriarchy. It all works together in one big mess of racism, misogyny and authoritarian impulse.  Here we see how our modern forms of communication bring all that together.

“They say, ‘He killed reporters.’ I said, ‘Really? He says he didn’t. “

by digby

Remember this?

I recall watching that one in real time and feeling the hair on the back of my neck go up. I knew that we weren’t supposed to take him seriously as a candidate but I always did and this sounded like something Mussolini would say. That kind of “joke” from a presidential candidate is designed to intimidate. I don’t think that worked particularly well but that man is now president of the United States and those kinds of comments and the authoritarian attitudes are chilling nonetheless. Who knows where this leads?

In Russia, this how it goes down:

A Russian investigative journalist who wrote about the deaths of mercenaries in Syria has died in hospital after falling from his fifth-floor flat.

Maxim Borodin was found badly injured by neighbours in Yekaterinburg and taken to hospital, where he later died.

Local officials said no suicide note was found but the incident was unlikely to be of a criminal nature.

However, a friend revealed Borodin had said his flat had been surrounded by security men a day earlier.

Vyacheslav Bashkov described Borodin as a “principled, honest journalist” and said Borodin had contacted him at five o’clock in the morning on 11 April saying there was “someone with a weapon on his balcony and people in camouflage and masks on the staircase landing”.

Borodin had been looking for a lawyer, he explained, although he later called him back saying he was wrong and that the security men had been taking part in some sort of exercise.

After he was found badly injured at the foot of the building on Thursday, regional authorities said the door of his flat had been locked from the inside, indicating that no-one else had either entered or left the flat.

The chief editor of Novy Den, where Borodin worked, said before he died that she could not rule out a crime, adding there was no reason for him to kill himself.

Harlem Désir of the international monitoring organisation OSCE said the death was “of serious concern” and called for a thorough investigation.

What did Borodin write?

In recent weeks, the journalist had written about Russian mercenaries known as the “Wagner Group” who were reportedly killed in Syria on 7 February in a confrontation with US forces.

Last week, the outgoing head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said that “a couple hundred” Russian mercenaries died in the clash in Deir al-Zour province. The mercenaries were apparently taking part in an attack by pro-Syrian government fighters on the headquarters of a US ally, the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Weeks later Russia admitted that several dozen Russian citizens had been either killed or wounded, but stressed they were not regular soldiers.

Last month, Borodin had written that three of those killed had come from the Sverdlovsk region in the Urals, in which Yekaterinburg is the main city. Two of the men were from the towns of Asbest and one from Kedrovoye, he said.

He had also investigated political scandals, including allegations made by a Belarusian escort known as Nastya Rybka in a video posted by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Maybe it’s all bs, I don’t know. We are always struggling to see the truth through a thick fog these days.

Trump hasn’t taken any action against the press. Maybe if he did there would be such an outcry that he’d be immediately removed from office. But his attitude is normal now. The distance between talking trash about the media and actually doing something to shit them up is shorter than it was before.

Keep in mind that other things, like firing DOJ officials for political reasons, ongoing thievery and incoherent foreign policy under a cloud of suspicion are more than just words. They’re actually happening.

.

Hannity and Trump’s legal threesome

by digby

When Hannity’s name surfaced yesterday I tweeted this:

I assume Deb Schlussel's phone is ringing off the hook?https://t.co/AVyhFnpHOD— digby (@digby56) April 16, 2018

That refers to a sexual harassment charge leveled by conservative commentator Deb Schlussel against Sean Hannity last year and then retracted. Obviously, it could be completely unrelated. But considering what Michael Cohen’s legal “specialty” is, it’s a fair question to ask.

Well apparently Hannity did seek legal help from other Trump associated lawyers in that matter:

On May 25, 2017, KFAQ, a radio station based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, received a cease-and-desist letter signed by two lawyers for Hannity: Victoria Toensing and Jay Alan Sekulow. Toensing’s signature sits above her name and that of her husband Joseph E. diGenova, the members of diGenova and Toensing LLP, who are identified as “Counsel for Sean Hannity,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Atlantic. Sekulow is also identified in the letter page as a “Counsel for Sean Hannity.”

Sekulow is now the only known personal attorney for President Trump working full-time on the response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry. Sekulow recently announced that diGenova and Toensing had been hired to join him, before reversing course. The letter to the radio station was sent before Sekulow joined Trump’s team.

The letter was sent in response to accusations against Hannity made by the controversial conservative activist Debbie Schlussel. During an appearance on the Pat Campbell show on KFAQ last April, Schlussel said Hannity had been “creepy” towards her and had invited her to his hotel room.

Hannity responded at the time by calling the allegations “100 percent false and a complete fabrication,” and said that he had hired lawyers to plan a response. “This letter provides notice that Ms. Schlussel’s statements are false and defamatory,” the letter read. “Continued publication will result in further exposure to liability because of continued harm to Mr. Hannity’s impeccable reputation.”

On Monday, Schlussel said she remembered that the radio station where she made the remarks had received a legal letter afterwards, but she didn’t know who the lawyer was. Reached by phone on Tuesday, Toensing acknowledged that “at that time” she was acting as Hannity’s lawyer but wouldn’t comment on whether she still represents him.

“I’ve just learned in the press that anybody who is Sean Hannity’s lawyer is going to be blasted so I think this phone call is over,” Toensing said. “I’m wondering what attorney-client privilege means to anybody. I don’t say who my clients are, sometimes I do, and many times, most of the time, I do not.”

Sekulow, diGenova, and Toensing have frequently appeared on Hannity’s program; diGenova appeared on the show as recently as Monday night. Asked for comment, Hannity sent a text consisting of NewsBusters and Daily Caller links to stories about ethical misconduct in the mainstream media and declined to offer further comment. “I don’t have time for these silly questions,” he said.
[…]
It’s already well-known that Hannity champions the president publicly and advises him privately, although the breadth of his relationships with attorneys linked to the president wasn’t known before this week. “I think he’s totally fine,” one Fox source who was not authorized to speak publicly said on Monday. “I take Sean at his word that nothing’s there” in the relationship with Cohen, a former Hannity employee who also spoke on the condition of anonymity said, adding that Hannity normally uses David Limbaugh as his lawyer and agent for “absolutely everything.”

“While Fox News was unaware of Sean Hannity’s informal relationship with Michael Cohen and was surprised by the announcement in court yesterday, we have reviewed the matter and spoken to Sean and he continues to have our full support,” the network said in a statement on Tuesday.

“I don’t want to get into it because I haven’t talked to Sean about whether he wants me to say anything publicly, as a lawyer I’d better not,” Limbaugh said, but added that he is “proud of my relationship with him.” Limbaugh said he had had nothing to do with anything related to the Schlussel matter.

Did he talk to Cohen about dealing with this or something else like it? Who knows? But apparently Hannity was concerned enough about this to have lawyers threaten a radio station.

By the way, he never mentioned that he’d hired these lawyers when he was interviewing them constantly on his show either.

“Would you kill for me?”

by digby

I haven’t seen this making the rounds but I find it quite astonishing. Barbara Res worked for the Trump Organization for years:

Avenatti & Stormy Daniels released a sketch on The View. Send tips IDthethug@gmail.com

Former Trump Organization EVP, Barbara Res, says she heard Trump ask security: “Would you kill for me?”

Res also confirms that mob-lite attorney Cohen threatened her
pic.twitter.com/HAbUHAlBJ2— ☇RiotWomenn☇ (@riotwomennn) April 17, 2018

I know we’ve all decided that James Comey is being very rude for saying mean things about Donald Trump but his description of him as a mob boss is simply an observation of reality.

.

The grift goes on

by digby

He would have had to sell a lot of ugly ties and cheap cologne to make this tidy little profit:

President Donald Trump’s U.S. businesses have received at least $15.1 million in revenue from political groups and federal agencies since 2015, according to a new report to be released Monday.

The money went to Trump’s airplanes, hotels, golf courses, even a bottled water company during the presidential campaign and the first 15 months of his presidency, according to a compilation of known records of the spending by Public Citizen obtained by McClatchy.

But it was Trump’s campaign itself that spent the biggest chunk by far – about 90 percent, or $13.4 million.

It also includes more than $717,000 from the Republican National Committee; nearly $595,000 from Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee set up by the RNC and Trump’s campaign; and $9,000 from the National Republican Senate Committee.

POLITICAL GROUPS AND FEDERAL AGENCIES HAVE SPENT $498,149 AT MAR-A-LAGO, TRUMP’S CLUB IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, SINCE 2015

Two political action committees, America First Action, dedicated to electing federal candidates who support Trump’s agenda, spent $33,000 and Great America Committee, Vice President Mike Pence’s group, spent $24,000.

Campaigns and committees supporting Republicans House members Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, Jodey Arrington of Texas, Tom MacArthur of New Jersey and Dana Rohrabacher of California also spent money on Trump businesses.

By comparison, in 2013 and 2014, political spending at his properties was less than $20,000.

The total amount is likely to be much more. There is no single place to find out how much the administration is spending at Trump businesses, though federal agencies have started to disclose some records in response to public record requests. Public Citizen analyzed Federal Election Commission data and federal agency records obtained from Freedom of Information Act requests by Public Citizen and Property of the People, a group comprised of legal experts and activists.

IT’S VERY POSSIBLE THAT I COULD BE THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE TO RUN AND MAKE MONEY ON IT

Donald Trump in 2000 interview with Fortune

Before he was sworn into office, Trump eschewed calls to fully separate from his business interests.

Instead he placed his holdings in a trust designed to hold assets for his “exclusive benefit,” which he can receive at any time without the public’s knowledge. He also retains the authority to revoke the trust.

Trump launched his campaign at one of his buildings, Trump Tower in New York, where his campaign leased space. Campaign events offered Trump-branded water and wine. The campaign and Secret Service paid Tag Air Inc. for use of Trump’s 757 airplane, customized with gold-plated bathroom faucets and seatbelts.

THE SECRET SERVICE HAS SPENT $64,090 AT TRUMP BUSINESSES SINCE 2015

Since his inauguration, Trump has visited one of his properties, usually in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia on 138 days, according to a compilation of information released by the White House. Those visits have led to government spending.

Federal agencies that spent money include the National Security Council, Secret Service, Defense Department, General Services Administration and U.S. embassies.

Recipients include Trump Tower Commercial LLC, Trump International Hotel in Washington, Mar-a-Lago club in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump National Doral Miami, Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, Trump Restaurants LLC, the Trump Corporation, Trump Payroll Corp. and Trump Plaza LLC.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif. is expected to introduce a bill that would bar taxpayer spending at properties owned by an officeholder if the money provides a profit to the officeholder.

“Trump has raised the art of the self-deal to unprecedented heights, enriching himself at the expense of taxpayers,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen. “This requires a legislative response.”

This is fine. So is the fact that his Interior Secretary Ryan Zincke and Head of the Environmental Potection Agency are ripping off taxpayers with impunity. He likes them and he will protect them. And why not? They’re smart, just like him.

Friendly reminder kids. This has never happened before. We used to think that government officials should not make a profit from their office. But then we’ve never seen a president pronounce that his political rivals and adversaries are criminals and should be jailed either. None of this has ever been normal in the past but it is normal now.

.

You say it isn’t a cult of personality?

by digby

Think again:

Anderson Cooper: "Have you ever heard the President lie?"

Republican lawmaker Jim Jordan: “I have not.”

Anderson Cooper: "Really?…"#KeepingThemHonesthttps://t.co/68BanvVlB3 pic.twitter.com/1wjswJAn1r— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) April 17, 2018

That’s not some obscure Trumpie being interviewed. It’s Congressman Jim Jordan, a powerful member of the Freedom Caucus in the House.

.