Month: May 2018

The Tactics of The NRA Fox GOP Intimidation Machine

By Spocko

My friend Amanda Gailey protested outside of NRA lobbyist Chris Cox’s home and his wife’s business, Ivy Lane Linens & Living in Old Town Alexandria Virginia, a few weeks ago. I wrote about it here, NRA Fears Women Brandishing Posters Protest Gun-Lobbyist Cox

Both protests were peaceful and legal. The Coxs called the police at both locations. The police made it clear the protesters did nothing wrong, however a woman identified as Cox’s wife did assault Catherine Koebel, one of the two protesters at the business, when she snatched the video recording phone from her hand and threw it on the ground. Catherine Koebel declined to press charges

The WaPo did a story about this. Protesters target NRA lobbyist’s home and wife’s business

Amanda Gailey, left, and Catherine Koebel, co-founders of The Great American Gun Melt, protest outside NRA lobbyist Chris Cox’s home in Alexandria this month. (The Great American Gun Melt)

Tucker Carlson did a story about it during his ‘The Aggressive Left segment” under the heading “Campus Craziness.”

Tucker was very concerned about people going to Cox’s house to protest. He questioned Jason Nichols, a University of Maryland professor about it asking,“Is it okay, if you decide you disagree with someone you can show up his house and scream at his wife and kids?”

NOTE: Gailey and her fellow protester did not scream and shout at Cox’s wife and kids. They also were on a busy public intersection.

Tucker is really concerned about what is “normal” and asked “Do decent people do this?” He states he believes that this crosses over into indefensible behavior.

Tucker says doing this is not okay. “It’s disgusting and wrong. “

This appears to be Charles Couger, Producer, Tucker Carlson Tonight @ Fox News

Fox Intimidation 
Today it looks like Carlson sent a producer to Lincoln Nebraska in full Jesse Watters, James O’Keefe mode. The reporter and a cameraman showed up in a truck outside Gailey’s home, followed her to her daughter’s middle school and then confronted her. He didn’t give his full name, just Charles.

(We believe he is Charles Couger, a producer for Tucker Carlson on Fox News)
He asked her, “All we want to know is whether you’re comfortable…”

Meanwhile Gailey identifies the truck and asks the name of the producer, who declines.

“Are you okay with people confronting you about your political beliefs in your private life like you did to Chris Cox?”

Gailey gives her message to Cox reiterating her message about Cox profiting from the sales of weapons.

I have the full Video from Gailey’s POV and is available for Rachel Maddow’s producers. Especially if Carlson does a segment on this…

Tucker said in his “Campus Craziness” segment that standing on a street corner with a sign outside someone’s house is “a threat.”

Carlson’s comment mirrors the language of the NRA attorney for the Coxes who said, “These coordinated tactics have crossed the line of civility and human decency.”

GOP Intimidation 
The producer, also asks Gailey about the three state senators trying to take her on. (Nebraska politicians Holloran, Erdman and Brewer are attacking Gailey because she and her group, Nebraskans Against Gun Violence, blocked NRA legislation.)

Gailey was not doing anything wrong using her 1st Amendment rights, but the politicians think she should be more civil. They believe professors should model what they call “right behavior” propriety, civility and respect for opposing viewpoints, which they state “used to be the hallmarks of a good education at UNL.” (Link)

Also Gov. Pete Ricketts rescinded Gailey’s “Admiral in the Nebraska Navy” award after Gailey testified against a bill the governor supported. Nebraska is a landlocked state, it’s a joke award given to people who are nominated by friends. Ricketts is speaking at the NRA convention this Friday.

The coordination that the NRA complains about and the threats that they talk about are classic projection. They pitched the idea to Carlson, who sent a producer out with the premise, “Liberal snowflakes don’t like it when THEY are protested!” This is a variation of the tactic used by James O’Keefe and his people or the Turning Point USA people (who also are very involved going after Gailey and other professors at UNL) They try to turn the tables on liberals with false equivalencies, “You liberals say you are tolerant but you won’t tolerate my hate speech!”

Assault Rifles vs Assault Posters

Two days ago, in Phoenix there was a “die in” calling for better gun laws in Arizona. A group called Arizona Patriots protested the students and teachers by yelling at them while open carrying handguns on their hips.

Jennifer Harrison, of Arizona Patriot who shouted at children at a protest in Phoenix while carrying a gun.

Another photo of  Jennifer Harrison and Arizona Patriots with Arizona Governor Doug Ducey

There is a qualitative difference between an armed protest and a paper one. In Arizona they are both legal. Does Tucker see these as something that normal and “decent people do?”

When the professor brought up protesters going to the Coxs’ house he said, “I’m assuming he’s armed.” Carson pulls back, “It’s not a matter about being armed, I hope we aren’t suggesting it’s going to get to gun play. I’m asking a philosophical question.”

Yeah right. The classic NRA open carry gun toter philosophical question, “I’m just showing off my 2nd Amendment right on my hip. What are you afraid of? The gun is just an inanimate object. It’s all legal.”

One of the ways that the NRA uses its power is to unleash its fan base against individuals who oppose them. They especially love to go after women. They like to tell them just how afraid they should be if they don’t carry guns. And then some show up with their guns as proof that it’s a scary world out there.

Arizona Patriots. Note the white power hand sign.

Keep an eye out for these individuals, you see it turns out that for many of them it is NOT legal for them to carry.

As we have been seeing in Florida and other states, people who shouldn’t legally have guns, do. Sometimes the system just hasn’t caught up with their mental health issues.

I always suggest to my activist friends “ABR. Always Be Recording” Video can be useful in the future. I know, I’m from it!

Updated to add photos and fix wordos.

A well-oiled machine

by digbyb

It’s fine. All fine:

A strong majority of voters say President Donald Trump’s administration is running chaotically after Trump’s pick for veterans affairs secretary, White House physician Ronny Jackson, withdrew his name from consideration last week, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

More than 3 in 5 voters, 62 percent, say Trump’s administration is running very or somewhat chaotically — nearly twice as many as the 32 percent who say it’s running very or somewhat well.

A majority of Republicans, 68 percent, say the Trump administration is running well. But that sentiment is shared by few Democrats (9 percent) and independents (25 percent).

Moreover, the percentage of voters who see chaos in Trump’s White House has increased modestly, but steadily, in recent weeks. In early April, 61 percent of voters said the Trump administration was running chaotically. In mid-March it was 57 percent, and in early March it was 54 percent.

68% of Republicans think the Trump administration is running well. Even if you watch Fox all day you have to get a sense of the chaos. They are just cultists.

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Sweet Little Lies

by digby

The devout Catholic moralist Rick Santorum is having a very hard time condemning his cult leader’s pathological dishonesty:

Former Pennsylvania senator and CNN commentator Rick Santorum said on Wednesday that President Trump “has a problem” with lying, during an interview with CNN’s New Day.

“The president says things that don’t comport with the facts,” Santorum told host Chris Cuomo. “I don’t like calling people liars, but the reality is this president has a problem. And I have said that over and over again. I wish he wouldn’t go out and say things that don’t comport with the facts.”

Santorum’s admission came in response to analysis released by Washington Post fact-checkers this week, which showed that, since taking office in January 2017, President Trump has made 3,001 “false or misleading claims…an average of nearly 6.5 claims a day.”

“We have never seen a record like this,” Cuomo said. “…How do you justify this data from the Washington Post?”

Santorum initially responded by claiming President Obama lied about the Affordable Care Act when he said people would be able to keep their doctor and current insurance if they liked them. He also claimed Obama had lied about a $400 million cash payment to Iran in January 2016, which Trump himself has argued should’ve been investigated. That payment was essentially part of a larger settlement for past military purchases that the United States still owed to Iran ($1.7 billion total), over a failed arms deal first made in 1979.

“‘You can keep your doctor, you can keep your insurance, we didn’t pay off the Iranians’…. I think the substance of the previous president’s lies were much more important than the substance of what the crowd size was at the [inauguration],” he said. “I mean, those are the things I really care about.”

After Cuomo accused Santorum of “moral relativism” and noted he had refused to answer questions about Trump’s lies up front, however, Santorum eventually changed gears.

“Look I’m not being–I’ll say it right here. You have seen me criticize President Trump for his hyperbole,” he said. “…I’m not saying he is not subject to hyperbole and exaggeration and other things. He is.”

The Washington Post’s analysis, published on Tuesday, reveals Trump’s tendency to not only skew the truth but shows his habit of repeating some of those lies at an astounding rate.

Trump has repeated 113 of those 3,001 false claims at least three times each, according to the study, including claiming he passed the largest tax cut in history (72 times), claiming the Russia investigation is made up or a “witch hunt” (53 times), claiming a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border will stop illegal drugs from flowing into the United States (34 times), and claiming that the border wall is already under construction, even though it isn’t (13 times in the past five weeks alone).

On one day last year — July 25, 2017 — Trump made 53 separate “misleading claims.” The second-highest day, in terms of the number of falsehoods the president made publicly, came on November 29, 2017, when Trump made at least 49 inaccurate statements or outright lies.

By the way:

In the 466 days since he took the oath of office, President Trump has made 3,001 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.

That’s an average of nearly 6.5 claims a day.

When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. Slowly, the average number of claims has been creeping up.

Indeed, since we last updated this tally two months ago, the president has averaged about 9 claims a day.

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Can he get away with it? Maybe.


by digby

Greg Sargent has a good piece up at the Plumline about Trump’s “strategy” such as it is with respect to Mueller:

President Trump and his legal team appear to have leaked special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s questions as a set-up to accomplishing a broader goal: To create a pretext for avoiding a sit-down interview. We don’t yet know whether Trump will go through with this, but if he does, and if Mueller tries to subpoena him — which is a real possibility — that could lead to a legal and political standoff that could crank up this crisis to Defcon One.

Which is why it is so dangerous that Trump’s team has reportedly concluded that Trump is currently winning the battle with Mueller in the minds of voters.

CNN reports this morning on Team Trump’s thinking. Trump’s lawyers have concluded that they can win the legal standoff over whether the special counsel has the authority to compel a sitting president to testify. But beyond this, they also believe they’re winning the political argument:

Their political argument also has changed. While the lawyers were originally in a let’s-get-this-over-with mode, they now believe that time is on their side — especially with the 2018 elections looming. They believe that Trump has done a good job discrediting the investigators and the investigation itself.

It’s always possible that this is just bluster and spin. But there are reasons to believe Trump himself probably does think this. He believes only the polls that show he is popular, and in recent weeks, he has conspicuously abandoned his cooperative tone toward the Mueller investigation, switching to a barrage of attacks on the probe as illegitimate and on Mueller himself as corrupt. Trump is getting bombarded by voices out of #Foxlandia telling him that he is the victim of a Deep State Coup, and he likely believes they represent majority opinion.

Meanwhile, whatever the skeletal remains of Trump’s legal team actually believe, they are likely telling him what he wants to hear on this front as well. After all, if they believe a sit-down interview would be treacherous, what better way to persuade him to avoid it than telling him he has already vanquished Mueller — that the public agrees the probe has been discredited and will cheer him on as he flouts the demand for an interview?

This morning, Trump himself basically underscored all these points. Trump tweeted his frequent claim that the charge of collusion is a “hoax” but added something new: He said the probe for obstruction is a “setup & trap.” He approvingly quoted a legal expert he heard out of #Foxlandia today claiming Mueller’s questions are “an intrusion” into the president’s power to fire anybody at will. That’s a reference to the fact that Mueller’s questions focus heavily on Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey.

Taken all together, the emerging stance of Team Trump is that any effort to question Trump about his true intent in trying to derail an investigation into himself is inherently illegitimate. It’s nothing more than a “setup & trap,” an “intrusion” on his powers. Trump is under no obligation to account for any of it.

There’s more.

I think this is probably the case. The only way that his supporters can protect him is by saying that he’s won public approval and therefore has no obligation to cooperate and can do as he pleases with the Justice Department. In other words, his lawyers and advisers may very well now be pushing him to take the 5th or simply refuse to accept a subpoena and also purge the DOJ of anyone that Fox News has told him are deep state traitors to the president, which means traitors to America.

It’s impossible to know if he will follow through on any of that because he lurches from one thought to the next, lies reflexively and fires his staff willy-nilly all day long. But taken all together, the actions of the team over the past month or so do indicate that he’s going to defy Mueller and find a pretext outside of of the Russia investigation to get rid of Rosenstein and maybe Sessions.
They have convinced him that the public is with him so he feels safe in doing that.

And the fact is that vast majority of Republicans are with him and GOP hatchet men in the congress are using their substantial power to help, so I am not sure he can’t get away with all of it.

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Nice little Justice Department you have here

by digby

That’s where the right wing is right now in a nutshell.

Oh, and what’s this about?

President Trump in a Wednesday tweet called out the Justice Department for refusing to hand over un-redacted documents related to the Hillary Clinton email probe to Congress.

Conservative allies of the president in Congress have drafted articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the Russia probe, to which Rosenstein responded, “the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.”

Fox News’ Joe DiGenova says that Rosenstein should be fired for using the word “extorted.”

I sure hope that all the people who are so sure that Trump can’t do anything too bad (or at least not much worse than a Democratic president would be doing) are right.

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About those questions …


by digby

I wrote about the big 49 question story for Salon today:

It’s rare, during this tumultuous era, that a single political story stays relevant for more than a few hours before something else even more important or scandalous drops. But 24 hours after it broke, The New York Times’ list of 49 questions Robert Mueller reportedly has for President Trump is still being discussed and analyzed. And that’s in spite of a very juicy story about Trump’s former doctor’s office supposedly being raided by Trump’s bodyguards, who demanded all his medical records — and the doctor’s admission that Trump had dictated his own suspiciously glowing medical report during the campaign.

It’s interesting that this particular Mueller story has such legs, because when you look at the questions, they almost all derive from public records and media reports. The legal beagles on cable news insist that prosecutors never ask a question to which they don’t know the answer, which strikes me as completely improbable unless they are questioning someone on the witness stand. But Mueller’s team probably does have the answers to these particular questions, because Trump has either tweeted out plenty of clues or blurted out some revelation during one of his blabby “press avails.” Perhaps the special counsel thinks that since most of these questions are already in the public domain and do not touch Trump’s personal finances, the president would feel confident enough to present himself.

It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. These questions enraged Trump — and we know this not by his hysterical tweets on Tuesday morning but by his tweets after those questions were first presented to him back in March. That was the weekend after Andrew McCabe was fired, when Trump’s attorney John Dowd screwed the pooch by giving this statement:

I pray that acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier.

That was originally provided as an official statement on the president’s behalf and then rapidly walked back, with Dowd claiming he was just speaking for himself. (Everything about it, from the bombastic tone to the strange word choices to the erratic capitalization, sounds dictated from on high.) In any case, it was a sign temperatures were rising at the White House that weekend. As you may remember, Trump tweeted madly about McCabe and Comey:

Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2018

As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded, there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. #DrainTheSwamp

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2018

This went on with more tweeting about McCabe and Comey through the weekend. Then he mentioned Mueller’s name for the first time:

The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018

Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added…does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018

At the time, the combination of Dowd’s bizarre statement and Trump’s unprecedented attacks on the Mueller team were interpreted as a new, more aggressive posture by Team Trump. But at this point, it seems obvious now that this epic meltdown was Trump’s response to this long list of questions.

It’s not clear exactly how this list was compiled, and that’s an important part of the story. Was it given, as is, by Mueller’s office, as the New York Times indicated?

[I]nvestigators for Mr. Mueller agreed days later to share during a meeting with Mr. Dowd the questions they wanted to ask Mr. Trump. 

When Mr. Mueller’s team relayed the questions, their tone and detailed nature cemented Mr. Dowd’s view that the president should not sit for an interview. Despite Mr. Dowd’s misgivings, Mr. Trump remained firm in his insistence that he meet with Mr. Mueller. About a week and a half after receiving the questions, Mr. Dowd resigned, concluding that his client was ignoring his advice.

That report doesn’t specifically say that the questions were written by the special prosecutor’s office, but numerous commentators have been frantically parsing them for what the wording may suggest about the direction of the case and what evidence Mueller already has. Not so fast. According to the Washington Post, the questions weren’t presented in those words at all:

Mueller’s team agreed to provide the president’s lawyers with more specific information about the subjects that prosecutors wished to discuss with the president. With those details in hand, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow compiled a list of 49 questions that the team believed the president would be asked, according to three of the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly . . . 

After investigators laid out 16 specific subjects they wanted to review with the president and added a few topics within each one, Sekulow broke the queries down into 49 separate questions, according to people familiar with the process.

If this is true, then these questions really reflect the defense team preparing its client for what he’s likely to face. It’s a customary legal strategy that may provide very little specific information about the state of Mueller’s investigation.

Nonetheless, parsing the wording of these questions is a useful exercise. If they were put together by Trump’s legal team in hopes of dissuading him from an interview, their choice of language could easily point to the areas in which Sekulow and others believed Trump was vulnerable.

You also have to have to consider that Trump’s lawyers were probably also trying to keep him from getting so angry that he fired Rosenstein and/or Jeff Sessions and triggered a constitutional crisis. Mueller had threatened them with a subpoena. They were walking a fine line.

Dowd resigned or was fired just a few days after that wild weekend. It has been assumed that was over his inability to persuade Trump not to consent to an interview. But maybe it was just that Trump felt the need to punish someone for showing him those questions and letting him know what kind of trouble he was in. So as despots and tyrants are wont to do, he killed the messenger.

As for the big parlor-game question of who leaked the list of questions to the Times: Who knows? Dowd swears he didn’t, the White House says it didn’t and even if Mueller’s office ever leaked things to the media, which it doesn’t seem to, these questions weren’t written by his team so that leaves him out. On Tuesday, Fox News correspondent Ed Henry reported that sources “in the Trump orbit” speculated that the president had leaked the list himself so all the possible witnesses would be on the same page and Trump’s supporters would see evidence that (in their view) Mueller is overreaching. That sounds as reasonable as anything else I’ve heard. Donald Trump is simply incapable of stopping himself from obstructing justice.

Constitutional crisis watch
by Tom Sullivan

Charles Blow declared in February “we are already trapped in a slow-motion constitutional crisis, or constitutional train wreck.” Days later, Keith Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University, and Eric Posner, of the University of Chicago law school, told The Guardian, no, we were not there yet. That would require the “unanswered flouting of constitutional rules.”

Yet with every day special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference continues, with every degree the water in the pot rises, the frog slowly realizes it is being cooked. Whether the frog is the sitting president or all of us remains to be seen.

The FBI in early April raided the office, hotel room, and home of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in connection with the Stormy Daniels lawsuit. Trump called it “an attack on our country.” Days later, Watergate affair journalist Carl Bernstein declared, “We are in a constitutional crisis.” During a CNN interview, Bernstein said, “The president of the United States has made clear to those around him and to those who are closest to him in the White House and among his friends that he is determined to shut down this investigation.”

After the New York Times published on Monday a long list of questions Mueller wants Trump to answer, there was confusion over its origins. The Times reported it obtained the list obtained from “a person outside Mr. Trump’s legal team.” Many of the questions pertain to obstruction of justice. Trump called the leak “disgraceful,” further evidence Mueller has gone off the rails. But the Washington Post now suspects the leak may have come from Trump’s own attorneys.

In a tense, early March meeting with Mueller, Trump’s attorneys insisted Trump had no obligation to answer questions, the Post reports:

But Mueller responded that he had another option if Trump declined: He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter.

Mueller’s warning — the first time he is known to have mentioned a possible subpoena to Trump’s legal team — spurred a sharp retort from John Dowd, then the president’s lead lawyer.

“This isn’t some game,” Dowd said, according to two people with knowledge of his comments. “You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”

Mueller subsequently provided a series of topics he wished to discuss. Citing anonymous sources, the Post reports Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow drafted those topics into the list of questions leaked to the Times.

Whether the leak was intended to help dissuade Trump from cooperating or to discredit the Mueller investigation (as Trump suggested) is unclear. But as Bernstein suggested, Trump is determined to shut down the investigation.

Trump allies in the House Freedom Caucus threaten to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to help that along. The Washington Post reported Monday it possessed leaked articles of impeachment drafted to target him. Rosenstein oversees the Mueller investigation had signed off on the Cohen raid — in a separate investigation — and stands between Trump and firing Mueller:

The document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, underscores the growing chasm between congressional Republican leaders, who have maintained for months that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III should be allowed to proceed, and rank-and-file GOP lawmakers who have repeatedly battled the Justice Department during the past year.

The draft articles, which one of its authors called a “last resort,” would be unlikely to garner significant support in Congress. But the document could serve as a provocative political weapon for conservatives in their standoff with Mueller and the Justice Department.

Rosenstein brushed away the threat:

“There are people who have been making threats, privately and publicly, against me for quite some time,” Rosenstein said at a Law Day event Tuesday at the Newseum in Washington. “I think they should understand by now the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted. We’re going to do what’s required by the rule of law.”

Someone needs to remind Trump and his associates in and out of Congress the law actually applies to them.

Case in point. NBC reported on Tuesday that in early February last year, Trump’s personal bodyguard, a layer for the Trump Organization and a third man entered the office of Trump’s personal physician and took/confiscated/stole his medical records on the new president. What Dr. Harold Bornstein described the incident as a “raid” took place two days after Bornstein told a reporter he had prescribed hair growth medicine for Trump for years:

In an exclusive interview in his Park Avenue office, Bornstein told NBC News that he felt “raped, frightened and sad” when Keith Schiller and another “large man” came to his office to collect the president’s records on the morning of Feb. 3, 2017. At the time, Schiller, who had long worked as Trump’s bodyguard, was serving as director of Oval Office operations at the White House.

“They must have been here for 25 or 30 minutes. It created a lot of chaos,” said Bornstein, who described the incident as frightening.

Plus, a violation of the patient privacy law, HIPPA, Bornstein added, as was his discussing his patient’s medications with the press. Bornstein also admitted he had not written the letter he issued declaring Trump’s health “astonishingly excellent.” Bornstein tells NBC, “He [Trump] wrote it himself.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders brushed off the incident as “standard operating procedure.” For Donald Trump, perhaps. Appearing on “All in with Chris Hayes,” Jess McIntosh of Shareblue Media observed Trump has a long history with this sort of standard operating procedure:

Shareblue Media Executive Editor @jess_mc: "There's nothing funny about [Trump] applying these absolutely mafia-like tactics to our country." pic.twitter.com/fW2k2ZIWo9— Shareblue Media (@Shareblue) May 2, 2018

“We have a president who is the kind of man who has goons,” McIntosh told Hayes.

“There’s nothing funny about him applying these absolutely Mafia-like tactics to our country,” McIntosh said, adding he has a pattern of such behavior that echoes Stormy Daniels’s allegation she was threatened by someone on Trump’s behalf.

“We are dealing with a very thin-skinned narcissist on a hair trigger … who has goons.” Some of them, it seems, wear lapel pins that allow them to work on Capitol Hill.

Are we in a constitutional crisis yet? Do they have those in the Twilight Zone?

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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.

QOTD: Michael Cohen

by digby

The National Enquirer publisher, as you know, is one of Trump’s most fervent supporters and has been deeply involved in all the hush agreements.

When asked whether he thought a message was being sent by that story’s publication, Cohen told CNN: “What do you think?”

Cray-cray o’ the day

by digby

Trump’s Dr Feelgood dropped a little bombshell today:

Dr. Harold Bornstein told NBC News he felt “raped, frightened, and sad” when three men, including former White House aide Keith Schiller and a lawyer at the Trump Organization, showed up at his New York City office on Feb. 3, 2017, to collect the president’s medical records.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday confirmed that officials “took possession” of Trump’s medical records, but said it was “not her understanding” that it was a raid.

“It would be standard procedure for a newly elected president’s medical records to be in possession by the White House medical unit,” Sanders told reporters.

CNN also later reported, according to anonymous sources, that the doctor has misconstrued the situation and that it wasn’t a raid.

Bornstein said he was not provided with a form authorizing the release of the records, which, if true, could be a violation of patient privacy laws.

Bornstein also told NBC that the men asked him to take a photo of him and Trump off of his wall.

A New York police spokesperson told BuzzFeed News on Tuesday that the department had no complaint on file in relation to the incident.

Bornstein did not return BuzzFeed News’ requests for an interview. He later told a CBS News reporter, “Sweetheart, this is Watergate, goodbye!”

He also told a CNN reporter that he was “robbed” of the medical records.

When they asked the White House snowflake Sarah Huckabee Sanders about this, this is what she said:

“As is standard operating procedure for a new president, the White House medical unit took possession of the president’s medical records.”

Right. Every four or eight years the new president sends in his private thugs to break the law and seize his medical records from his private doctor. Everybody knows that.

Is it just me or is this president’s essential thuggishness becoming more obvious every day?

And, by the way, as it becomes more obvious that the country has a criminal mobster in the White House, conservatives in the media and the congress are circling the wagons ever tighter.

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Criminal GOPers? Say it ain’t so.

by digby

I don’t really know what to say about this …

Former New York congressman Michael Grimm is a felon who has admitted to hiring undocumented workers, hiding $900,000 from tax authorities and making false statements under oath. To hear him tell it, that’s a reason Staten Island Republicans should vote him back into office.

“It’s almost identical to what the president has been going through,” Grimm says of the federal investigation that led to his imprisonment. “It’s not an accident that under the Obama administration the Justice Department was used politically. And that is all starting to come out.”

Grimm has uncovered a new reality in the constantly changing world of Republican politics: Criminal convictions, once seen as career-enders, are no longer disqualifying. In the era of President Trump, even time spent in prison can be turned into a positive talking point, demonstrating a candidate’s battle scars in a broader fight against what he perceives as liberal corruption.

In a startling shift from “law-and-order Republicans,” Trump has attacked some branches of law enforcement, especially those pursuing white-collar malfeasance, as his allies and former campaign officials are ensnared in various investigations.

Following his lead, Republican Senate candidates with criminal convictions in West Virginia and Arizona have cast themselves as victims of the Obama administration’s legal overreach. Another former Trump adviser who has pleaded guilty to a felony has also become an in-demand surrogate, as Republicans jump at the chance to show their opposition to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Here’s a general rule of thumb: Lawmakers should not be law breakers,” said Susan Del Percio, a New York GOP consultant who advised Grimm in 2010 but opposes his candidacy. “I guess it’s a different political norm we are facing today.”

Yes, yes it is: