Month: May 2018

Mad as tinfoil hatters
by Tom Sullivan

Yesterday’s classified briefing at the White House were odd even for a day the president sent the leader of North Korea a “Dear John” letter. The briefings on the FBI’s reported “confidential source” on the Trump campaign farcically included the presence of White House lawyer Emmett Flood.

Democrats responded:

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “Never seen a Gang of Eight meeting that included any presence from the White House. Those individuals left before the substance of it. Unusual times.”

California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence panel, called Flood’s presence “completely inappropriate.”
“Although he did not participate in the meetings which followed, as the White House’s attorney handling the Special Counsel’s investigation, his involvement — in any capacity — was entirely improper, and I made this clear to him,” Schiff said in a statement.

The purpose of the meeting was to review information regarding Trump’s concocted outrage over the FBI informant who provided information on Russian efforts to infiltrate the Trump election campaign. In Trump’s mind, this counterintelligence effort is evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.

“Nothing we heard today has changed our view that there is no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intel agency placed a spy in the Trump campaign,” Schiff told reporters.

Steve Benen writes, “The president made this demand for brazenly political reasons, threatening to undermine not only the rule of law, but also a probe in which Trump is a subject.” But of course he did. The White House is desperate to derail the Mueller investigation by any means necessary.

Benen provided a list of some of the other conspiracy theories floated by the White House and its coterie:

* Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. (He didn’t.)

* There were improper unmaskings. (There weren’t.)

* The FISA warrants related to Carter Page were improper. (They weren’t).

* It was Democrats who actually colluded with Russia. (They didn’t.)

* Conspiring FBI officials may be guilty of “treason.” (They aren’t.)

* “Uranium One” is a real scandal. (It isn’t.)

* Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) had improper communications with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch. (He didn’t.)

* Every member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team is a rabid Democratic partisan. (Mueller is a Republican.)

* Law enforcement officials ”infiltrated” the Trump campaign, “implanting” a “spy” in the Republican operation. (They didn’t.)

“Innocent people generally don’t try to undermine investigations through a series of ridiculous conspiracy theories,” Benen tweeted.

Is he implying something? He might be implying something.

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Totally not colludingTotally not colluding

by digby

Roger Stone to his pal Randy Credico:

“Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30–particularly on August 20, 2011,” Mr. Stone wrote to Randy Credico, a New York radio personality who had interviewed Mr. Assange several weeks earlier. Mr. Stone, a longtime confidant of Mr. Trump, had no formal role in his campaign at the time.

…. and:

After earlier asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in the House probe, Mr. Credico now says he is willing to talk with investigators. He said he met on Wednesday with the committee’s Democratic staff members for what he called a limited conversation about WikiLeaks, the 2016 campaign and Mr. Stone.

As Mr. Credico has become more vocal about what he says are discrepancies in Mr. Stone’s account, Mr. Stone has responded with a series of threats, according to emails and text messages reviewed by the Journal.

In early April, in one of those emails, Mr. Stone accused Mr. Credico of serving as an informant.

“Everyone says u are wearing a wire for Mueller,” the April 7 email said. Two days later, Mr. Stone wrote: “Run your mouth = get sued.” Mr. Credico denies being an informant.

Mr. Stone said he was warning Mr. Credico against defaming him and urging him to “simply tell the truth.”

Hookay …

Trump first, America last

by digby

Chris Hayes made an observation that would be really smart for Democratic politicians to take up:

Chris Hayes lays out all the ways Trump and his associates have been "selling off U.S. foreign policy." #inners #Trump #Cohen #Flynn #Manafort pic.twitter.com/IuFvd2xwnZ— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) May 24, 2018

It’s quite clear now that in many cases America came in second to the interests of the president and his associates.

His national security adviser Michael Flynn was secretly being paid by Turkey during the campaign and into the transition, pushing for more favorable policy towards the Turkish strongman in an op-ed he published on Election Day.

Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman running the campaign at a certain point, was deeply entangled with Russia and Ukrainian interests, which he apparently tried to appease by leveraging his role running a presidential campaign …

Michael Cohen was reportedly pitching the government of Qatar at Trump Tower during the transition, soliciting a $1 million payment in exchange for access to the new administration. It turns out the president’s own son, Donald Trump Jr. wasn’t just interested in what Russia could do for the campaign. He also met with an Israeli, an emissary from the Saudi government and the United Arab Emirates in the months before the election. These are just the instances we know about, what’s publicly come to light.

Today we learned of what looks like yet another example of the president’s inner circle selling off U.S. foreign policy. BBC reporting, citing sources in Kiev close to those involved, the president of Ukraine secretly funneled $400,000 to Michael Cohen to arrange a meeting at the White House.

You can add the Broidy and ZTE deals too …

This really can’t be said enough. Trump isn’t for internationalism or America First. He is for Trump. Period. And he and his family and cronies obviously made it very clear during the campaign and since then that they are open for business.

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So much losing

by digby

As much as I loathe Trump I was still hopeful that somehow, by accident, he would be able to strike a deal to keep North Korea moving toward some kind of rapprochement with South Korea and a more peaceful, engaged relationship with the world. There are people living there. Nuclear war is unthinkable. Even temporary time outs are better than escalation.

But I can’t say that I’m surprised it fell apart. Trump is in over his head that he can’t really think about anything but Hannity and Nunes anyway. His team is unprepared and not cohesive. He refused to prepare and only cared about the pageantry. And all this talk about the Libya solution was just daft …

This piece by Fred Kaplan in Slate sums up how it went down:

By canceling his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, President Donald Trump has proved his lack of skill as a negotiator, handed the world’s most brutal dictator a win, and further isolated the United States as a world power.

In a letter to Kim, released at the same time as Western reporters were witnessing the destruction of North Korea’s nuclear test site, Trump wrote that proceeding with a summit would be “inappropriate,” given the “tremendous anger and open hostility” in Kim’s recent statements. He thus revealed how little he knows about the history of diplomacy with Pyongyang—a true expert could have told him that fiery rhetoric is par for the course—and about Kim’s long-standing position on the issues that were to be discussed.

The statements that threw Trump for a loop—issued by North Korea’s vice minister for foreign affairs, who has been its top negotiator for more than a decade—were, in substance, no different from Kim’s public position since the idea of a summit came up months ago: that the goal should be “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” (not just of North Korea), achieved, if at all, through “phased and synchronous measures” (not all at once).

Trump’s pullout is puzzling, in that, at his press conference this week with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, he said that, while he would prefer instant disarmament by Pyongyang (the position pushed by National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo), a phased approach might be acceptable.

Trump may think that Kim will now come crawling back to the table, but this is a dubious proposition. First, Kim’s negotiator had already threatened to pull out, saying that there was no point talking if Trump endorsed Bolton’s public comparison of North Korea to Libya, a country whose voluntary surrender of its nuclear program led to a Western-backed ouster of its leader, followed by his brutal murder.

Second, Kim doesn’t need this summit. He has already, deceptively or not, cultivated the image of a peace-seeker, through a charm offensive that began with his New Year’s Day message and continued through the Winter Olympics, his own summits in China and South Korea (the first meetings with those countries’ leaders on their territory), his offer to meet with Trump, his suspension of nuclear and missile tests (though only after announcing that he now had a viable nuclear arsenal), and proposing “denuclearization” (though with a vague timetable and the usual caveats).

Imagine if Trump had gone ahead with the summit, which was scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, and Kim hadn’t shown up, still protesting Bolton’s remarks. Trump could have touted himself as the real peace-seeker. He could have invited the leaders of South Korea, Japan, and perhaps China to come along and, in lieu of the scheduled summit, held a security conference, to discuss further steps to contain and isolate Kim’s regime. It would have been a double win for Trump.

No doubt Bolton and Pompeo are relieved, and may have prompted, Trump’s cancellation. They never wanted a summit to begin with. Bolton had said, as a guest on Fox News before he was hired by Trump, that he hoped the summit would end badly and quickly, so Washington could proceed with ousting Kim’s regime by force if necessary. Bolton had also written op-eds arguing that a preventive strike against North Korea was legal and necessary.

Trump’s big mistake was accepting Kim’s invitation to a summit without first discussing its potential risks and opportunities with people who know something about these things. His second, bigger mistake was hyping expectations, tweeting that a peace treaty was on the horizon and that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize simply for agreeing to meet. These absurd remarks only heightened his own stake in the summit’s success—and Kim’s leverage in the negotiations.

There’s more at the link. He ends with this:

What is Trump’s Plan B? As usual, he doesn’t have one.

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Love it or leave it, hippies

by digby

Greg Sargent says it all about this insane clusterfuck:

This morning, “Fox and Friends” aired an interview with President Trump, in which he hailed the National Football League’s decision to herd African American players prone to kneeling during the national anthem into locker rooms, sparing NFL audiences the uncomfortable spectacle of accomplished black athletes protesting systemic racism and police brutality.

Trump said: “I don’t think people should be staying in locker rooms. But still, it’s good. You have to stand, proudly, for the National Anthem. Or you shouldn’t be playing. You shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

Only hours earlier, PBS aired the perfect complement to Trump’s command for unthinking nationalistic fervor — and let’s not confuse this with patriotism, which, as George Orwell told us, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life” that the true patriot has “no wish to force on other people” — in the form of an interview with former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.

In that interview, Clapper expanded on the claim made in his book that, in his judgment, Russia’s subversion of our election did, in fact, prove decisive in tipping it to Trump:

“As a private citizen, it’s what I would call my informed opinion that, given the massive effort the Russians made, and the number of citizens that they touched, and the variety and multi-dimensional aspects of what they did to influence opinion … and given the fact that it turned on less than 80,000 votes in three states, to me it exceeds logic and credulity that they didn’t affect the election. And it’s my belief they actually turned it.”

Clapper noted that the intelligence community’s formal 2017 assessment of Russian interference was not charged with assessing its impact. But this is exactly the point. It wasn’t the place of the intel community to place its imprimatur on this debate one way or the other. But now that Clapper is free to offer his own view, he believes Russia did swing the election — and he knows a lot more about the specifics of what Russia did than we do.
[…]
We probably will never know whether Russia’s interference — whose tip we only glimpsed in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals for their sabotage plot — was sufficient to swing the election. The result had many causes. But allow me to point out that journalists regularly suggest, on an even flimsier basis, that this or that Hillary Clinton failing caused the outcome. Yet even asking whether Russian interference — or, say, James B. Comey’s 11th-hour intervention — might have been sufficient to swing a relative handful of votes is regularly greeted with knee-slapping ridicule, even though, as Brian Beutler has noted, every journalist knows that it is absolutely plausible.

But this Clapper claim has relevance well beyond whether Russian interference was decisive. It places the ongoing efforts by Trump and his allies to frustrate an accounting of what happened in a whole new light.

The key point is this. Even if you put aside whatever the Trump campaign did or didn’t do to conspire with Russian sabotage, what’s left is this obvious fact: Trump and his GOP allies don’t want to know the full story of what Russia’s operation entailed in and of itself, because it doesn’t concern them in the least, and indeed they are engaged in an active effort to keep that story suppressed.

It keeps getting lost in the discussion, but one of the charges of both Mueller’s investigation and the probes run out of Congress has been to determine the full truth about the Russian effort separate and irrespective of whether there was any Trump campaign collusion with it. Trump himself has regularly dismissed the whole thing as a hoax. The GOP-run House Intelligence Committee probe laughably airbrushed Russia’s goal of helping Trump win out of its final conclusion, putting it at odds with both the intelligence community and Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans.

And this isn’t the only way in which Trump’s Republican allies are actively working to prevent the full truth from coming out. Their push for the release of highly sensitive Justice Department documents on the FBI informant that Trump and his allies have railed about — who contacted Trump campaign officials after the FBI established questionable contacts involving Russian hopes of corrupting the election — represents direct collaboration between Trump and Republicans to subvert Mueller’s investigation. This pressure resulted in an extraordinary capitulation by DOJ, in which officials agreed to make info they believe to be compromising available only to Republicans (though now Democrats will get a briefing as well).

There’s more.

Remember when Republicans used to say “love it or leave it?” “These colors don’t run?”

Yeah, that was then.

And, by the way:

Pro-tip: When journos ask Ryan and others if they agree there were spies in Trump’s campaign, please distinguish any FBI informant from the known RU, KSA, UAE, Turkish, & Israeli spies buttering up the campaign.

Free f-up Q idea: Ask whether they prefer the latter. https://t.co/oYmKE5MKrw

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 24, 2018

Update: The president today:

‘You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing. You shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.’ 

He didn’t specify which national anthem or which country.

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Headline o’ the Day

by digby

Actually, conspiring with Russians to sabotage your rival’s campaign is a departure from norms.  Just sayin’.

In fact, there is nothing normal about what the Trump campaign was up to so there were no norms to rely on. We’ve never had a traitorous presidential candidate before.

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The regime change and assassination model

by digby

This is going well.

North Korea said on Thursday that it would have second thoughts about a summit meeting between its leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Trump if American officials continued to make what the North considers threats against its leadership.

The North Korean official who issued the warning singled out Vice President Mike Pence for remarks that she called “ignorant and stupid.” In an interview broadcast on Monday on Fox News, Mr. Pence warned that North Korea’s government could end up like that of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former Libyan leader.

Mr. Qaddafi gave up his nascent nuclear program in the apparent hopes of staving off Western intervention and sanctions, and of negotiating economic integration with the West. But little of that happened, and years later he was killed by rebels after he was weakened in a military action against Libya by the United States and its European allies.

In a statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency on Thursday, the North Korean official, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui, referred to “unlawful and outrageous acts” by top American officials and said that Mr. Pence had made “unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya.”

Ms. Choe’s comment was the second time in a week that North Korea has threatened to withdraw from Mr. Kim’s planned summit meeting with Mr. Trump, which is slated for June 12 in Singapore.

“As a person involved in the U.S. affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the U.S. vice president,” Ms. Choe said. “In case the U.S. offends against our good will and clings to unlawful and outrageous acts, I will put forward a suggestion to our supreme leadership for reconsidering the D.P.R.K.-U.S. summit.”
[…]

Mr. Bolton has repeatedly referred to the so-called Libyan model. Mr. Trump last week disavowed Mr. Bolton’s remarks, but never referred to Libya’s voluntary disarmament in 2003. Instead, he discussed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s demise at the hands of his own people less than a decade later in the upheavals that swept the Arab world, and suggested that if there was ultimately no agreement over the North’s nuclear program, its leaders could meet a similar fate.

Mr. Trump also opened the door on Tuesday to a phased dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, backing away from his previous demand that Mr. Kim completely abandon his arsenal without any reciprocal American concessions.

In her statement on Thursday, Ms. Choe accused Mr. Pence, another North Korea hard-liner in the Trump administration, of promoting a “military option” on North Korea and also pushing for a quick and unilateral nuclear disarmament of the country.

In his interview on Monday, Mr. Pence said, “You know, as the president made clear, this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong-un doesn’t make a deal.”

When it was noted that the comparison could be interpreted as a threat, Mr. Pence replied, “Well, I think it’s more of a fact.”

I think it’s pretty obvious by this point that they’re saying this for a reason.

And it’s not a good reason.

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No scintilla of integrity
by Tom Sullivan

John Gotti, the original “Teflon Don.”

Stop dancing around it.

“The president surrounds himself with criminals.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes told his “All In” audience last night that is what Democrats should say every time they are in front of a camera. There have been to date 17 indictments and 5 guilty pleas, three from Trump associates. Over 100 charges. “The campaign of the president of the United States, including some of its most senior members,” Hayes states bluntly, “was staffed with criminals.”

James Clapper, former director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, told PBS “NewsHour” last night he now believes Russian interference gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump. “To me, it just exceeds logic and credulity that they didn’t affect the election,” Clapper said, “and it’s my belief they actually turned it.”

Responding to Trump’s vigorous claims the FBI is part of a “criminal deep state” that spied on his campaign, Clapper explained it was quite the opposite:

“The intent, though, is the important thing. It was not to spy on the campaign but rather to determine what the Russians were up to. Were they trying to penetrate the campaign, gain access, gain leverage, gain influence, and that was the concern that the FBI had? … I think they were just doing their job and trying to protect our political system.”

Reacting to Clapper’s comments, counter-terrorism and national intelligence commentator Malcolm Nance told MSNBC he believes Trump is “mortally terrified” that his presidency is illegitimate. Trump is bringing all his disinformation-spreading skills to bear against law enforcement to prevent the idea from catching fire. “In 1780, Benedict Arnold did not realize his name would become infamous throughout all of history. I think Donald Trump might want to reflect on that.”

In a way @realDonaldTrump is right. #SpyGate & will be the worst scandal in US history. TRUTH: Russian spies conspired w/Trump campaign members to STEAL AN ELECTION by using social media, money & family ties to elect Trump President. #RealSpyGate— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) May 24, 2018

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, also reacting to Clapper, told Rachel Maddow Russians have tried repeatedly to influence America presidential elections. They offered to help Adlai Stevenson in 1960. Stevenson reported it. They then approached John F. Kennedy (1960) with an offer of help, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In each case, the candidates turned them down.

“We have norms in this country,” Maddow responded. “It’s not an unprecedented thing for them to do an attack. It’s an unprecedented thing for it to be accepted.”

Indeed it is. But Josh Marshall takes issue with the notion that Trump simply violates “norms” or engages in “conflicts of interest.” The president is obstructing justice. He is abusing his power. (Not to mention he is compromised by a hostile foreign power.) Our diplomatic language obscures those as violations of “bureaucratic niceties” along the lines of violating political correctness. They are not.

What special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating is not collusion but conspiracy: whether Trump conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election the way Richard Nixon conspired with South Vietnam to win his in 1968.

Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo:

The President is trying to obstruct and stymie and hamstring a lawful investigation into his own crimes and those of his associates: by repeatedly lying, firing and threatening to fire people, intervening in law enforcement decisions in his own interest, fabricating fake stories to impede the investigation. The list goes on and on and even those who know better are becoming inured to it. The President is in the midst of a massive, more or less public and months-long effort to cover up his own crimes and the crimes of his associates. That’s really clear-cut. It’s obvious to anyone why that’s not okay. So we need to state that clearly so everyone will know what is at stake. Otherwise, everything becomes a blur. We lose the thread, the significance. We should stop talking around the issue and say this as clearly as we can because our future depends on it.

As background to yesterday’s commentaries, a survey from Navigator Research finds that Trump’s disinformation campaign is working, aided by Beltway Democrats’ reflexive politeness in the face of Trump actively undermining the constitution he swore to uphold and defend. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say the Mueller investigation into Russian election manipulation has not uncovered evidence of crimes, just as the administration and its media and elected flacks claim.

Republicans insist the Mueller probe has gone too far, taken too long, and uncovered nothing criminal. That is a lie. The indictments and guilty pleas attest to it. As for timing, Mueller has been at work for just over a year. It was thirteen months after the Watergate break-in before the Nixon Oval Office tapes came to light, and thirteen more before Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment. Conspiracy with North South Vietnam was never part of the Watergate probe. That betrayal is largely forgotten.

Donald Trump lacks any scintilla of integrity. That much the world can see without an investigation. His court is a rogues’ gallery befitting a police lineup. Having snookered half the country, what Trump wants now is to be the new “Teflon Don” and walk away unchained, only unlike Nixon, on his own terms and in his own good time. Like Nixon, Trump is a crook. All we lack is proving it in a court of law. (He’s already rigged the jury of public opinion.) All his personal and congressional accomplices lack besides spines is indictment as co-conspirators.

How do you like that political incorrectness?

Correction: h/t WL

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At least they aren’t going to ignore it

by digby

Apparently, the Democrats have been trying to find the right way to address the Mueller investigation in the election. Lo and behold, they found one:

The report found that when presented with two arguments — one that the year-old investigation should be ended and another that the multitude of indictments is proof it should continue — 59 percent of the public (and 63 percent of independents) side with the argument that the probe should keep going.

That’s a far better result for Democrats than other messages tested, including that ending the investigation would let the Russians win after interfering with the last presidential election and that an experienced official such as Mueller deserved to finish the investigation.

The only message that tested better was arguing that nobody, including the president of the United States, was above the law: 63 percent of the public sided with that argument, including 64 percent of independents.

It’s less convincing to counter that ending the investigation would encourage more Russian meddling, or to simply appeal to the credentials of the investigator, special counsel Robert Mueller, the report found.

The special counsel’s investigation has thus far yielded charges against 22 people or companies, including former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort.

[…]

But congressional Republicans fare even worse in the public’s view: Just 16 percent of people think GOP lawmakers have handled Mueller’s probe into Trump well, while 58 percent said they have not handled it well.

Overall, only 27 percent of Americans say they approve of the job congressional Republicans are doing to hold the Trump Administration accountable, compared to 53 percent who disapprove.

Asked what concerned them the most about congressional Republicans response to the Mueller probe, 47 percent of people said it was “putting politics over country.”

It should be obvious to anyone that the Trump Tower meeting and the hiring of Paul Manafort show that Trump’s judgment was, at best, seriously impaired when it came to the Russian interference. But I understand that this is complicated. I get lost in the arcana too. But it’s a very serious. And the Democrats have to find a way to inform the public about this not just because it politically useful but because it’s important.

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A tiny bit of hope

by digby

I don’t know what to make of this, but perhaps it will give you something to hope for:

Just 36 percent of voters say they would vote for Trump over a generic Democratic candidate in 2020, compared with 44 percent who would pick the Democrat, the poll shows. One in five voters, 20 percent, are undecided.

Trump has trouble on the homefront, too. Despite the conventional wisdom that the president is wildly popular with the GOP base, the poll also shows a desire among a healthy slice of Republicans — though a distinct minority — for a challenger to run against Trump for the nomination.

Sounds good, right? Well….

While the poll suggests Trump is being buffeted on all sides, he may be stronger than the data suggest. On Election Day 2016, only 38 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of the then-GOP candidate, according to exit polls. More than three in five voters, 61 percent, said he wasn’t qualified to be president.

Obviously, it’s way to early to judge anything about 2020. And the Democrat who runs against him will get such a full Trump going-over that he or she will be unrecognizable by the time it’s all over. Still, there’s a slight glimmer of hope that despite a roaring economy only 36 percent of Americans say they would vote for this lunatic again.

That 36 percent, though. They seem to be in charge at the moment for reasons that don’t really make much sense.

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