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Month: June 2018

Giuliani’s FBI buds worked those refs hard

Published by digby on June 18, 2018

Giuliani’s FBI buds worked those refs hard

by digby

I wrote about the DOJ Inspector General’s report for Salon this morning:

I think everyone remembers that Rudy Giuliani played a significant role in the Trump presidential campaign and was especially visible during the last month or so. On October 25th he made a couple of appearances on TV in which he hinted broadly that the campaign had an October Surprise coming.

On Fox and Friends he was asked if Trump had anything planned other than “inspiring rallies” and he said (at the 8:50 mark) “yes.” When asked what that was he replied

“Heh-heh-heh,” Mr. Giuliani laughed. “You’ll see.”

Appearing to enjoy his own coy reply, Mr. Giuliani resumed chuckling: “Ha-ha-ha.”

“When will this happen?” Ms. Earhardt asked.

“We got a couple of surprises left,” Mr. Giuliani said, smiling.

Later that day he appeared on another show and gleefully reiterated his claim. You can see it at the 2 minute mark in the following video:

https://youtu.be/L-4mDUS1a9w

Two days later James Comey sent his notorious letter.

On November 4th Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye reported that Giuliani went on Fox and Friends again and was openly bragging about that gambit:

He said he had expected it 3 or 4 weeks previous and had heard about FBI agents upset about Clinton not being charged since July. They were especially angry that they couldn’t get a hold of her medical records.

This was four days before the election. And that appearance prompted Reps. Elijah E. Cummings and John Conyers, the Ranking Members of the House Committees on Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary to ask the Inspector General of the Department of Justice to investigate the leaks Giuliani was bragging about receiving. The result of that investigation was assumed to be included in the Inspector General’s report that was released last week. It was not.

This is very odd and unlike this IG who has a reputation for thoroughness. It’s particularly odd since within the report itself there is a lot of evidence that there was tremendous hostility to Clinton among this group of FBI agents centered around the NY office but the IG didn’t summarize any of it or offer any conclusion. Some analysts have assumed this means there is an ongoing investigation but there is no official word to that effect. It’s just left hanging out there, unresolved.

Today the House Judiciary Committee will be hearing testimony from the Inspector General Michael Horowitz. And one hopes that the Democrats will be prepared to ask him about all this.

And it isn’t all of it by any means. There was the big Bret Baier “scoop” days before the election in which he claimed that sources told him that Clinton was going to be indicted after the election:

He had to apologize for that report later, admitting that his FBI “sources” were wrong. But it was already out in the ether and Trump had made it a central theme of his rallies which had been carried live by the networks and millions of people heard it. As KellyAnne Conway Trump’s campaign manager at the time said on MSNBC when asked if Trump would correct his claims, “well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton. No matter how it’s being termed, the voters are hearing it for what it is, a culture of corruption.”

It seems to have worked exactly as “someone” hoped it would.

Last Friday night, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), once again proving that he’s a few pecans short of a fruitcake, did it again. He told Laura Ingraham that he had received leaks from Trump supporting FBI agents as well:

The ranking member of the committee Adam Schiff (D-CA)said on Sunday that he’d never heard anything about that so if it was a “whistleblower” he forgot to share the evidence all this time with his fellows on the committee. Giuliani, meanwhile, is on a tear, saying the whole top echelon of the FBI needs to be replaced with his friends, the “honest” New York FBI agents.

The report did conclude that the FBI played it straight in the Clinton email investigation even as it showed that a couple of the investigators were hostile to Trump and that former FBI director Comey was insubordinate and showed poor professional judgment. (And whether he admits it or not, the report indicates quite clearly that Comey’s judgment was influenced by this cabal of FBI agents who were pressing for him to “lock her up.”) The Republicans played the refs very, very hard and it’s fair to conclude that they may have played Inspector General Horowitz too since he focused on all the specious Trump accusations and left the more damning evidence of the successful FBI sabotage against the Clinton campaign hovering between the lines.

And naturally, all this information about the  FBI agents scheming to sabotage the Clinton campaign is being ignored in the press in favor of the sensational text message from Peter Strzok to his girlfriend Lisa Page in which he said “we will stop him” when his girlfriend lamented that Donald Trump might become president. As Yogi Berra said, it’s like deja vu all over again. Once again the Trump team’s misconduct is downplayed while petty misdeeds that feed the Trump narrative of grievance and victimization are emphasized.

A cabal of FBI agents in the New York office with loyalty to Trump and Giuliani hectored their bosses, leaked to the press, had former agents go on television to put the Department of Justice and the FBI under pressure to act harshly against Hillary Clinton, even when if was outside the norms, rules and laws of the department. They were successful beyond their wildest dreams.

The media very helpfully obliged them:

The media have done no introspection on this issue and the dynamic continues to this day. The press does a lot of critical coverage of Trump but they will leap at any chance to “balance the scales” no matter how ludicrous as we have seen once again this past week when the GOP handed them the Strzok text as if they’d just found the ark of the covenant.

The Republicans will be happy to spoon feed them buckets of “oppo” to fill their desire to be even-handed as soon as the next presidential campaign begins.  And the end result will be as distorting of the facts and the truth as this inane narrative that poor Donald Trump was the victim of an FBI plot to deny him the presidency when he won the election at least in part because the FBI sabotaged his opponent.

It’s enough to give you a migraine. But that’s the idea.

GOPers like Trump’s new bff Kim more than Pelosi

Published by digby on June 18, 2018

GOPers like Trump’s new bff Kim more than Pelosi

by digby

Self-identified Republicans now have a marginally more favorable view of Kim Jong Un than they do for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), according to a new Ipsos poll done exclusively for The Daily Beast.

The poll of roughly 1,000 adults aged 18 and over was conducted June 14-15, shortly after President Trump’s historic summit with the North Korea dictator. According to the results, 19 percent of Republicans indicated they had a favorable view of Kim with 68 percent saying they had an unfavorable view (12 percent of voters overall had a favorable view of Kim, compared to 75 percent who viewed him unfavorably). That compared slightly better than the perception of Pelosi, who had a 17 percent favorable, 72 percent unfavorable rating among self-identified Republicans.

Pelosi, nevertheless, was only the second-most disliked figure on Capitol Hill. Her overall 29 percent favorable, 47 percent unfavorable rating was slightly better than the numbers for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell had an overall favorability rating of 20 percent with 43 percent viewing him unfavorable.

Self-identified Democrats, for what it’s worth, had a significantly more favorable opinion of McConnell than of Kim Jong Un.

I’m actually shocked that 68% of Republicans still have an unfavorable view of Kim Jong Un after Trump’s paeans to his fabulousness. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.

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Losing control by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 18, 2018

Losing control
by Tom Sullivan


Hundreds amassed on Father’s Day outside the federal tent city erected to house immigrants in Tornillo, TX. Image from Facebook live feed by Louis Moncivias.

Control of the narrative shifted away from the sitting president’s control over the weekend as the Trump administration, unaccustomed to concerted resistance, found itself outgunned and outflanked. First, it took fire for its policy of separating families at border stations. Second, details in the Department of Justice’s Inspector General report emerged that showed pressure from anti-Hillary Clinton agents in the FBI’s New York field office influenced then-director James Comey to issue a damaging letter to Congress in the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign. The news erodes Trump’s allegations that his winning 2016 campaign was somehow a victim of a “deep state” conspiracy directed against him.

Teams from Congress and thousands of citizens converged on Texas immigrant processing stations along the Texas border and elsewhere to inspect, to protest, and to ask where the girls and toddlers are who were separated from parents at the border. Most of the reporting on detention centers to date has been on facilities holding boys 10 and older.

In Tornillo, TX, protesters held signs reading, “Fight ignorance, not immigrants” and “This is how the Holocaust started.” Texas Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Rep. Beto O’Rourke, attended along with other Texas Democratic candidates and Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-MA).

Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) visited a “processing facility” in Texas known by detainees as the “icebox.” He described it as “nothing short of a prison.”

At an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Elizabeth, NJ, Democratic members of Congress met with detainees from the U.S.-Mexico border. Nearly 500 protesters held a rally outside to condemn the detention policy:

“What I saw in there is inhumane. I see the politics of this administration and it turns my stomach, because I know what this country stands for,” said Rep. Albio Sires, D-West New York. “And that’s not what we are in America.”

The Associated Press and other outlets reported on the hundreds of children detained under the separation policy “in a series of cages” constructed in an old warehouse in South Texas. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Kirstjen Nielsen flatly denied any such policy exists, despite the visual evidence, the announcement of the policy in May by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the publishing of detention/separation guidelines on the DHS website. The Nielsen tweet reflecting the Trump administration’s incoherence drew condemnation online.

Fordham Law professor Jed Jed Shugerman described Trump policy in a tweet: 1. It is a good policy that the Bible requires; 2. It is a horrible “law” that is somehow the Democrats’ fault. Don’t ask us why; 3. It’s not our policy at all.

From the AP report:

“The government is literally taking kids away from their parents and leaving them in inappropriate conditions,” Brane said. “If a parent left a child in a cage with no supervision with other 5-year-olds, they’d be held accountable.”

Dr. Colleen Kraft, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that she visited a small shelter in Texas recently, which she declined to identity. A toddler inside the 60-bed facility caught her eye — she was crying uncontrollably and pounding her little fists on mat.

But perhaps the greatest challenge yet to the policy, former first lady Laura Bush published a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post Sunday night condemning the policy, calling it “cruel” and “immoral.” Bush wrote:

“I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.”

As of this writing, the sitting president has not yet taken to Twitter to savage Bush for daring to challenge him. Unless a staffer manages to take a hammer to Trump’s cell phone, that is simply a matter of time.

Meanwhile, information in the DOJ Inspector General’s report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation revealed “a cadre
of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton” among members of the FBI’s New York Field Office and retired members. Actions suggest that within days of receiving Anthony Weiner’s laptop as part of a separate investigation, personnel from that office leaked its presence to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) and the Trump campaign via Rudy Giuliani. Knowing the story might leak to the press put pressure on then-FBI Director James Comey to get ahead of the story by sending a letter to Congress about the matter days ahead of the election. That letter, Nate Silver argues, probably cost Clinton the election. A rumored IG investigation into the New York/Congress/Trump leak could cost Nunes as well.

Josh Marshall assembled a timeline of events that suggest links between the New York FBI office leaks, Nunes, and the Trump campaign.

Finally, some world-class trolling of the Trump administration yesterday by the French embassy in Washington:

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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.

I want the DeTrumpication of the Country @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on June 18, 2018

I want a DeTrumpication of the Country

By Spocko

When I read about Presidential pardons being handed out to “clean things up” I feel my Angry Left human side rise up. I really want to see some serious prosecution of the jerks who are driving the fascist state. I want them to get caught, disgraced, lose their money and go to jail.

I want the people who supported them to not get away with the, “I barely even knew them!” crap.

I want these jerks to get caught for crimes they committed, flip on the crimes that others committed, and then NOT get off easily for their own crimes.

I don’t want them to get a fine and get rehabilitated on Fox News.

When the Democrats get back in power, I don’t want them to “move on” or “look forward, not backward.” I want them to hold investigations and trials. I want them to repeal laws that made corrupt things legal.

 I want the  DeTrumpication of the country

I’m tired of Republican politicians not getting their feet held to the fire for their support of fascist policies. I want them to OWN Trump hard now, so that when he goes down, they go down with him.

I want the media to keep asking why the degradation of Constitutional values is acceptable to Republicans.

I want the Democrats to have a thirst for punishment, instead of a timid attitude of, “Well, the Republicans are just like me, I better not piss them off, because then they’ll come after me when they are in power.”

To return to norms of humanity, decency and American constitutional values we need punishment of the breaking of those values. Otherwise they become the norms.

This is not your father’s America

Published by digby on June 18, 2018

This is not your father’s America

by Dennis Hartley

Norman Rockwell’s America:

George Lincoln Rockwell’s America:

“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.”
–William S. Burroughs

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PSA: How to help with the border crisis

Published by digby on June 18, 2018

PSA: How to help with the border crisis

by digby

This Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick and Margo Schlanger rounds up some of the ways you can contribute volunteer or otherwise help:

First, the policy: It helps to be incredibly clear on what the law is, and what has and has not changed. When Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that the policy of separating children from their parents upon entry is a law passed by Democrats that Democrats will not fix, they are lying.

There are two different policies in play, and both are new.

First is the new policy that any migrant family entering the U.S. without a border inspection will be prosecuted for this minor misdemeanor. The parents get incarcerated and that leaves children to be warehoused. The parents then typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor and are given a sentence of the few days they served waiting for trial. But then when the parents try to reunite with their children, they are given the runaround—and possibly even deported, alone. The children are left in HHS custody, often without family.

Second is a new and apparently unwritten policy that even when the family presents themselves at a border-entry location, seeking asylum—that is, even when the family is complying in all respects with immigration law—the government is snatching the children away from their parents. Here, the government’s excuse seems to be that they want to keep the parents in jaillike immigration detention for a long time, while their asylum cases are adjudicated. The long-standing civil rights case known as Flores dictates that they aren’t allowed to keep kids in that kind of detention, so the Trump administration says they have to break up the families. They do not have to break up families—it is the government’s new choice to jail people with credible asylum claims who haven’t violated any laws that is leading to the heartbreaking separations you’ve been reading about.

So that is what is happening. Whether or not that is what the Bible demands is the subject of a different column. Good explainers on what is and is not legal detention of immigrants and asylum-seekers can also be found here and here and here.

Next: Which groups to support.

• The ACLU is litigating this policy in California.

• If you’re an immigration lawyer, the American Immigration Lawyers Association will be sending around a volunteer list for you to help represent the women and men with their asylum screening, bond hearings, ongoing asylum representation, etc. Please sign up.

• Al Otro Lado is a binational organization that works to offer legal services to deportees and migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, including deportee parents whose children remain in the U.S.

• CARA—a consortium of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the American Immigration Council, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association—provides legal services at family detention centers.

• The Florence Project is an Arizona project offering free legal services to men, women, and unaccompanied children in immigration custody.

• Human Rights First is a national organization with roots in Houston that needs help from lawyers too.

• Kids in Need of Defense works to ensure that kids do not appear in immigration court without representation, and to lobby for policies that advocate for children’s legal interests. Donate here.

• The Legal Aid Justice Center is a Virginia-based center providing unaccompanied minors legal services and representation.

• Pueblo Sin Fronteras is an organization that provides humanitarian aid and shelter to migrants on their way to the U.S.

• RAICES is the largest immigration nonprofit in Texas offering free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families. Donate here and sign up as a volunteer here.

• The Texas Civil Rights Project is seeking “volunteers who speak Spanish, Mam, Q’eqchi’ or K’iche’ and have paralegal or legal assistant experience.”

• Together Rising is another Virginia-based organization that’s helping provide legal assistance for 60 migrant children who were separated from their parents and are currently detained in Arizona.

• The Urban Justice Center’s Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project is working to keep families together.

• Women’s Refugee Commission advocates for the rights and protection of women, children, and youth fleeing violence and persecution.

• Finally, ActBlue has aggregated many of these groups under a single button.

This list isn’t comprehensive, so let us know what else is happening. And please call your elected officials, stay tuned for demonstrations, hug your children, and be grateful if you are not currently dependent on the basic humanity of U.S. policy.

Update, June 17, 2018: Thanks to readers who updated us with more organizations fighting this policy. Other good work is being done by the following:

• CLINIC’s Defending Vulnerable Populations project offers case assistance to hundreds of smaller organizations all over the country that do direct services for migrant families and children.

• American Immigrant Representation Project (AIRP), which works to secure legal representation for immigrants.

• CASA in Maryland, D.C., Virginia, and Pennsylvania. They litigate, advocate, and help with representation of minors needing legal services.

• Freedom for Immigrants (Formerly CIVIC), which has been a leading voice opposing immigrant detention.

• The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center represents all of the immigrant kids placed by the government in foster care in Michigan (one of the biggest foster care placement states). About two-thirds are their current clients are separation cases, and they work to find parents and figure out next steps.

• The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project is doing work defending and advancing the rights of immigrants through direct legal services, systemic advocacy, and community education.

• Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights works for the rights of children in immigration proceedings.

• The Women’s Refugee Commission has aggregated five actions everyone can take that go beyond donating funds.

• And finally, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP)—which organizes law students and lawyers to develop and enforce a set of legal and human rights for refugees and displaced persons—just filed suit challenging the cancellation of the Central American Minors program.

Shushing the obnoxious uppity wimmin

Published by digby on June 17, 2018

Shushing the obnoxious uppity wimmin

by digby

Yes, he really said that

Usually he has to pay big bucks to keep women quie, but this time he got a feebie. I’ll bet this gave all those old male Fox viewers a thrill:

Ain’t he sweet?

This was the same “spontaneous” press avail (actually a planned interview with Fox and Friends that they tried to pass off as spontaneous) in which Trump said how much he admires the fact that Kim Jong Un’s people sit up straight and how he wants his “own people” to do that too. (He said later he was being sarcastic but it sure didn’t sound that way when he said it.)

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Bannon bowing and scraping to get back in the court is enough to make you vomit

Published by digby on June 17, 2018

Bannon bowing and scraping to get back in the privy chamber is enough to make you vomit

by digby

How desperate is this man to get back in Trump’s good graces? Bleccch.

Honestly, giving Trump a literal tongue bath on national TV would be less demeaning. It’s kind of sickening to watch it:

“Donald Trump is accomplishing everything he committed to the American people on the campaign that I stepped in as CEO. I couldn’t be prouder of the guy. All he has to do is continue to hit those marks on that whiteboard and he’s going to run the tables.”

More embarrassing sycophancy:

(That’s the strategy Fareed Zakaria called “clever.”)

Even the 2 year olds are nothing but hardened criminals who must be punished.

He’s working it so, so hard. And I’d guess it all made Trump want to pop a little blue pill.

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We knew he was a snake before we let him in

Published by digby on June 17, 2018

We knew he was a snake before we let him in

by digby

No one should be surprised in the least that the Trump administration would forcibly remove children from their parents and put them in camps. It’s right up his alley:

December 2015:

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump told TIME that he does not know whether he would have supported or opposed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer,” he said during a recent interview in his office in New York City. “I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.”

Trump added that he believes wartime sometimes requires difficult choices. “It’s a tough thing. It’s tough,” he said. “But you know war is tough. And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We’re not a strong country anymore. We’re just so off.”

He loves torture and mass execution with bullets dipped in pigs blood too. He believes in “taking out the families.”

He always made it clear that he didn’t give a damn about children:

A man who said he was from Connecticut told Trump about plans to relocate Syrian families into the community and let their children come to schools.

When asked whether he’d be able to “look at these children” to tell them they couldn’t go to school, Trump said: “I can look in their faces and say, ‘You can’t come here.’”

The crowd applauded wildly.

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The Trump administration will decide who’s an American and who isn’t

Published by digby on June 17, 2018

The Trump administration will decide who’s an American and who isn’t

by digby

It seems that no matter what, there’s always plenty of money for hunting down foreigners. In fact, that seems to be the most important function of government these days:

The Trump administration is not only doing everything it can to discourage immigration of all sorts, it intends to launch an effort to identify naturalized American citizens it believes cheated the naturalization process and strip them of their American citizenship. The extraordinary process of denaturalizing an American citizen has occurred very rarely, with the Justice Department filing an estimated 300 civil denaturalization cases since 1990. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna, however, told the Associated Press that the agency is ramping up its efforts to identify citizens who, for instance, assumed new identities in order to avoid deportation and claim a green card or citizenship.

Cissna said his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of suspected fraud. “We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”

I don’t think they’ll be hunting Nazis.In fact, Nazis are undoubtedly exempt. As are Russian mobsters and money launderers. It’s the Mexican hotel maids who are the biggest danger to society.

Or flag-burners:

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