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Month: June 2018

Fox News tells the truth!

Published by digby on June 10, 2018

Fox News tells the truth!

by digby

Like a stopped clock, Fox and Friends is right twice a day. Here is one of those times:

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Trade tantrum for dummies

Published by digby on June 10, 2018

Trade tantrum for dummies

by digby

Ted Lieu:

“It does not help the American worker when the president throws a temper tantrum at one of our closest allies,” Lieu replied. “It’s particularly odd to go after Canada for three reasons. Number one, the U.S. has an $8.4 billion trade surplus with Canada. Number two: Canada has lower average tariffs than the United States. And number three, American steel companies and steelworkers oppose these tariffs on Canadian steel, so the very industry that the Trump administration is trying to help opposes these tariffs. None of this makes any sense.”

“Is there any part of this that is justifiable?” Witt pressed. “The president himself keeps reiterating it’s about farmers — specifically dairy farmers. Is that at least where there is legitimate concern for trade imbalance between the two countries?”

“That’s actually not the reason that the United States, according to the Trump administration, imposed the steel tariffs on Canada,” he replied. “And if I were a steelworker, I’d be quite offended that Donald Trump is trying to use the steel industry and steelworkers to somehow affect dairy. That’s not how this should be done. At the end of the day, a trade war doesn’t help anyone and it’s going to ultimately hurt middle-class families across America.”

Trump thinks “free trade” means that everyone agrees to import and export the same products at the same price in every country. If they sell cars to us, they have to buy the same number of cars from us.

He’s confused. And there’s nothing anyone can say to change his mind because he’s been addled on this subject for 40 years.

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The divide and conquer strategy in full effect

Published by digby on June 10, 2018

The divide and conquer strategy in full effect

by digby

Oh look…

Arron Banks, the millionaire businessman who bankrolled Nigel Farage’s campaign to quit the EU, had multiple meetings with Russian embassy officials in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, documents seen by the Observer suggest.

Banks, who gave £12m of services to the campaign, becoming the biggest donor in UK history, has repeatedly denied any involvement with Russian officials, or that Russian money played any part in the Brexit campaign. The Observer has seen documents which a senior Tory MP says, if correct, raise urgent and troubling questions about his relationship with the Russian government.

The communications suggest:

• Multiple meetings between the leaders of Leave.EU and high-ranking Russian officials, from November 2015 to 2017.

• Two meetings in the week Leave.EU launched its official campaign.

• An introduction to a Russian businessman, by the Russian ambassador, the day after Leave.EU launched its campaign, who reportedly offered Banks a multibillion dollar opportunity to buy Russian goldmines.

• A trip to Moscow in February 2016 to meet key partners and financiers behind a gold project, including a Russian bank.

• Continued extensive contact in the run-up to the US election when Banks, his business partner and Leave.EU spokesman Andy Wigmore, and Nigel Farage campaigned in the US to support Donald Trump’s candidacy.

Arron Banks refuses to appear before Commons committee
Read more
Banks and Wigmore – who was also present at many of the meetings – were due to appear before the select committee for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on Tuesday to answer questions about Leave.EU’s role in the European referendum.

Hours after the Observer contacted them for comment on Friday, they published a letter stating they would not attend the hearing, and accused the committee of colluding with a pro-Remain campaign group.

I realize that there is a lot of hysteria about the Russian government right now. But there is also a lot of evidence that they have an agenda to divide the western allies from within to their own advantage — and are successfully carrying it out. I see that the right in all these countries is more than willing to allow this because they seem to be advancing their cause at least in the short run.

It’s probably time for people to sober up and recognize that something profound is happening and decide if they are going to be rational about this challenge or if we’re all going to lose ourselves in internecine fighting and just let it happen. That dynamic has happened before. It doesn’t end well.

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Biff Tannen’s great adventure

Published by digby on June 10, 2018

Biff Tannen’s great adventure

by digby

Trump told the world leaders not to retaliate AND HE MEANT IT.

Trump is the Emperor of the world (well, maybe except for Vlad) and these other leaders had better learn to kiss the ring. He WILL be obeyed.

Actually, he’s a dumb bully who can dish it out but he can’t take it.

And his chief economic adviser needs to lay off the Molson or the Nyquil or whatever he’s on.

If what he’s trying to do is create an impression that Trump is tough, whining like a little baby on TV about how our own neighbor didn’t play along with the ruse isn’t gettying the job done. Does he think the North Koreans can’t hear what he’s saying?

Apparently, Trump thinks this is all a reality show in which the “script” calls for America’s allies to take his shit in public so that Kim Jong Un will be impressed by his big, beautiful hands. He doesn’t seem to realize that other world leaders have their own audiences and they don’t especially enjoy watching their leaders treated like shit by a dotard.

What a mess.

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World View by tristero

Published by digby on June 10, 2018

World View

by tristero

Trump’s world view: He wants to align himself with the “winners” in a brutal, vicious world (by “himself” meaning not America, but himself, his family, and his fawning courtiers). The winners will be China and other authoritarian regimes. Especially Russia. The losers are all the weaklings of G-7, NATO and other democracies.

In such a world view, who cares what these losers think? They’ll scramble to take our scraps and be grateful. In such a world view, it’s important to put the losers in their place. Lie to their faces, dis their meetings, show how easy it is to embarrass them, keep the attention on me. It both gets them used to groveling and sends a clear signal to the winners: I’m with you guys.

There’s a major problem with this world view. The world is a far more complicated place. But never mind. Trump is hellbent on aligning the US with other totalitarian states. As the first among equals. And that means he must turn America into an unabashedly overt totalitarian state. No more pussy-footing around. Torture? You bet we torture, we’re proud of it, and better watch out, or you’re next.

As for you losers? Germany? France? Canada? What are you gonna do when I break your stupid trade treaties? Cry? Oh, boo hoo hoo. Seriously, why am I wasting my precious time? Let’s talk to the real men and make real deals. Like with Russia. Like with China. There’s the real game.

And as much as we don’t like it, this will be the future company America will find itself aligned with: fellow dictatorships, allied to openly exploit the resources of the losers.

In short, the world is not going back to November 7, 2016. Ever. When Trump’s gone, not a single traditional ally will trust us. Why would they when the forces that elected Trump could re-emerge at any time and derail everything? Or as Krugman put it, “even if Trump eventually departs the scene in disgrace, the fact that someone like him could come to power in the first place will always be in the back of everyone’s mind.”

One more thing: The world is not going back to pre-Trump but the world will not long endure a totalitarian-dominated global order either.

We are in for a long, very difficult time.

De-escalation training by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 10, 2018

De-escalation training
by Tom Sullivan


2016 presidential vote by county.

The United States, a place of legendary freedom, has become an authoritarian state under our noses, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed recently. If there is an upside to the Twilight Zone-ish quality of recent weeks, they seem (for now) to have sidelined the post-November 8 progressive funk of shock and rage. We are perhaps seeing the beginnings of a strategy for Democrats regaining both their footing and political ground. We may have to de-escalate the rhetoric in the country first to heal it.

Joel Dodge wrote at Washington Monthly that what animated and empowered Robert F. Kennedy’s message was a politics of dignity:

What Americans needed and craved, Kennedy believed, was greater dignity and purpose. And that meant jobs. Good work is more than clock-punching drudgery. It means having a stake in a community to call one’s own—an exercise of citizenship to take pride in.

“We need jobs, dignified employment at decent pay,” he said. “The kind of employment that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, ‘I helped build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures. I am a man.’”

As inequality widens even as the economy recovers from the Great Recession, it is not only the loss of buying power, heightened uncertainty, and decline of white privilege animating the resurrection of authoritarianism. It is the fading of the American Dream, and the disappearance of the middle class and the sense that people have a stake in this country.

Not coincidentally, dignity has become the core dividing line in our politics in the age of Trump. The president has set about boosting solely the dignity of his own narrow political base, and stripping the dignity of everyone else. By relentlessly denigrating just about every marginalized group, Trump elevates the relative status of his followers by undermining the status of nearly everyone else.

At the same time, conservatives have latched on to rhetoric about the dignity of work to justify cutting off Medicaid and other welfare benefits from the unemployed. There’s a big difference between penalizing people for not working and facilitating work for all who want it. Progressives shouldn’t dismiss the gains to personal dignity from expanding employment just because conservatives pervert that idea to demean and marginalize the poor.

A jobs guarantee is a good start, Dodge believes, but the ability to serve The Market is not the same as having work that elevates one’s family and community. Workers in the underworld of Metropolis had jobs. What they lacked was economic justice, a share in the fruits of their collective labors, and recognition of their humanity.

Speaking of the starving children he’d seen in rural Mississippi, the despair of jobless and hopeless Native Americans on reservations, and decaying, unheated classrooms in black neighborhoods, Kennedy said, “Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all.”

Supporters of the current administration, aware their fortunes and demographic dominance have been in decline for decades, now find themselves enraged at the prospects of joining their brethren on society’s lower rungs. Sneering at their Trumpist folly won’t help us. Policies that truly lift all boats might.

Preliminary findings from Anat Shenker-Osorio (Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy), Ian Haney López (Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class), and Demos researchers suggests an economic message alone will not draw as much support for Democrats as a “race-class narrative” that combines an economic message with acknowledgment of racial and economic disparities. The assumption that the left must run on either identity politics or economic populism is a false choice, their research shows.

Josh Holland writes at The Nation:

Shenker-Osorio told me that the “race-class narrative” she and her colleagues are developing “draws a causal link between issues of race and racism and the extreme and growing class inequities that are of course more acute for communities of color.” The project’s goal is to determine whether a message “that combines issues of race and class [can] actually beat both the opposition’s message—which is always the name of the game—and also the kind of color-blind, economic populist message that we’ve come to accept as a progressive standard.”

The results, according to Shenker-Osorio, were compelling. “Every single message that we tested that gave explicit mention of race” performed better with what the researchers defined as the progressive base and was “also more persuasive to the 63 percent of people who fell not in our base, and not in the opposition’s, but in that coveted middle.”

“Persuadable” white voters are torn between the two. Yet dog whistles deployed by the right to fire up their base activate a fear response that drowns out an otherwise appealing economic message.

Shenker-Osorio said that it’s vital to “help white people understand why it is that these severe racial disparities exist, rather than just naming the disparities, which leaves people to fill in the causal relationship for themselves.” When voters are left to draw their own conclusions about why people of color have disparate economic outcomes, they’re more likely to embrace conservative narratives that hold that poor work habits or stereotypical cultural flaws are responsible. Naming a culprit—in this case, politicians who use racial animus to divide working America—creates a sense of solidarity with people of color, rather than stoking resentment toward them. “Perhaps the most interesting finding from our research,” said Shenker-Osorio, “is that explicit references to race actually bolster economic populism.”

In their survey of Minnesota voters — half people of color and half of them white — people of color responded positively to the race-class message. Twice as many people of color said they would sit out the election after being presented the race-neutral economic appeal.

At Washington Monthly, Hullabaloo alum David Atkins extends the discussion:

It is self-evident that Trump voters by definition didn’t see a problem with voting for a racist, sexist buffoon. But many Trump voters also proved remarkably indifferent to Republican economic orthodoxy, and many want high taxes on Wall Street, robust jobs programs and investment in domestic industry, and libertarian social policy on many issues like drugs. Neither party will give them everything they want, but a committed progressive economic agenda that rejects the muddled market-directed pabulum of education and retraining as a solution to all ills can be successful in winning many of them over, even though the progressive commitment to racial and gender equality might rankle them as just so much social-justice-warrior political correctness. We already [know] this can work, as a very large number of registered Democrats are already just so cross-pressured. Appallingly, a full third of Democrats have a negative opinion of the Black Lives Matter, and a quarter of Democrats think millions voted illegally in the 2016 election. If they register as Democrats anyway, it’s a fair bet that economics are their top priority. It stands to reason their number could be increased to regain some of the voters who chose Barack Obama twice, and then flipped over to Trump.

So, too, can cross-pressured affluent suburban Democrats be won over by a stridently economically progressive Democratic Party in spite of their potential reservations about their tax bracket, mutual fund returns, McMansion values and budget deficits. Sure, these voters might not like the idea of transaction taxes on Wall Street impacting their dividends or affordable housing being built near their bungalows, but their commitments to social equality and their desire not to have jingoists running the country’s trade and foreign policy mean that they will generally choose the party of both Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders over that of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

“Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class problem,'” Stanley Greenberg said this time last year. “They have a ‘working-class problem.’” That extends beyond urban and suburban enclaves. Race-class messaging that works there ought to work in harder-to-reach districts. I must reiterate that focus on suburban voters at the expense of rural ones reflects not only a federal elections bias at the expense of state and local ones, it threatens to leave the majority of state legislatures in GOP hands for the next round of redistricting in 2021. Let’s not do that, shall we?

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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.

The biggest scandal of all-time

Published by digby on June 9, 2018

The biggest scandal of all-time

by digby

I have been meaning to draw your attention to this piece by David Corn at Mother Jones because I think it’s important to take a step back and look at the big picture:

The other evening I was on a cable news show to cover the latest Russia news of the day—and I had an epiphany.

We were talking about a recent scoop from Michael Isikoff, the co-author of my latest book, Russian Roulette. He had reported that a Spanish prosecutor had handed the FBI wiretapped transcripts of a Russian official who was suspected of money laundering and for years had been trying to gain influence within the American conservative movement and the National Rifle Association. We then discussed a New York Times article revealing that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime fixer, had met with a Russian oligarch in January 2017, around the time a US company affiliated with this tycoon began making $500,000 in payments to Cohen. Next we turned to the latest in the so-called Spygate nonscandal—the false claim, championed by Trump and his defenders, that the FBI infiltrated a spy into his presidential campaign for political purposes.

Then the show moved on. We had spent 15 or so minutes on these important developments, delving into the details—but without referring to the essence of the story. And it hit me: Though it’s clear Trump’s presidency has been hobbled by the Russia scandal, the manner in which this matter plays out in the media has helped Trump.

Almost every day, Trump pushes out a simple (and dishonest) narrative via tweets and public remarks: The Russia investigation is a…well, you know, a witch hunt. Or a hoax. Or fake news. He blasts out the same exclamations daily: Witch hunt, hoax! Hoax, witch hunt! That’s his mantra.

His synopsis is easy to follow. It encompasses (even if by ignoring) every new fact and revelation. It connects all the inaccurate and false dots Trump and his partisans toss out: Unmasking! Obama wiretapped Trump! The FBI improperly obtained warrants to conduct surveillance on his campaign advisers! And so on. He’s the victim. The bad guys are the Dems, libs, prosecutors, and deep staters pursuing this huge nothing-burger for nothing but political gain. The Russia story, in Trump’s telling, is a black-and-white tale of evildoers persecuting a great man—him. Sad. And this bully uses his pulpit (and smartphone) to transmit this simple message nonstop.

The other side—the accurate perspective—isn’t that complicated. In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s regime mounted information warfare against the United States, in part to help Trump become president. While this attack was underway, the Trump crew tried to collude covertly with Moscow, sought to set up a secret communications channel with Putin’s office, and repeatedly denied in public that this assault was happening, providing cover to the Russian operation. Trump and his lieutenants aligned themselves with and assisted a foreign adversary, as it was attacking the United States. The evidence is rock-solid: They committed a profound act of betrayal. That is the scandal.

He goes on to point out what a complicated story it is and how difficult it is to keep track of the details. But everyone gets tangled in them which means that Trump’s narrative is being absorbed, mainly because nobody’s repeating that less complicated narrative, especially the Democrats who, for some reason, seem terrified to make the case.

He concludes:

Much of the media framing of the Russia scandal has followed Trump’s lead and adopted his collusion-centric perspective. The debate, such as it is, has become whether Trump directly collaborated with Moscow’s covert operation—and whether Trump, as president, tried to thwart the investigation and obstruct justice. The story is not driven by the serious offenses already established: Trump and his associates encouraged and assisted an attack from a foreign foe.

In this ongoing fight, it is Trump and his bumper stickers versus a media presenting a wide variety of disparate disclosures that come and go quickly in a hyperchaotic information ecosystem, often absent full context. No wonder then that a recent poll found that 59 percent of Americans said Mueller has uncovered no crimes. In fact, he has secured 17 criminal indictments and obtained five guilty pleas. Accurate news reporting alone does not always carry the day.

The Russia scandal is the most important scandal in the history of the United States. President Andrew Johnson was impeached (but not convicted) because he violated an act of Congress to remove a secretary of war. In the Teapot Dome scandal, the secretary of the interior in Warren Harding’s administration leased federal lands at low rates to private oil companies, presumably in return for bribes. In Watergate, a president and his aides engaged in political skulduggery against political foes. President Bill Clinton lied about a sexual affair he had with a subordinate in the White House. All these scandals raised serious questions about integrity in government. But at the heart of the Russia scandal is the most fundamental issue for a democracy: the sanctity of elections.

An overseas enemy struck at the core of the republic—and it succeeded. Trump and his minions helped and encouraged this attack by engaging in secret contacts with Moscow and publicly insisting no such assault was happening. This is far bigger than a bribe, a break-in, or a blow job. And, worse, the United States remains vulnerable to such a strike.

Yet the full impact of this scandal does not resonate in the daily coverage and discourse. In many ways, the media presents the Russia scandal mostly as a political threat to Trump, not as a serious threat to the nation. And many Americans, thanks to Trump and his allies, view it as a charade. All this shows how easy it is for disinformation and demagoguery to distort reality. That is a tragedy for the United States. For Trump—and Putin—that is victory.

Read the whole thing, there’s much more and it’s good.

The bottom line is that an incompetent, unfit, corrupt president was elected with the help of an adversarial foreign power. Of course that’s the worst scandal in American history. And he may get away with it.

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Too dark for Kafka

Published by digby on June 9, 2018

Too dark for Kafka

by digby


This is happening. In the United States of America. In 2018.

A Honduran father separated from his wife and child suffered a breakdown at a Texas jail and killed himself in a padded cell last month, according to Border Patrol agents and an incident report filed by sheriff’s deputies.

The death of Marco Antonio Muñoz, 39, has not been publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security, and did not appear in any local news accounts. But according to a copy of a sheriff’s department report obtained by The Washington Post, Muñoz was found on the floor of his cell May 13 in a pool of blood with an item of clothing twisted around his neck.

Starr County sheriff’s deputies recorded the incident as a “suicide in custody.”

Muñoz’s death occurred not long after the Trump administration began implementing its “zero tolerance” crackdown on illegal migration, measures that include separating parents from their children and the threat of criminal prosecution for anyone who enters the United States unlawfully.

For no good reason. This is purely because Trump wants to please Ann Coulter and the rest of his deplorable racist base. There is a lot of work available. They would not come here if there wasn’t. Others are fleeing violence in their home countries. None are coming here to get on the welfare gravy train because it’s almost impossible for a native born American to negotiate the system, much less an undocumented immigrant.

Even if all that weren’t true, this family separation policy is just grotesque.

Here’s what happened to that father:

According to Border Patrol agents with detailed knowledge of what occurred, Muñoz crossed the Rio Grande with his wife and three-year-old son on May 12 near the tiny town of Granjeno, Texas. The area is a popular crossing point for Central American families and teenagers who turn themselves in to apply for asylum in the United States.

Soon after Muñoz and his family were taken into custody, they arrived at a processing station in nearby McAllen and said they wanted to apply for asylum. Border Patrol agents told the family they would be separated. That’s when Muñoz “lost it,” according to one agent, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the incident.

“The guy lost his s—,” the agent said. “They had to use physical force to take the child out of his hands.”

Muñoz was placed in a chain-link detention cell, but he began punching the metal and shaking it violently, agents said.

Though Muñoz did not attempt to assault Border Patrol staff, he was at that point considered to be “pre-assault” because he was so agitated. As one agent described it, Muñoz “had the look of a guy at a bar who wanted to fight someone.”

“We had to get him out,” the agent said. “Those cells are about as secure as a dog kennel. He could have hurt someone.”

Unruly detainees typically are taken to local jails where they can be placed in more secure settings or isolation cells, known as administrative segregation. Border Patrol agents found a vacant cell for Muñoz 40 miles away at the Starr County Jail in Rio Grande City. When they attempted to place Muñoz in the van, he tried to run away, and had to be captured and restrained.

“He yelled and kicked at the windows on the ride to the jail,” an agent said. Shackled and handcuffed, Muñoz attempted to escape again upon arrival, and once more had to be restrained.

According to the sheriff’s department report, Muñoz was booked into the jail at 9:40 p.m. He remained combative, and was placed in a padded isolation cell, it says.

Guards said they checked on Muñoz every 30 minutes, and observed him praying in a corner of his cell the following morning.

A guard who walked by the cell at 9:50 a.m. said he noticed Muñoz laying in the center of the floor, unresponsive and without a pulse. The guard “noticed a small pool of blood by his nose,” and “a piece of clothing twisted around his neck which was tied to the drainage location in the center of the cell,” according to the incident report filed by the sheriff’s department that morning.

Paramedics found Muñoz dead, his electrocardiogram showing a “flat line,” according to the report. The sheriff’s department said it attempted to contact Honduran authorities who could reclaim Muñoz’s body, but they received no answer at a consulate. Muñoz’s wife and son were later released from Border Patrol custody, according to one agent.

Horrifying. Then get this:

Another agent familiar with what happened said he couldn’t understand why Muñoz “would choose to separate himself from his family forever” by taking his own life.

What a snotty bastard. These agents have all been told to take off the gloves and they are reveling in it. You can imagine how poorly they are treating these people.

This is just horrible and it’s getting worse.

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If you build it they will use it

Published by digby on June 9, 2018

If you build it they will use it

by digby

Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post makes an important point about this outrageous surveillance of reporter Ali Watkins:

It was never a question of “if.” 

It was always a matter of “when.”

The seizure of a New York Times reporter’s phone and email records has sent a chill down the spine of every reporter concerned about protecting his or her sources.

That means every serious reporter — especially those in Washington who report on politics and national security.

It is disturbing because reporters need to be able to do their jobs, unfettered. But absolutely no one should be surprised.

First off, the Trump administration has been all too clear about its scorn for established press rights — with the president himself boasting about how he’d love to change libel-law protections and speculating about locking up reporters.

His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, ducked questions early on about whether he would ever agree to subpoena a reporter in a leak investigation.

The signs were all there.

“I’ve been warning reporters to take care as this administration rattled it would go after sources like the previous one,” wrote New York Times reporter Adam Goldman on Twitter shortly after the news broke Thursday night that a former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has been indicted and arrested on charges of making false statements to the FBI during a leak investigation.

But Trump’s anti-press bluster aside, there’s a clear blueprint to follow — courtesy of Barack Obama, who once claimed that he would be the most transparent president ever but proved to be no friend to press rights.

As part of the new investigation, law enforcement officials seized years’ worth of phone and email records of Times reporter Ali Watkins, who had previously dated the Senate staffer. Watkins had reported for BuzzFeed and Politico before being hired by the Times.

BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith described the seizure in stark terms as “what looks like a case of law enforcement interfering with a reporter’s constitutional right to gather information about her own government.”

Under Obama, the Justice Department subpoenaed the telephone records of AP journalists as investigators pursued a leak.

It also went after Fox News reporter James Rosen and named him as a “co-conspirator” in a leak about North Korea’s nuclear program.

And James Risen, then a New York Times reporter, struggled for years to avoid testifying about his confidential source during the leak investigation of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer.

Risen told me that he had thought, for a time, that the Obama administration would drop the efforts to pursue him that were begun during the George W. Bush administration, but that never happened. If anything, they ramped up.

But the pursuit of Rosen may have been the most extreme of all the Obama-era cases.

The Justice Department used security badge access records to track his comings and goings from the State Department, The Washington Post wrote at the time: “They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal emails.”

Eventually, the pursuit of Rosen was dropped, as was the government’s characterization of him as a co-conspirator. Eventually, Risen was let off the hook, too.

But what happened under Obama set an ominous tone for reporters who were trying to do their jobs of informing the public.

So did the Obama administration’s record-breaking use of an arcane century-old law — the Espionage Act — which it used nine times to pursue leakers.

“If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama,” Risen wrote shortly after Trump’s election.

Later in Obama’s second term, perhaps aware of how history would judge this unsavory part of his presidential record, the administration backed off its aggressive pursuit of reporters’ sources.

They began to play nice.

New Justice Department guidelines were agreed upon after collaborative discussions between the department and members of the press. The rules require government investigators to have “made all reasonable attempts to obtain the information from alternative, non-media sources” before they may go after reporters’ records. (It’s unclear whether that happened in the current case.)

And Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, eventually said publicly that he never wanted journalists to go to jail for doing their work.

Neither did the nation’s founders, which is why the U.S. Constitution includes the First Amendment — a powerful protection but one that is open to interpretation and real-life norms.

Despite the Obama endgame, no one could erase what had happened. The dangerous precedent was set.

On Friday, Risen put out a statement in his new role as director of the First Look Press Freedom Defense Fund, calling the move against the Times reporter “an ominous step toward a more authoritarian approach to the press by a White House that has already made it clear that it is at war with journalists who are performing the daily public service of keeping Americans informed.”

I wrote a lot about these cases during the Obama administration.

What I always said about both Bush and Obama was “if you build it, they will use it” meaning that once you create the apparatus for this behavior and set the precedents successive leaders will never tear it down. Whether you were worried about another Bush or another Obama or, God help us, Donald Trump, if you let it happen under “your” leader the ones you don’t like were going to make use of it too.

Now we have an outright authoritarian who has openly declared war on the press in a dozen different ways doing exactly that. They may have done it anyway but it’s awfully hard to make an argument when President Obama was the one who put it in play in the first place.