Month: August 2018

Fasten your seatbelts. We’re about to go into warp drive.

by digby

Paul Waldman writes this morning that the next eleven weeks are going to be decisive for the Trump presidency. He notes first that Michael Cohen appears to either be on the cusp of indictment or cooperation and that could spell all kinds of new headaches for Trump both politically and legally. But that’s not all:

And here are some other things that could or, in some cases, will happen between now and the first week in November:

• Paul Manafort will either be convicted or acquitted in his first trial, presumably this week (the jury is currently deliberating). And his second trial — which will deal more directly with his work in the former Soviet Union and the ways it may have affected his actions as Trump campaign chairman — will begin in mid-September.
• Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III could hand down more indictments, or even release a final report on all that he has learned in his investigation.
• Trump will likely continue to revoke the security clearances of his critics in the intelligence community, which will generate more bipartisan condemnation and comparisons to Richard Nixon.
• Omarosa Manigault Newman will release more tapes she recorded of conversations with people in the White House.
• A lawsuit will begin in Texas in which Republican states and the administration will be arguing for the entire Affordable Care Act to be struck down, handing Democrats a priceless campaign issue.
• Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings will take place. Even if the process ends with a win for Trump, it will also likely generate an immediate backlash, a wave of fear and opposition from Democrats as they realize the implications of an intensely partisan, intensely conservative Supreme Court.

Then there’s McGann, the trade war and any of a number of simmering international crises. And these are just what we know about. He continues:

The culmination of this intense period is, of course, the November elections. The wave of scandal news will only increase the likelihood that Democrats will win control of the House, and as much as we’ve talked about that possibility, we haven’t fully reckoned with how transformative it would be.

Right now Congress is all but nonexistent as a force in our political life; having passed a tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, Republicans have given up on any serious legislating, and certainly aren’t exercising anything resembling oversight of the administration. But if Democrats have control, they’ll begin holding hearings and mounting investigations of all the Trump scandals. Russia will be just the beginning; they’ll use their subpoena power and ability to create news events to probe the president himself, possible misconduct committed by other members of his administration (of which there is a nearly inexhaustible supply) and various policy outrages. It will be a ceaseless drumbeat of Trump scandal for the next two years.

It’s been a drumbeat of scandal since he started running for president. But this will be different. The Democrats are going to hold public hearing and real investigations. That changes everything.

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John Dean, Michael Cohen and Don McGahn, oh my

by digby

Jonathan Swan:

President Trump tweeted this morning: “The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel [sic], he must be a John Dean type “RAT.” But I allowed him and all others to testify — I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide.”

What we’re hearing: This afternoon, I called up said “RAT,” John Dean, to get his take. Dean was Richard Nixon’s White House counsel and heavily involved in the Watergate cover-up before he became a key witness for the prosecution.

“I am actually honored to be on his enemies list as I was on Nixon’s when I made it there,” Dean told me. “This is a president I hold in such low esteem I would be fretting if he said something nice.”
Dean told me he read the hard copy of The New York Times this morning and enjoyed the “fascinating” story about the White House counsel, Don McGahn, cooperating “extensively” with Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“It says more than it seems just in the cold print of the story,” Dean said. “Trump doesn’t really know what he’s done. … I don’t think he really knows what this involved, and it’s got to be incredibly helpful to Mueller, to put things in perspective and timelines…from somebody who was right there.”
“Rudy [Giuliani] may think he [McGahn] had nothing but nice things to say about the boss, but Rudy has to remember his days as a prosecutor where, if you can get this kind of information, it can put a lot of other pieces into perspective that aren’t so good for the defendant, or the potential subject or target.”

Per the latest reporting from the NYT’s Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt, “The president, who is said to be obsessed with the role that John W. Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon, played as an informant during Watergate, was jolted by the notion that he did not know what Mr. McGahn had shared [with Mueller].”

What’s next? As Politico first reported, Dean has been talking to Michael Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, who became a friend when they both appeared regularly on cable news during the Bill Clinton impeachment.

Dean says he sees parallels between his own Watergate experience and what Cohen is going through now.

Both were in the cross-hairs of criminal investigations (including a Southern District of New York investigation), both engaged with multiple congressional investigations, and both had been attacked by the president in order to discredit future testimony.

“There are some parallels,” Dean said. “Nixon made a comment in his memoir, that I found striking.

That he wasn’t worried about my Watergate testimony, but it was everything else I had to say.

Because I had become privy to so many activities… and he said that’s what killed him.”

“He [Cohen] can place this president in a broader context of how he operates.”

I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I’ve been saying this for months.

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Trump’s White House Counsel has a history with Russian oligarchs too


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Reading President Trump’s Twitter feed over the past week, it’s hard not to conclude that he feels the walls are closing in. It started with his former adviser and fellow reality TV star Omarosa’s new book. She accused him of being a racist and, even more unsettlingly, revealed that she has been taping conversations with people in the campaign and the White House, including the president himself.

Meanwhile, Paul Manafort’s trial was coming to a conclusion. Trump seemed so unnerved by that spectacle that he went before the cameras and hinted strongly to any supporters on the jury that he thought they should acquit his former campaign chairman because the whole trial is “very unfair.”

In what seems to have been a blatant attempt to change the subject, Trump revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, ostensibly for his erratic behavior on the internet. (That took some real chutzpah.) This dramatic action resulted in major pushback from the intelligence community, starting with a scathing Washington Post op-ed by retired U.S. Navy Adm. William McRaven, the man who led the bin Laden mission. He asked for his own security clearance to be revoked in solidarity with Brennan:

Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation. If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken. The criticism will continue until you become the leader we prayed you would be.

This was followed by similar criticisms from top intelligence officials going back nearly 40 years.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the administration has a list of more such enemies at the ready. They’re subject to having their clearances removed when the White House needs to shift the media attention. If that’s the case, look for more clearances to be revoked this week. The New York Times published a major story on Saturday night, followed up with reactions on Sunday, that has the White House in a tailspin.

According to the Times, White House counsel Don McGahn has been extremely forthcoming with special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump and his lawyers have made a big show of asserting they have fully cooperated with the investigation, and it’s true they have not claimed executive privilege, refused to turn over documents or stonewalled on interviews — except when it comes to the president himself, whose lawyers apparently understand that he can’t tell the truth and would only get himself in trouble. As Barack Obama’s former White House counsel, Bob Bauer, makes clear in this post for Lawfare, there’s nothing unusual about the White House counsel cooperating with a prosecutor, since his obligation is to the office of the presidency, not the sitting president. It’s a requirement, in fact.

But the Times reports McGahn has spent more than 30 hours in interviews, which certainly suggests that he had something interesting to tell the prosecutors. What made this such a bombshell was the revelation that McGahn and his lawyer became convinced some time back that Trump was preparing to throw McGahn under the bus and blame him for “shoddy” legal advice. So they decided he needed to make sure he wasn’t implicated. The Times further reports that Trump and his lawyers were unaware of the scope of McGahn’s cooperation, particularly in regard to possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Trump reacted as one would expect. He took to Twitter and tried to claim that he has no issue with McGahn, while rather too obviously revealing his criminal state of mind by claiming that John Dean, who blew the whistle on Richard Nixon’s abuse of power, was a “rat.”

The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type “RAT.” But I allowed him and all others to testify – I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2018

He is clearly cracking under the pressure, and you can understand why. Learning from The New York Times that McGahn spent 30 hours being interviewed by prosecutors had to come as a particular blow, and not necessarily for the reasons assumed in the story.

As journalist Marcy Wheeler has astutely observed, the assumption that McGahn is only providing information about possible obstruction of justice may not be correct. After all, he was with the campaign as its general counsel from very early on and is one of the GOP’s top campaign finance and election law experts. He ran the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee for nearly a decade and served as a controversial member of the Federal Election Commission from 2008 to 2013. If there is anyone in the Trump campaign who should have known what the legal exposure for accepting “things of value” from a foreign entity might be, it is Don McGahn.

Wheeler also points out that McGahn has a long history with Roger Stone and various dubious fundraising schemes that are likely to be of interest to the Mueller team as they seem to be homing in on the notorious dirty trickster. And McGahn himself has some interesting experience with Russian pay-to-play schemes going back to his days as former GOP House Whip Tom DeLay’s lawyer.

In the late ’90s, DeLay and his chief of staff came under scrutiny for some trips he took to Russia with the corrupt K Street lobbyist Jack Abramoff. These were organized by Russian oil and gas executives who wanted to lobby the U.S. government for more foreign aid. The trips were paid for by a shadowy group in the Bahamas associated with Abramoff and suspected of being financed by these Russian players. DeLay subsequently voted for the bill the Russians were pushing.

The kicker was that the Russian businessmen had also given a million dollars to something called the U.S. Family Network, an “advocacy” group founded by DeLay’s former chief of staff and part of what was known as DeLay’s “political money carousel.” That group also received half a million from the National Republican Campaign Committee, where McGahn, who was DeLay’s lawyer, worked as in-house counsel.

When some Democratic groups ran ads against DeLay in 2006, accusing him of pay-for-play corruption, Don McGahn publicly defended him, saying that there was no Russian connection and that there was nothing illegal about it anyway. (An argument that may sound somewhat familiar at present.) But the suspicion that the disgraced DeLay had engaged in a highly lucrative quid pro quo with Russian oligarchs lingered on.

Don McGahn’s background as an election law expert and criminal defense lawyer for corrupt politicians with suspicious connections to Russian oligarchs made him a perfect choice for Donald Trump’s campaign. It also makes him a highly desirable witness for Robert Mueller’s investigation. Thirty hours of interviews can cover a lot of ground.

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QOTD: Dave Wasserman

by digby

 “This election is the year of the angry female college graduate.”

“The most telling number in the most recent NBC/WSJ poll is that Trump’s approval rating among women with college degrees was 26 percent. That’s absolutely awful and the intensity of that group is extraordinary. They’re already the most likely demographic to turn out to vote in midterms. But never have they been this fervently anti-Republican.”

Actually, we hate hate him and his minions with the fire of a thousand nuclear warheads…

But other than that …

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The freedom to be afraid
by Tom Sullivan

Wolfe at the White House in 2004. (Public domain)

Maybe it is coincidence. Or maybe shifts in thinking across large swaths of society simply take time to become visible. People’s unconscious frustration with their standing under metastasized capitalism has been bubbling around society’s edges long enough that lately it is breaking out into the open. Brexit was a clue. So were the 2016 campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Sanders pointed to shortcomings in how the economy as presently configured treats ordinary people. Trump blamed brown-skinned Others, because as a member of the class benefiting most from today’s economy, of course he did.

Bottom line? This ain’t working and people feel it.

Noah Smith argues Americans still reel from “half-century of wealth destruction and stagnation.” He writes at Bloomberg:

The government’s failure to bail out underwater homeowners — recall that the Tea Party was inspired by an on-air rant against the idea of aiding struggling mortgage borrowers — was a fateful error whose economic and social consequences are still being felt.

Wealth inequality eats at the core of a society. But as long as the wealth of the middle and lower classes is growing — as it was up until 2006 — the corrosive effect of inequality will be limited. For half of the country, the housing collapse destroyed a 60-year story of the American dream — no wonder so many people are turning to populism and socialism.

To restore that dream, wealth will have to grow again for a broader swath of Americans. In a country with slow productivity growth and an aging population, that probably would require redistribution of wealth.

We have yet to decide on how. But as with treating any ailment, identifying the disease helps in defining a course of treatment.

Economic historian Louis Hyman of Cornell University argues in the New York Times that the insecure nature of our work is not driven by “the inexorable march of technology,” but by decisions from business and policymakers. The Industrial Revolution did not take place because of technology, Hyman writes. Rather, changes that had already occurred in how people organized their work made it possible for technological advances to build on it.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution came an “industrious revolution” in which independent networks of farmers spun fibers and wove cloth. Manufacturers gathering those workers under one roof as paid employees was a cultural change and a precondition for the Industrial Revolution:

The same goes for today’s digital revolution. While often described as a second machine age, our current historical moment is better understood as a second industrious revolution. It has been underway for at least 40 years, encompassing the collapse, since the 1970s, of the relatively secure wage-work economy of the postwar era — and the rise of post-industrialism and the service economy.

Corporations began to abandon the old model, Hyman writes, in favor of “a new, strictly financial view of corporations, a philosophy that favored stock and bond prices over production, of short-term gains over long-term investment.” This approach, he asserts, not technology, made employees more disposable and jobs more tenuous. The technology behind the gig economy simply accelerated the change in work culture resulting from corporate and policy decisions:

I am neither for nor against temping (or consulting, or freelancing). If this emergent flexible economy were all bad or all good, there would be no need to make a choice about it. For some, the rise of the gig economy represents liberation from the stifled world of corporate America.

But for the vast majority of workers, the “freedom” of the gig economy is just the freedom to be afraid. It is the severing of obligations between businesses and employees. It is the collapse of the protections that the people of the United States, in our laws and our customs, once fought hard to enshrine.

The late Tom Wolfe famously mocked the 1970s as the “Me” Decade, one of self-infatuation as self-enlightenment, of personal transformation, a third religious Great Awakening. If people felt it, so did the business world. In a world no longer defined by an us, infatuation with maximizing one’s wealth drove corporations to become the vehicle for self-realization either through entrepreneurship or boosting stock value. Any balance between the interests of capital and labor broke down along with the very idea of a social contract. Self-maximalization through politics came through winning by any means necessary.

Stunned by the number of people, including Rudy Giuliani, who confess the belief that anyone in politics would take stolen information from an adversarial foreign government to win an election. In this view, there are no means to victory that are not justified by victory.— Jonathan Allen (@jonallendc) August 19, 2018

What Wolfe wrote of the new seekers is true of the period of vast wealth disparity that decisions since the 1970s have led us to, “There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism.”

So, it is welcome to see Sen. Elizabeth Warren fighting to save capitalism from the worst excesses maximized by our own choices.

Forty years ago, Wolfe wrote:

And now many dare it! In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about . . . Let’s talk about Me!

Now the Great Me is President of the United States, and the greater we are free to be afraid.

[h/t MPW for Bloomberg]

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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.

Did Robert Mueller direct the Watergate break-in too?

by digby

How many people are watching this drivel and believing it? Besides the president, I mean:

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro used the 2012 Benghazi attacks in Libya for her latest criticism of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Speaking on Fox News Saturday, Judge Pirro used mafia references to claim Mueller and members of the Democratic Party need a “serial cleaner” to cover-up past government mistakes. Pirro linked a Mueller testimony regarding the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans in 2012 to Democrats “panicking” in 2018. Pirro claimed Mueller’s past is laden with government cover-ups, including for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Your credentials as a government serial cleaner are really good,” Pirro said Saturday. “You testified, after four Americans are killed in Benghazi, to cover for Hillary Clinton’s incompetence. Bob, why would you say that the FBI couldn’t get into Benghazi in time?”

Last week, Pirro asked viewers whether Russian President Vladimir Putin was a bigger threat than Mueller.

“When covert missions go wrong, the government calls in its own cleaner,” Pirro said one week after suggesting Mueller himself needs legal defense. “And when things go terribly wrong for the Democrats, they don’t just call in a cleaner to get the job done, they call in someone who’s been in the clean-up business for a long time, they call in the serial cleaner, former FBI director and now Special Counsel Bob Mueller.”

Pirro’s criticism of Mueller is only the latest right-wing shot at the Russia election meddling investigation. The Fox News host and ardent Trump defender mocked Mueller for having found “nothing” linking the president to any 2016 election meddling.

“Bob, honestly, you look and sound like a fool. CNN and just about every newspaper in the country, in the world, got there. They made it there, but the FBI couldn’t? Hey, I get it, a good cleaner wants a crime scene as trampled as possible. But you know, Bob, we are all getting tired of this and this all comes down to your effort to get Donald Trump indicted and you are panicking. You got nothing.”

The Benghazi attack conducted by the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia in September 2012 was a rallying cry against the Obama administration for several years. Last week, Benghazi terror attack survivor Kris “Tanto” Paronto applauded Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA DIrector John Brennan.

This is just nuts. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for the likes of Try Gowdy to put this idiocy to rest.

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The careerists join the cult

by digby

If you want to see Trumpism in all its glory, just hanging right out there, this guy is it:

I don’t know about you but I think that smug asshole ought to have his mouth washed out with soap. Bigly.

He won the nomination. And what’s important about that is that he’s not just some loon on the fringe. He’s the Georgia Secretary of State and he’s not just sitting around watching Fox News and pleasuring himself like some people we know. He’s putting his disgusting words into action:

On Thursday evening, the election board of Randolph County, Georgia, met to discuss a startling proposal to eliminate three-fourths of the county’s polling places months before the November election. A rural, impoverished, and predominantly black county, Randolph has just nine polling locations, all of which were open during the May primaries and July runoffs. The election board may soon shut down seven of them, including one in a precinct where about 97 percent of voters are black. Its plan would compel residents, many of whom have no car or access to public transit, to travel as much as 30 miles round trip to reach the nearest polling place.

Because of its history of racist voting laws, Randolph County was once required to seek federal permission before altering its election procedures. But after the Supreme Court gutted this oversight in 2013, the county was freed to crack down on the franchise. It is no coincidence that its election board chose this moment to shutter most of its polls: In November, the popular Democrat Stacey Abrams will compete for the governorship against Republican Brian Kemp, the current Georgia secretary of state. Kemp, who has devoted his time in office to a ruthless campaign of voter suppression, called upon Randolph County to abandon the plan when it spurred widespread outrage. That being said, the key figure in the Randolph County controversy is a Kemp ally who was handpicked by the secretary of state to close polls throughout Georgia.

To understand the brazen attack on black suffrage now occurring in Randolph County, it’s important to remember that Georgia is in the midst of a seismic demographic shift. As whites cease to be the majority in more and more counties, Republicans have clung to power by disenfranchising minority voters. Kemp’s opposition to the Randolph County plan marks the first time that he has adopted an affirmatively pro-suffrage stance. During his nearly eight years as secretary of state, Kemp engaged in mass voter purges, removing hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls. State officials appear to have singled out black voters in targeted purges.

Kemp also canceled or suspended 35,000 voter registrations using Exact Match, a version of Kris Kobach’s notorious Crosscheck program that compares registrants’ information with motor vehicle and Social Security databases. If a single letter, space, or hyphen did not match the database information, the voter application was rejected. Black voters were eight times more likely than whites to have their registrations halted due to Exact Match

Perhaps most egregiously, Kemp launched an investigation into Abrams’ efforts to register more minority voters despite no evidence of fraud. He used the probe to harass and intimidate voting rights advocates. Later, he refused to register 40,000 would-be voters who had signed up through the drive. Speaking to Republicans behind closed doors, Kemp explained the stakes: “Registering all these minority voters that are out there … if they can do that, they can win these elections.” During Kemp’s tenure, Georgia’s population has increased substantially—yet the number of registered voters has actually gone down.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Kemp seems to have played a major role in the Randolph County poll closures. At the meeting on Thursday night, the election board revealed that the move had been encouraged by Mike Malone, an associate of Kemp’s. Malone, who attended the meeting, explained that Kemp—who now claims that the poll closures are a bad idea—had asked him to go around the state and “recommend polling place closures” to various counties. Ten Georgia counties have already taken Malone’s suggestions and closed polling places. All of those counties have large black populations.

Malone has claimed that he chose which polls to close by gauging their compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Rather than target certain communities, he merely advised election boards to shutter polling places that are not ADA compliant. Notably, many of these locations are government buildings that should already comply with ADA regulations. (Several polling places selected for closure in Randolph County, for instance, are fire stations.) But rather than direct counties to fix whatever ADA problems they might have, Malone simply suggested these locations be scrapped.

At Thursday’s meeting, a county resident also asked Malone whether he had considered finding alternative polling places, like churches, that might be ADA compliant. Malone shot back that he was “not hired to find alternatives.” Another resident asked how much he was being paid for his consultant work. He refused to answer.

Sean J. Young, legal director of the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me on Friday that he found Malone’s answers disturbing.

“The purpose of this ‘consultancy’ is not to explore the best ways to serve the voters with polling places that are up to code,” Young said. “It’s to shut down polling places. This alleged concern with ADA compliance is a total sham.”

We’re really supposed to believe that the man in that campaign ad is concerned with people with disabilities? No, of course we are not. He is trolling even more competently than Trump himself. They want people to know they are not serious.

This man is the future of the Republican Party. If they continue to win (by whatever means they find) this is going to be the norm.

Paul Krugman described this accurately in his column today:

Republicans who defended Trump over the Muslim ban, his early attacks on the press, the initial evidence of collusion with Russia, have in effect burned their bridges. It would be deeply embarrassing to admit that the elitist liberals they mocked were right when they were wrong; also, nobody who doesn’t support Trump will ever trust their judgment or patriotism again.

So the path of least resistance is always to sign on for the next stage of degradation. “No evidence of collusion” becomes “collusion is no big deal” becomes “collusion is awesome — and let’s send John Brennan to jail.”

To some extent this is just human weakness in action. But there are some special aspects of the modern GOP that make it especially vulnerable to this kind of slide into leader-worship. The party has long been in the habit of rejecting awkward facts and attributing them to conspiracies: it’s not a big jump from claiming that climate change is a giant hoax perpetrated by the entire scientific community to asserting that Trump is the blameless target of a vast deep state conspiracy.

And modern Republican politicians are, with few exceptions, apparatchiks: they are creatures of a monolithic movement that doesn’t allow dissent but protects the loyal from risk. Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on “wing nut welfare” — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.

Even now, I don’t think most political commentators have grasped how deep the rot goes. I don’t think they understand, or at any rate admit to themselves, that democracy really could die just a few months from now.

And if it doesn’t, if Republicans lose Congress and Trump leaves office on or before January 2021, the same people who kept declaring that Trump just became president will try to go back to pretending that Republican politicians are serious, honorable people who care about policy. But they aren’t.

So remember this moment. We’re seeing, in real time, what the GOP is really made of.

Yep.

This is your brain on Fox News

by digby

For those who aren’t on twitter, here is your president today, via Hunter at Daily Kos:

Well, Trump is on a tear again. And it’s the fault of the New York Times, which he doesn’t read and is dumb and stupid and shut up.

The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type “RAT.” But I allowed him and all others to testify – I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2018

It seems instructive that Donald Trump, walking garbage fire and man at the center of numerous investigations into potentially illegal acts he has undertaken both as candidate and pretzeldent, considers John Dean a “RAT.”. We should probably make a note of that.

No Collusion and No Obstruction, except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats. All of the resignations and corruption, yet heavily conflicted Bob Mueller refuses to even look in that direction. What about the Brennan, Comey, McCabe, Strzok lies to Congress, or Crooked’s Emails!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2018

This is what happens when grandpa spends all his days watching Fox News. His cabinet has been roiled by scandal and resignations to an extent not seen since the Watergate days, but since Fox News doesn’t cover it he doesn’t remember it’s happening. Instead, Something Something Witch Hunt.

Some members of the media are very Angry at the Fake Story in the New York Times. They actually called to complain and apologize – a big step forward. From the day I announced, the Times has been Fake News, and with their disgusting new Board Member, it will only get worse!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2018

Ah yes, the raging incompetent’s favorite lie: What My Invisible Friends Are Saying. The odds that reporters have been calling Biff here to apologize for writing stories about his crimez is approximately zero. The odds that Donald spends hours of each day imagining this happening, however, are considerably higher.

Study the late Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2018

Donald Trump has in his hand a list of reporters who are very ashamed that they are writing stories about him, and if you don’t believe him you’re like Joe McCarthy.

This man has been at the center of American politics since 2015.  Will we ever be able to recover?

Truth isn’t truth?

by digby

Good lord, Rudy needs to lay off the Limoncellos on Saturday nights. His Sunday morning appearances are getting more and more embarrassing:

This is incredible.

Rudy says the Trump campaign has NO IDEA they were meeting with representatives of the Russian gov’t prior to the Trump Tower meeting

Email to Don Jr.: This “is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”pic.twitter.com/CAu4HlLiLS

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) August 19, 2018

Trump: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Kellyanne Conway: The White House gives “alternative facts.”

Rudy Giuliani: “Truth isn’t truth.”pic.twitter.com/6IdN7EDMYb

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) August 19, 2018

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Kevin McCarthy, stable genius

by digby

Via Crooks and Liars:

The GOP Leader, and would-be Speaker-in-waiting, joined the other Trump cultists in accusing Twitter of censoring them.

It was pointed out pretty much immediately that he was being a dumbass had his settings wrong on twitter so that he couldn’t see sensitive tweets which might contain hateful or racist language. Since he was trying to see something by Fox News personality and hatemonger Laura Ingraham that would make sense. Anyway, he got pissy about “censorship” of conservative voices, and started huffing and puffing about holding hearings on Twitter.

Two days after the fact, GOP Leader and his staff have yet to acknowledge their error, or even delete the tweet. Typical, right?

So, the heir to Paul Ryan has his twitter settings set to block hateful or racist language and it blocked something Laura Ingraham wrote. It’s possible that he thinks nothing Laura Ingraham or  writes could possibly be considered hateful or racist so the setting is somehow “rigged” to see conservative comments that way. But that would be even dumber.

Keep in mind, this is the guy we’re talking about:

No wonder Trump calls him “my Kevin.”
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