Month: November 2018

Chief Justice John Roberts offers a rebuke. Trump has a tantrum

by digby

I have little doubt that Roberts is still the right wing conservative we always knew he was. And he will likely rule with the right-wing majority on any issues of real conservative philosophy. But this indicates that he’s not happy with Trump’s assault on the courts for being biased whenever they rule against something he wants. Roberts appears to believe that ends up creating public distrust in the judiciary. (Ya think?) And as Tom blogged this morning, he’s not the only one.

NBC News reports:

Chief Justice John Roberts is pushing back against President Donald Trump for his description of a judge who ruled against Trump’s migrant asylum policy as an “Obama judge.”

It’s the first time the Republican-appointed leader of the federal judiciary has offered even a hint of criticism of Trump, who has previously blasted federal judges who ruled against him.

Roberts said Wednesday the U.S. doesn’t have “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.” He commented in a statement released by the Supreme Court after a query by The Associated Press.

Roberts said on the day before Thanksgiving that an “independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Last year, the president used the term a “so-called judge” after the first federal ruling against his travel ban. During the presidential campaign, Trump criticized Roberts himself for the chief justice’s decisive vote in 2012 to preserve the Obama health care overhaul.

Trump also referred to a judge who was presiding over a fraud lawsuit against Trump University as a Mexican who would be unable to rule fairly because of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.

The president’s latest remarks come as the Supreme Court is enmeshed in controversy over his appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Several justices have spoken out about judicial independence and the danger of having the court viewed as a political institution that is divided between five conservative Republicans and four liberal Democrats.

Trump had spoken Tuesday when a reporter asked for his reaction to a ruling by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco that put the administration’s asylum policy on hold.

It’s very hard to say whether this means anything in the long run. But judges do sometimes evolve. It’s not impossible that Roberts may be seeing the fruits of this decades-long campaign to discredit the courts as ultimately blowing back on him. Or maybe he’s just realizing that the tribe to which he belongs has gone batshit crazy and needs reining in from somebody, somewhere.

I won’t hold my breath. He’s a long-standing conservative legal movement zealot. But if George Conway can break with his wife …. who knows?

Update:

Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have “Obama judges,” and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country. It would be great if the 9th Circuit was indeed an “independent judiciary,” but if it is why……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2018

…  aren’t they licking my boots?

He’s declaring war on the Chief Justice.

BTW: This is how he actually continued that tweet. It’s equally stupid:

…..are so many opposing view (on Border and Safety) cases filed there, and why are a vast number of those cases overturned. Please study the numbers, they are shocking. We need protection and security – these rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2018

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Sorry dude, you’re tied for 13th

by digby

This was fake news

.@realDonaldTrump on @TIME person of the year: “I don’t know, that is up to TIME magazine. I’ve been there before. I can’t imagine anybody else other than Trump, can you imagine anybody else other than Trump?” pic.twitter.com/Fq4ksjM0pB

— The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 20, 2018

The publication earlier Tuesday released the results of a reader poll to pick the Person of the Year. Trump finished tied for 13th with 2 percent of the vote, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergand special counsel Robert Mueller, among others.

The top choice was South Korean boy band BTS.

The magazine typically announces its editors’ choice in December.

Trump was named Time’s Person of the Year in 2016, with the magazine’s editor saying at the time he was a polarizing figure who elicited opinions from individuals across the political spectrum.

The president claimed in 2017, when he was named runner-up, that he turned down the honor, though the magazine refuted his claim. Time eventually named the “Silence Breakers,” including the women of the “Me Too” movement, its Person of the Year.

Also, this:

The framed copy of Time magazine was hung up in at least five of President Trump’s clubs, from South Florida to Scotland. Filling the entire cover was a photo of Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”

This cover — dated March 1, 2009 — looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.

But that wasn’t true.

The Time cover is a fake.

There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

In fact, the cover on display at Trump’s clubs, observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes. Its red border is skinnier than that of a genuine Time cover, and, unlike the real thing, there is no thin white border next to the red. The Trump cover’s secondary headlines are stacked on the right side — on a real Time cover, they would go across the top.

And it has two exclamation points. Time headlines don’t yell.

“I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover,” Kerri Chyka, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

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QOTD: Obama

by digby

Obama hailed Pelosi as “one of the most effective legislative leaders that this country’s ever seen.”

“Nancy is not always the best on a cable show or with a quick sound bite or what have you,” Obama said. “But her skill, tenacity, toughness, vision, is remarkable. Her stamina, her ability to see around corners, her ability to stand her ground and do hard things and to suffer unpopularity to get the right thing done I think stands up against any person that I’ve observed or worked directly with in Washington during my lifetime.”

He would know. She had to herd a bunch of Democratic cats and thwart the wingnut freakshow and she was amazingly effective.

Just look at how John Boehner and Paul Ryan did…

Update: Reporters on my TV are all saying that she’s not good at the job because she isn’t good at entertaining them on TV and is also “polarizing” (because Republicans like to portray older, liberal women as witches.)

I hear Paul Ryan is available so maybe the Democrats could recruit him to please these people. The media worshipped Ryan like he was Jesus Christ. Of course, he couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag after he’d spent his career being a half-assed, innumerate policy wonk. But he was dreamy. And that’s all that really counts.

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Another Trump Dr Feelgood

by digby

Great new book out, “Mad Politics: Keeping Your Sanity in a World Gone Crazy” by @RealDrGina Loudon. Go out and get your copy today — a great read!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2018

He doesn’t read so any recommendations are based on Fox News appearances. But if you’re wondering what this is about:

Gina Loudon, the Republican commentator and author, recently declared that she has scientific evidence that Donald Trump might be the “most sound-minded” president in history. It’s a claim that might carry more weight if her new book didn’t falsely describe her as having a doctorate in psychology.

Loudon, who worked as a surrogate for the Trump campaign and frequently appears on the airwaves to defend the president, obtained a Ph.D in a field called “human and organization systems” from an online school called Fielding Graduate University.

Loudon, 58, who often refers to herself as “Dr. Gina,” does not have a psychology degree or license.

But the author’s bio on the jacket of her new book, Mad Politics: Keeping Your Sanity in a World Gone Crazy—which contains theories that experts say have been dismissed by scientific research—states she has two masters’ degrees “as well as a Ph.D in psychology.”

The text on the front flap refers to her as “America’s favorite psychological expert,” and one of the blurbs inside gushes that she “has the depth of a credentialed psychoanalyst.”

Inside the book, Loudon—a member of Trump’s 2020 campaign Media Advisory Board—admits she does not have clinical training. “My gut instincts, which have nothing to do with my professional training, are pretty solid,” she writes.

Her “gut instincts” tell her that Trump is the most sound-minded president in history. You can do the math.

If you’d like to see a great example of journalism, read the whole Daily Beast report which uses her thesis as a way to get real psychologists and psychiatrists to weigh in on Trump’s psychological problems without forcing them to

Donald Trump, mob boss


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Last week, the Federalist Society grand poobah Leonard Leo, widely credited as the mastermind behind Trump’s extremist court-packing scheme, got into a bit of spat with another high powered conservative legal luminary. That would be George Conway, the prominent Trump critic who is also the husband of Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway. Leo was upset because Conway had started a legal organization called Checks and Balances, which is dedicated to opposing Trump’s abuse of presidential power and degradation of the rule of law.

Leo said he found the whole concept outrageous. Just because the president spouts off day and night wondering why the Department of Justice isn’t jailing his political rivals and demanding that its top officials pledge fealty to him as he imagines Joe McCarthy’s lawyer (and Trump mentor) Roy Cohn would have done — well, isn’t an abuse of power unless he takes action.

Leo told Axios:

I measure a president’s sensitivity to the rule of law by his actions, not his off-the-cuff comments, tweets or statements. And the president has obviously had lots of criticisms about former Attorney General Sessions and about the department, but at the end of the day, he hasn’t acted upon those criticisms

This was fatuous in all respects but particularly so since Trump has just fired Jeff Sessions because he followed the ethical guidelines of the department and recused himself from the Russia investigations, thus failing to protect Trump. That is taking action. The same goes for firing James Comey for failing to quash the Russia investigation.

Needless to say, every time Trump tweets or comments about what he thinks should be done it conveys a very clear message. The fact that career officials have not completely carried out his wishes does not mean they haven’t had an influence. Trump apparently learned that lesson and has put Matt Whitaker, a shameless lackey, in place as acting AG to keep him apprised and follow his orders when he gives them.

One of Trump’s longstanding desires, going all the way back to the 2016 campaign, was to see his opponent Hillary Clinton imprisoned. His crowds still gleefully chant “Lock her up!” which likely has led Trump to believe that prosecuting Clinton (for something) would be a very popular decision. I’ve been sure that he was serious about that for some time, largely because he keeps saying it. Contra Leonard Leo, he has actually succeeded in having the DOJ take action.

Recall that under pressure from Trump, Fox News and GOP henchmen in the House, Sessions assigned a Trump-friendly U.S. attorney in Utah to investigate Clinton’s alleged Russia connection, a bogus charge on which she’d already been investigated and cleared. None other than the reformed maverick and born-again Trumper, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who will take the gavel as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, has said he is eager to investigate Hillary Clinton.

On Tuesday, the New York Times validated my assumptions about Trump’s seriousness. The paper reported that former White House counsel Don McGahn had to talk Trump out of ordering the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton and former FBI director James Comey, explaining that it could lead to his impeachment for abuse of power. The Times report isn’t specific about when this happened, only saying it was last spring. But that’s also when Sessions assigned the imaginary Clinton case to the Utah U.S. attorney’s office, so it’s likely this was all happening at the same time. (Sessions said at the time that this would obviate the need for a special counsel, for which Fox and the House henchmen had been agitating.)

Today, McGahn and Sessions are gone. FBI director Christopher Wray, Comey’s successor, has not been mentioned as one of the senior Trump appointees on the chopping block. But the Times reports that Trump is unhappy with Wray because he’s “weak” for failing to go after Clinton, so who knows? The article says Trump frequently brings up the notion of prosecuting Clinton, suggesting he hasn’t given up on it.

If that grotesque illustration of Trump’s authoritarian instincts wasn’t bad enough, I’m afraid Tuesday brought an even worse example. The world has been waiting for our government to offer some kind of official conclusion about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist and U.S. resident who was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last month. It got one in the form of a White House statement written as if it had originally been a series of presidential tweets, replete with exclamation points.

Basically, the president declared that despite the high confidence of his own intelligence community, we can never know for sure if Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s murder. Even if he did, it doesn’t matter, because he also promised to buy a lot of weapons from the U.S. and that’s what really matters. In other words, the world’s most powerful superpower can be bought off. (The arms sales Trump endlessly references are only theoretical so far — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says they’re still being “negotiated.”)

Autocrats and dictators must be very relieved to know that all they have to do is hand over the envelope and the American capo di tutti capi will look the other way when you “take care of business” — if you know what I mean.

Axios reported last week that Trump had never really cared whether or not the crown prince had ordered this grotesque assassination because “other countries do bad things too.” This is consistent with his general amoral attitude toward world affairs. He consistently attacks the leaders of Western democracies for failing to pay proper tribute and makes excuses for tyrants and dictators. As the president wrote in his tweet-style official statement, “the world is a very dangerous place!” Apparently this means we can’t even afford to pay lip service to such niceties as international law or common human decency; certainly not when there’s money on the table.

Just in case everyone didn’t get the message, Trump added that “some say” Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state,” echoing his own frequent complaints about the press here at home. (Can you hear me, Jim Acosta?)

Happy Thanksgiving, America. Your president has just proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he is operating as a reckless, lawless mob boss who seeks to use the power of his office for money and revenge. (And he’s personally making more than a little scratch for himself in the process.) If that sounds like the work of an organized crime family running a shakedown, that’s because it is.

“Nice little democracy you have here — be a shame if anything happened to it.”

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Governance by tantrum
by Tom Sullivan

“So much winning” does not apply to the sitting president’s efforts in court. That in itself seems an ill portent of what lies ahead for him.

Meantime, the Trump administration suffered two losses in court this week so far. A federal court has slapped down administration attempts to curtail asylum requests:

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar agreed Monday with legal groups that immediately sued after President Donald Trump issued a Nov. 9 proclamation saying anyone who crossed the southern border between official ports of entry would be ineligible for asylum. The administration argued that caravans of migrants approaching the southern border made the new restrictions immediately necessary.

“Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden,” said Tigar, a nominee of former President Barack Obama.

Federal law stipulates people claiming asylum may do so from anywhere on U.S. soil.

Knowing any appeal from the Northern District of California would go to the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, a mewling Trump called the court a “disgrace” and its judges “very unfair.” From The Hill:

“You go to the Ninth Circuit and it’s a disgrace, and I’m going to put in a major complaint,” Trump told reporters outside the White House when asked about the judge’s asylum ruling. He did not elaborate on what specific action he might take.

The president railed against the Ninth Circuit for nearly two minutes, claiming that “everybody who wants to sue the United States” does so in the California-based court because “it means an automatic loss” for his administration.

But not only there. U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman of Manhattan’s Southern District issued a ruling Tuesday against the Trump administration’s attempts to preempt a ruling in a case challenging the Commerce Department placing a controversial citizenship question on the 2020 census:

“Enough is enough,” Judge Jesse M. Furman in New York said as he rejected what he said has become a weekly effort by Justice Department lawyers to stop him from ruling on the merits of lawsuits accusing the Commerce Department of improperly adding the question.

He denied what he called the “latest and strangest effort,” a request that he wait to rule after a trial he presided over earlier this month until the Supreme Court hears arguments.

“What makes the motion most puzzling, if not sanctionable, is that they sought and were denied virtually the same relief only weeks ago,” Furman said, noting that he had rejected that request, as did the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.

Those rulings follow a Trump-appointed judge on Friday overturning Trump’s revocation of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials.
The court found the White House had done so without due process.

Rulings against the Trump administration occur so regularly, Dahlia Lithwick explains, that they almost go unnoticed. There are quite a few, and Lithwick recounts a couple clusters of them. Many of the judges ruling against Trump, she adds, are Republican-appointed, and in some case Trump-appointed. The reason is so many of the cases stem from the administration having to defend on the fly ill-conceived decisions “enacted by random tweet … or by vengeful tantrum.” Defending them in court before a federal judge is often a cringe-worthy exercise:

Regardless of inclination or ideology, most judges still prefer facts to alternative facts, and reasoned discourse to free-flowing policy by hissy fit. And regardless of inclination or ideology, most judges still don’t like lies or liars. And regardless of inclination or ideology, most judges favor sobriety, stability, and the integrity of the judicial branch to nihilist attacks on everyone and everything that is fact-based. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that judges are as totally exhausted by the lurches and feints of the first Honey Boo Boo presidency as the rest of us.

Even as Sen. Mitch McConnell and his aiding-and-abetting Senate majority attempt with all haste to remake the judiciary in Trump’s image, America’s judicial keel has yet to fall off. The courts continue to be “a quiet, meticulous check” on a presidency with no regard for laws that do not line up with Trump’s illiberal impulses.

Trump’s legal strategy throughout his career has been to intimidate opponents into submission or to outlast them in drawn-out legal proceedings. Lest “the losing-est loser” be allowed to recover, those who worked so diligently in October to defend democracy in November, Lithwick cautions, need to defend the judicial branch “every time the president threatens, dismisses, or insults a judge or ruling.” Especially, because federal agencies themselves have marginal ability to punch back when their boss punches them.

The liberal penchant for novelty seeking means lefties often tire from continuing a fight that drags out. Conservatives know this. Trump uses this to his advantage, as Bush did before him. So do children who learn their tantrums can wear down weak-willed parents. There are fewer and fewer adults in the room with Trump. The “Resistance” has to be the adults on the outside, and in the face of tantrums nevertheless persist.

Trump’s 40% stick with him

by digby

New CBS poll:

Seven in 10 Americans think President Trump should allow the Russia investigation to continue, and a slight majority think Congress should pass legislation to prevent Special Counsel Robert Mueller from being fired.

Most Republicans think the president should allow the investigation to continue, but don’t support Congress passing legislation to protect Mueller from being fired.

Overall, 52 percent of Americans think Congress should pass legislation to protect the special counsel in charge of the Russia investigation from being fired, including three out of four Democrats and most independents. Sixty-seven percent of Republicans, however, disagree.

Fifty-one percent of Americans see the special counsel’s Russia investigation as politically motivated rather than justified (46 percent), but seven in 10 think President Trump should allow the investigation to continue, including 57 percent of Republicans.

Little has changed since the 2018 congressional elections regarding evaluations of Donald Trump’s overall job performance. His approval rating is 39 percent among Americans overall – the same as last month – with 85 percent of Republicans approving and 90 percent of Democrats disapproving of the job he’s doing.

By almost three to one, more Americans saw the midterm elections as a rejection of Mr. Trump and his policies than an endorsement. Democrats were particularly likely to see it this way. Less than a quarter of Republicans saw the election as a rejection of the President, and half said it wasn’t about him.

But Americans continue to have positive views of the economy and the President’s handling of that particular issue. Fifty-two percent of Americans approve of the way Donald Trump is handling the economy, including nine in 10 Republicans and slight majority of independents. In contrast, most disapprove of his handling of immigration and U.S. relations with its European allies.

He’d better hope the economy stays buoyant because it’s all that’s holding up his yuge 39% approval rating:

The percentage of Americans that thinks the economy is good continues to climb. Now, 74 percent rate the economy positively, up four points from last month and the highest percentage recorded since March 2001.

He’s trying as hard as he can to fuck that up too. His trade war is biting.

Also:

The gloom-and-doom on Wall Street has wiped out the stock market’s gains for the year.

The Dow dropped as many as 596 points, or 2.4%, on Tuesday. Plunging retailers like Target (TGT) and Kohl’s (KSS) led the S&P 500 1.7% lower.

Tech stocks once again got hit hard, with the Nasdaq sinking 2%. Apple retreated another 4% after Goldman Sachs dimmed its price target on the iPhone maker for the second time in a week.

All three major indexes are now slightly lower for the year. The Dow is around 2,400 points off its peak.

“The highways will be crowded this evening as the Thanksgiving rush will begin in earnest, but this morning investors are rushing for the exits,” Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group, wrote to clients on Tuesday.

The Dow lost nearly 400 points on Monday as well. This week’s selloff marks a continuation of a glum two months on Wall Street. The S&P 500 dipped back into a correction, marking a 10% retreat from the index’s record closing high on September 21.

The losses have been sparked by a flurry of concerns about everything from higher interest rates and crashing oil prices to the US-China trade war. But the overarching theme is that investors are bracing for the end of the fantastic economic and profit growth that marked the past year. Analysts expect a deceleration in 2019 driven by tariffs, the fading impact of the tax cuts and higher borrowing costs caused by the Federal Reserve.

“Put simply, stocks have already started to price in the risk of an economic slowdown,” Goldman Sachs chief US equity strategist David Kostin wrote to clients on Tuesday.

I don’t wish for economic downturns. But they are inevitable and this expansion has been going on for a long time so we are due. It would be very nice if the invisible hand could help us out here and make it happen in time to help Trump be defeated.

The Dow closed 551 points (2.25%)  down today.

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I’ve been saying this from the get: Trump seriously wants to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey

by digby

Will Whitaker fulfill that wish?

President Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

The lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To underscore his point, Mr. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Mr. Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.

The encounter was one of the most blatant examples yet of how Mr. Trump views the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. It took on additional significance in recent weeks when Mr. McGahn left the White House and Mr. Trump appointed a relatively inexperienced political loyalist, Matthew G. Whitaker, as the acting attorney general.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump read Mr. McGahn’s memo or whether he pursued the prosecutions further. But the president has continued to privately discuss the matter, including the possible appointment of a second special counsel to investigate both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey, according to two people who have spoken to Mr. Trump about the issue. He has also repeatedly expressed disappointment in the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, for failing to more aggressively investigate Mrs. Clinton, calling him weak, one of the people said…

Mr. Trump has grown frustrated with Mr. Wray for what the president sees as his failure to investigate Mrs. Clinton’s role in the Obama administration’s decision to allow the Russian nuclear agency to buy a uranium mining company. Conservatives have long pointed to donations to the Clinton family foundation by people associated with the company, Uranium One, as proof of corruption. But no evidence has emerged that those donations influenced the American approval of the deal.

I’ve always believed he really wanted to do it and have written it several times. This one from February, for instance:

Tuesday, February 06, 2018

Can they lock everybody up? 

by digby

I wrote about the ongoing GOP plan to prosecute everybody in sight for Salon this morning:

Apparently the stock market felt left out of the Trump roller coaster ride so it decided to go a little bit crazy on Monday: The Dow Jones average dropped by 1,500 points before climbing back just a bit to settle at a loss of 1,100 for the day. Whee! We have had many such days that were more significant in terms of percentage, but it was the largest single-day point drop in history.

What made it even more dramatic than usual was the fact that President Trump, who has repeatedly taken credit for the market’s steady rise, was giving a televised speech on his glorious economic success while the stock ticker in the corner of the screen told a dire tale. There are myriad factors behind the plunge, but one possible contributor is that tax-cut euphoria is wearing off and investors are realizing the freak show in Washington might just be a little bit destabilizing.

The Nunes Memo and all the congressional shenanigans may be a nice distraction for the president, but there is a little matter of another possible government shutdown this week and a budget that doesn’t seem likely to come together, largely because the GOP leadership doesn’t want anyone to see the new debt projections. In other words, the mess is getting messier.

In the midst of all this excitement, the House Intelligence Committee voted to release the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes Memo — if Trump approves the release, that is. Cable news pundits all seem to believe that part is a slam dunk, because the White House has said it wants transparency. I have to wonder if they’ve been watching the same Trump administration as I’ve been watching. I think it’s entirely possible that Trump will refuse to release it, if only for the chance to demand the arrest of Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., if it were to leak. Don’t think he wouldn’t do that:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, right up there with Comey, Warner, Brennan and Clapper! Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!

134K

4:39 AM – Feb 5, 2018

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As I mentioned yesterday, House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (whom Trump recently declared on Twitter was an American hero) has announced that he plans to produce more memos exposing people within the Department of Justice, FBI and State Department for vague acts of partisan wrongdoing. Nunes is calling this “Phase Two” of his operation, although Schiff wryly corrected the record in a press conference, pointing out that it’s really Phase Three of Nunes’ pro-Trump skulduggery, the first phase being the congressman’s harebrained “midnight run” last year.

A bit more information emerged Monday about just what Nunes has in mind. According to Natasha Bertrand at the Atlantic, Republicans are now homing in on a State Department official named Jonathan Winer, who was the Obama administration’s special envoy to Libya and a longtime aide to former Secretary of State John Kerry. Bertrand reports that “Winer received a memorandum from political activist Cody Shearer and passed it along to Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence official who had compiled his own dossier on Donald Trump.”

It appears that Nunes will have some company in this phase because Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., are also involved, having previously referred Christopher Steele to the FBI for allegedly failing to tell them about all the journalists he spoke to. Those two are also pretending to be in a tizzy about this contact between Winer, Shearer and Steele — as if it had any bearing on anything. All of this is likely happening because Steele stuck a handwritten Post-it note on the Shearer document saying that the author was a contact of longtime Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal, whose name is guaranteed to set off a collective primal scream among right-wingers.

This obviously has no real bearing on anything, since it doesn’t matter where information comes from during an investigation if it turns out to be true. As has been pointed out a thousand times, the Russia investigation now overseen by Robert Mueller was not precipitated by anything in the Steele dossier. It was all the other evidence of attempted Russian infiltration and coordination with the Trump campaign, along with the hacking of the Democratic Party computer system by Russian agents and their subsequent deployment of propaganda in many forms. If there had never been a Steele dossier, it wouldn’t make much difference.

As ridiculous as this obsessive focus on Steele may be, there actually is a method to the Republican madness, which I saw coming some months ago when I wrote a Salon column about Hillary Clinton’s “real Russia scandal.” Monday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, Devin Nunes came right out and said it:

We have a clear link to Russia — you have a campaign who hired a law firm, who hire Fusion GPS, who hired a foreign agent, who then got information from the Russians on the other campaign. It seems like the counterintelligence investigation should have been opened up against the Hillary campaign when they got ahold of the dossier. But that didn’t happen, either.

This would be known in intelligence circles as the “I know you are but what am I” strategy. But Republicans aren’t stopping at that. Axios also reported Monday that Trump’s lawyers have “approved the idea of appointing a second special counsel to investigate the FBI and Justice Department’s actions during the 2016 presidential campaign.” I’m not sure why their “approval” would be sought or required, but there you have it. As wacky as that is, it’s nothing compared to this nugget reported by Howard Fineman at NBC:

Trump is even talking to friends about the possibility of asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to consider prosecuting Mueller and his team. “Here’s how it would work: ‘We’re sorry, Mr. Mueller, you won’t be able to run the federal grand jury today because he has to go testify to another federal grand jury,'” said one Trump adviser.

Basically they are building a case that Hillary Clinton, along with top leadership of the Department of Justice, the FBI and the State Department, colluded with the Russian government — and all of them, along with special counsel Mueller, should be locked up. That sounds extreme. But consider what the president said on Monday about Democratic members of Congress who didn’t applaud him at the State of the Union address last week:

They were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, “treasonous.” I mean, yeah, I guess. Why not? Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country that much.

With a leader like that, is it such a stretch to believe that his Attorney General might actually appoint special counsels to investigate the FBI and the State Department to ferret out the Democratic traitors? Would we really be that shocked to see them try to prosecute Hillary Clinton or Bob Mueller? I’m afraid it’s getting easier to believe every day.

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digby 2/06/2018 10:30:00 AM

This wasn’t the first time he indicated he was serious.

Lindsey Graham is going to be the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Trump’s bootlicking toady Matt Whitaker is now the Attorney General. And Whitaker has said on television that he thought Clinton could be prosecuted.

And there is an existing investigation. Per the New York Times:

Some of his more vocal supporters stirred his anger, including the Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro, who has railed repeatedly on her weekly show that the president is being ill-served by the Justice Department.

Ms. Pirro told Mr. Trump in the Oval Office last November that the Justice Department should appoint a special counsel to investigate the Uranium One deal, two people briefed on the discussion have said. During that meeting, the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, told Ms. Pirro she was inflaming an already-vexed president, the people said.

Shortly after, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote to lawmakers, partly at the urging of the president’s allies in the House, to inform them that federal prosecutors in Utah were examining whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate Mrs. Clinton. A spokeswoman for the United States attorney for Utah declined to comment on Tuesday on the status of the investigation.

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Trump was too scared to go to a war zone


by digby

Daily Beast reports:

President Trump has reportedly privately told aides and White House officials that he is reluctant to visit troops in Iraq or Afghanistan because of the long flights and security risks. “He’s never been interested in going,” one unnamed official told The Washington Post on Monday. “He’s afraid of those situations. He’s afraid people want to kill him.” The president has only recently begun discussing tentative plans to visit troops amid increasing criticism of his attitude toward the military, the Post reports. He has been under pressure to visit U.S. troops for several months, and the issue took on new relevance after he angered veterans by skipping a visit to a World War I military cemetery in Paris this month and then opted not to go to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day. More recently, he lashed out at the former head of U.S. Special Operations Command, retired Adm. William H. McRaven, who led the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. On Sunday, Trump claimed McRaven should have caught bin Laden “a lot sooner” and mocked him as a “Hillary Clinton fan.”

He says he’s going soon now — because he’s been shamed.

I hope there’s no gunfire in that warzone. He’s easily frightened:

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Make America Depraved Again

Whatevs

Oh, by the way, speaking of governments going around the world assassinating their enemies whenever and wherever they choose, this is happening too:

An international firestorm erupted over the possibility that a Russian official could become the new president of global police agency Interpol, as Moscow denounced a demand by U.S. senators that the Trump administration block the candidacy of a Kremlin-backed nominee.

Interpol confirmed Tuesday that Maj. Gen. Alexander Prokopchuk a veteran Russian Interior Ministry official, had been nominated for president, amid allegations that Moscow has used the international police agency to go after political foes.

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Florida Republican Marco Rubio and Chris Coons (D. Del.), issued a joint statement Monday, accusing Russia of routinely abusing Interpol “for the purpose of settling scores and harassing political opponents, dissidents and journalists.”

Electing Mr. Prokopchuk as president, would be “akin to putting a fox in charge of a henhouse,” the senators said in the statement.

The Kremlin was quick to fire back, charging that the senators’ intervention was tantamount to “a kind of election interference, the election held by this international organization,” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

Interpol’s former president, Meng Hongwei, resigned in October after Chinese authorities arrested him on charges of alleged corruption.

Interpol’s general assembly will vote for the new president in Dubai on Wednesday. Kim Jong-yang, currently acting president, is also a nominee for the presidential post.

Mr. Prokopchuk has headed Interpol’s National Central Bureau for Russia since 2011 and has also served as the agency’s vice president since 2016.

Kremlin opponents, human rights activists and several Western officials have accused Moscow of exploiting Interpol’s international arrest-warrant system, called red notices, to prevent its opponents from traveling, freeze their bank accounts and try to force their extradition to Russia. 

Pompeo said this morning that the US is endorsing Kim, but you know, whatevs. And anyway, can we really ever know if President Putin is routinely having his critics murdered at home and all over the world? I think not. So he might as well have the apparatus of the international police agency at his fingertips.

This whole thing is sick. Pompeo repeated Trump’s claim that it’s a “mean, nasty world” out there (it’s full of dangerous foreigners!) so there’s no point in having any kind of standards, laws, norms or anything else to try to keep the whole thing from blowing up.

Let’s just get as much money as we can before the world explodes.  We might all die but we’ll be rich and what more can you hope for, amirite?

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