Month: December 2018

Flynn’s gambit flopped

by digby

In my piece for Salon this morning I linked to Marcy Wheeler’s post discussing the Flynn sentencing and his lawyers’ implication that the FBI had somehow entrapped the poor naive general by not telling him he shouldn’t lie to federal investigators. I noted the immediate assumption in the right wing fever swamp that because the judge had asked to see the interview documents, it meant that the judge was going to stick it to the Deep State and Flynn and Trump would be somehow exonerated. Like this guy:

“The FBI said Michael Flynn, a general and a great person, they said he didn’t lie. And Mueller said, well, maybe he did. And now they’re all having a big dispute. So, I think it’s a great thing that the judge is looking into that situation. That’s an honor for a lot of terrific people,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

Marcy suggested that they might regret opening this can of worms. Today the judge ordered that he interview reports be released to the public. They aren’t good news. For Flynn. And Trump.

Marcy explains:

In response to Judge Sullivan’s order, the government filed Flynn’s 302 under seal. After Sullivan reviewed it, he deemed it pertinent to Flynn’s sentencing, and had the government release a redacted version.

And it is unbelievably damning, in part because it shows the degree to which Flynn’s lies served to protect Trump.

The 302 shows how the FBI Agents first let Flynn offer up his explanation for his conversation with Kislyak. He lied about the purpose for his call to Kislyak on December 29 (he said he had called to offer condolences about the assassination of Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey) and he lied about the purpose of his call about Israel (he claimed he was, in part, doing a battle drill “to see who the administration could reach in a crisis” and in the process tried to find out how countries were voting on the Israeli motion; Flynn denied he had asked for any specific action).

Then, after the Agents specifically asked whether he recalled any conversation about the Obama actions, Flynn doubled down and claimed he did not know about those actions because he was in Dominican Republic.

He was hiding two things with this claim: first, I believe Susan Rice had given the Trump Administration a heads up on what Obama was going to do (at the very least the Obama Admin had asked the transition not to send mixed messages, and at least one person on the transition says they agreed not to). More importantly, he was hiding that he had already talked about the actions with KT McFarland, who was at Mar-a-Lago relaying orders from Trump.

And Flynn again denied having had a heads up from Susan Rice when he claimed he didn’t know that Russia’s diplomats were being expelled.

Finally, Flynn offered an excuse that is at least partly bullshit for why he called Kislyak multiple times.

The reason he kept calling Kislyak was, at least in part, because he was coordinating with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. His earlier claim that he didn’t respond to Kislyak is also probably a lie; he delayed his response to contact Mar-a-Lago first.

Sullivan said this 302 is relevant to Flynn’ sentencing, so he may actually use it to justify ignoring the joint requests of Flynn and Mueller for no jail time (though I’m not betting on it).

But by giving DOJ the opportunity to present this 302 for publication, Flynn provided proof of what has been hidden all this time — why Trump responded to the way he did about this investigation.

Flynn lied to hide Trump’s involvement in all this (and, to an extent, the degree to which it involved specifically ignoring a heads up from Obama).

Flynn lied to hide Trump’s personal involvement in telling the Russians to hold off on responding to Obama’s sanctions. And when the FBI investigated those lies, Trump fired the FBI Director to try to end that investigation….

This 302 also reveals that he was quoting directly from the instructions KT McFarland had given him, relaying Trump’s orders. Here’s what McFarland said she had told Flynn, in an email shared with multiple transition officials.

She also wrote that the sanctions over Russian election meddling were intended to “lure Trump in trap of saying something” in defense of Russia, and were aimed at “discrediting Trump’s victory by saying it was due to Russian interference.”

“If there is a tit-for-tat escalation Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown U.S.A. election to him,” she wrote.

And here’s what — quoting from the transcript of his calls with Kislyak — the Agents asked him if he said.

I have always assumed that Trump was fully informed of the sanctions calls and probably ordered them. It’s obvious by what he tweeted after they were made:

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

“Bring me tariffs! I want tariffs!”

by digby

I remember when Tea Partiers tore out their hair and rent their garments over government bailouts during the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes. Today … eh:

This is a taxpayer bailout for farmers Trump hurt with his senseless trade war https://t.co/BCkaxfPo1L

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 17, 2018

Trump’s idiotic “trade war” is to blame of course. He seems to think these subsidies will be paid for by big checks the Chinese government is writing to the US Treasury. Or something. It’s very hard to understand exactly what he wants out of all this other than for President Xi to say to the world “Donald Trump is the greatest leader the world has ever known and I bow before his genius.”

If this is truly a battle of wits between these two men I’m afraid we’re screwed.

I think one of the most surprising aspects of this Trump debacle for me is the extent to which the government bureaucracy is impotent in the face of a cretinous conman. I would have thought that when everyone in the world knows that a president’s policy, divorced from any ideology other than his own fever dreams hatched over a quarter century ago, is absurd and counter-productive there would be some way to stop it. The congress could do it but it would take a major united front led by the people who can’t even muster the strength to say that foreign infiltration of our electoral system might not be a good thing. So that’s out.

Basically, he can pretty much do what he wants. Recall:

The scene: The Oval Office, during Gen. Kelly’s first week as Chief of Staff. Kelly convened a meeting to discuss the administration’s plans to investigate China for stealing American intellectual property and technology. Kelly stood beside Trump, behind the Resolute desk. In front of the desk were U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, senior trade adviser Peter Navarro, top economic adviser Gary Cohn, and Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Trump, addressing Kelly, said, “John, you haven’t been in a trade discussion before, so I want to share with you my views. For the last six months, this same group of geniuses comes in here all the time and I tell them, ‘Tariffs. I want tariffs.’ And what do they do? They bring me IP. I can’t put a tariff on IP.” (Most in the room understood that the president can, in fact, use tariffs to combat Chinese IP theft.)

“China is laughing at us,” Trump added. “Laughing.”

Kelly responded: “Yes sir, I understand, you want tariffs.”

Gary Cohn, who opposes tariffs and the protectionist trade measures pushed by the Bannonites, had his shoulders slumped and was clearly appalled by the situation.

Staff secretary Rob Porter, who is a key mediator in such meetings, said to the president: “Sir, do you not want to sign this?” He was referring to Trump’s memo prodding Lighthizer to investigate China — which may lead to tariffs against Beijing.

Trump replied: “No, I’ll sign it, but it’s not what I’ve asked for the last six months.” He turned to Kelly: “So, John, I want you to know, this is my view. I want tariffs. And I want someone to bring me some tariffs.”

Kelly replied: “Yes sir, understood sir, I have it.”

At one point in the meeting, Navarro pulled out a foam board chart. Trump didn’t pay attention to it, saying “I don’t even know what I’m looking at here.”

Trump made sure the meeting ended with no confusion as to what he wanted.

“John, let me tell you why they didn’t bring me any tariffs,” he said. “I know there are some people in the room right now that are upset. I know there are some globalists in the room right now. And they don’t want them, John, they don’t want the tariffs. But I’m telling you, I want tariffs.”

Kelly broke up the meeting and said the group would work things out and reconvene at the appropriate time.

He got tariffs. And now they are costing the taxpayers billions of dollars to subsidize all the people everyone told him would be hurt by his stupid plan that he doesn’t even understand. What a system.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Great Russian and Trump campaign minds think alike

by digby

So I’m reading this blockbuster story about the Russian infiltration of social media on behalf Donald Trump during the election campaign and I couldn’t help but think back to this story called “Inside the Trump Bunker” from just 16 days before election day. It was an inside look at the “direct marketing operation’ run by Brad Parscale.

Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.

Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle. Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.

To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

Here’s what the Russians were doing at the same time:

While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home…

By 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used their fictitious online personas to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump…

In or around the latter half of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through their ORGANIZATION-controlled personas, began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate.

Great minds think alike, I guess.

Maybe it’s all one great big coincidence. But there sure are a lot of them.

By the way, Brad Parscale is Trump’s campaign manager for the 2020 campaign.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

by digby

Josh Marshall quotes one of his reader’s thoughts on Giuliani’s insane ramblings yesterday in which he blurted out that Trump was talking about Trump Moscow project all the way up to the election:

The last time Giuliani admitted a fact that was not publicly known, it was to get ahead of the Stormy Daniels story before it was disclosed in a likely indictment of Cohen. It seems safe to assume that he is revealing the fact that Trump was negotiating the Trump Tower Moscow deal/bribe in the closing days of the election for the same reason.

Cohen’s office was raided on April 9th and not coincidentally, Giuliani announced as Trump’s new lawyer on April 19th. 

Looks to me like Giuliani is trying to construct a firewall here. Admitting the fact that the negotiations were taking place right up to the election so that he can deny the evidence that they continued after Trump won. 

Also significant is the obvious lie that the Moscow Tower deal was known about. Like the Trump Tower meeting it was vociferously denied both before the election and after the inaugural.

Marshall says this, and I agree:

I think this is part right. We routinely say Giuliani is a bad lawyer for blurting out deeply damaging facts about his client. I think that’s half right. It seems clear that in private discussions Trump’s team has a running conversation about a very damaging set of facts, an effort to conceal a lot of those facts but also a parallel effort to stand up legal theories that those facts don’t equate to crimes. In Giuliani’s partial defense, the facts appear to be really, really, really bad and the relentlessness of the Mueller probe is making it extremely difficult to keep them secret. So standing up defenses on the law is both necessary and inevitable, as far-fetched as they may be. 

What I don’t buy is that Giuliani is using the cover of fumbling, improvisational interviews to get these new facts out. Because he ends up conceding new facts that are deeply damaging, not absolutely necessary to concede at this point and forcing yet further revelations that can be strongly inferred from those admissions. 

When Rudy says these things, it’s a window into conversations Trump’s legal team (such as it is) is having and has to have. But Rudy, like his generational peer boss, is unable not to think out loud, drift, ramble and admit critical facts.

There is no doubt in my mind that Giuliani’s ramblings are totally off the cuff. I remember what he used to be like and it wasn’t like this. 

It does sound as if Trump had to admit to Mueller under oath that he had been doing the deal with Putin for Trump Moscow all the way to the election.  And then, as we know, Russians were crawling all over the transition, the inaugural and the administration. For someone with Giuliani’s disordered mind it’s all very confusing and he blurted out something he didn’t need to say.

Remember: “three weeks before Election Day, Trump Jr. flew to Paris, where he attended a conference at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on ending the Syrian civil war. The event was hosted by an obscure French think tank whose founders have worked closely with Russia’s government, which plays a major role in the Syrian conflict.” It’s obvious they were trying to keep that ball in the air. And in doing so they left themselves open to blackmail.

Which explains the multiple private unrecorded face-to-face meetings:

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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All the president’s scandals

by digby

Add caption

Investigations by the Special Counsel

1. The Russian Government’s Election Attack: The special counsel moved aggressively to outline and charge the Russian government’s core attack on the 2016 election, which included both active cyber intrusions and data theftby the military intelligence unit GRU, as well as the GRU’s attempted attacks on the US voting system, as well as online information influence operations by the Internet Research Agency, known by the moniker “Project Lakhta.” Numerous threads from this investigation remain unseen—including a possible cooperator inside the Internet Research Agency, Putin’s own involvement, if any Americans contributed knowingly to the attack, the role of the FSB’s “Cozy Bear” hackers, and if or how Russia’s expensive and multi-pronged attack coordinated with contacts between Russian nationals and the Trump campaign over the course of 2016, including the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Mueller has also reportedly been investigating the role of late GOP activist Peter Smith, who had apparently tried to locate stolen emails and make contact with Russian hackers. It’s also unclear what has sparked Mueller’s apparent continuedinterest in Trump’s campaign tech firm, Cambridge Analytica.

Status: 12 Russian military intelligence officers from the GRU indicted, 13 people indicted from the Internet Research Agency, alongside three Russian companies, and a guilty plea from one California man who unwittingly aided their identity theft. Manafort aide Sam Patten is cooperating with investigators.

2. WikiLeaks

3. Middle Eastern Influence:

Potentially the biggest unseen aspect of Mueller’s investigation is his year-long pursuit of Middle Eastern influence targeting the Trump campaign, which the Daily Beast reported last week might become public sometime early next year.

4. Paul Manafort’s Activity the money laundering scheme.

5. The Trump Tower Moscow Project

That’s a lot of investigations. And those are just the ones we know about. Just this morning the feds arrested some Turkish business associates of Michael Flynn in an illegal lobbying scheme that may have included kidnapping.

The rightwingers are dancing on the head of a pin trying to explain all this away but it’s really not working except for the kind of people who will believe anything. You know — Republicans.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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Michael Flynn, wingnut in good standing

by digby

I published this at Salon this morning:

I doubt that Robert Mueller and his staff spend much time worrying about what the right-wing fever swamp thinks about the job they are doing. But if they did pay attention to what the Trump fanatics say about them, they would likely be surprised to learn that they are currently being excoriated for giving Michael Flynn what amounts to a “get out of jail free” card. It’s not because these Trump supporters think Flynn deserves to pay a higher price for lying to the feds or betraying the national trust. They think that Mueller’s office should have withdrawn all charges and apologized to Flynn for ever indicting him the first place.

Some of these folks laboring under the misapprehension that Flynn’s only crime was lying when it’s perfectly obvious that the reason he was only charged with that crime is that he was implicated in something much more serious, and had the goods on others with whom he was involved. (You’d think they might have gotten a clue from the massive redactions in the government’s sentencing memorandum.) Apparently, they are not aware of how any of this works.

Mueller’s prosecutors asked the judge to give Flynn no prison time because they reported he had provided them “substantial” assistance and because his “early cooperation was particularly valuable.” They reported that Flynn had participated in 19 interviews and provided documents and communications related to three separate investigations — two of which nobody had known anything about until this sentencing memo was submitted to the court. It was extremely generous to Flynn, citing his military record and testifying to his devotion to public service.

Proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished, when Flynn’s defense lawyers submitted their sentencing memo they decided to imply that their client hadn’t been adequately informed that lying to the FBI could be a crime. So the right wing went crazy, building up all kinds of conspiracy theories about how the former head of Intelligence for the Pentagon, who was briefly national security adviser to the president, had been duped by the corrupt Hillary lovers at the FBI. They’ve been wringing their hands and rending their garments for the last week about “perjury traps” and “witch hunts,” portraying Flynn as a naive rube who couldn’t possibly have known that lying to the FBI about Russia — at a time when everyone in the country knew there was a counter-intelligence investigation into Russian interference in the election — might not be a smart move.

The Wall Street Journal led the way with a fatuous op-ed called “The Flynn Entrapment,” which claimed that Flynn was a tragic figure who couldn’t possibly have lied to the FBI because he was a “highly decorated officer” and that the whole thing “reeks of entrapment.” They propose that Flynn may have simply “misremembered,” implying that he was so intimidated by the G-men that he just stumbled and then pleaded guilty to crimes he didn’t commit. They don’t address all the further cooperation in the criminal cases cited by the Mueller team, but others on Fox News and elsewhere seem convinced that Flynn was somehow coerced into lying about all of it out of fear for his life and that of his family.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., told Fox News, “I would not be surprised a bit if the conviction of Flynn is overturned because of the Justice Department and the FBI’s misconduct.” Gadfly law professor Jonathan Turley, said the case was a “canned hunt” in which the feds “put [Flynn] in a cage and shot him” by charging him with lying during an interview.

The president echoed those sentiments:

They gave General Flynn a great deal because they were embarrassed by the way he was treated – the FBI said he didn’t lie and they overrode the FBI. They want to scare everybody into making up stories that are not true by catching them in the smallest of misstatements. Sad!……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2018

Trump’s personal lawyer, the formerly hard-nosed “hang ’em high” federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, went even further, saying on Fox News that the FBI had set a “perjury trap” and adding, “I am disgusted with the tactics they have used in this case … what they did to Gen. Flynn should result in discipline – they are the ones who are violating the law.”

The reason right-wingers are so excited about all this is that the judge in the case took the defense attorney’s concerns seriously and asked for the underlying interview documents from the FBI. Numerous bloviators immediately leapt to the conclusion that this will lead to the entire Russia investigation being shut down, and all the evil FBI and DOJ people will be punished for conducting this witch hunt.

Mueller’s team responded with a strongly worded rebuttal on Friday, pointing out that Flynn was a seasoned professional who absolutely knew that lying to the FBI is a crime. They also reminded the judge that Flynn had been lying about this for weeks to anyone who asked. In fact, his false statements to Vice President Pence were used by Trump as the reason he was fired.

Flynn has been one of the smarter clients in this scandal, generally keeping his head down for the last year and doing what his lawyers have told him to do. So it was something of a surprise that his attorneys would raise this issue, considering that their client has pleaded guilty but is unlikely to do any time. Why would they do this?

My first thought was that Flynn had demanded it. Despite his discipline over the last year, as I documented two years ago he is a full-fledged right-wing fruitcake, who even went on TV during the presidential campaign to accuse of Hillary Clinton of pedophilia. His one foray into politics since he pleaded guilty was to campaign for a fringe character who was running against Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. (in one of the bluest districts in the country), so he doesn’t appear to have had an awakening. (This piece in the Washington Post trying to figure out what happened to the former intelligence officer is interesting but the answer is obvious — he immersed himself in right-wing media. Many of us have relatives who’ve fallen down that rabbit hole.)

National security journalist Marcy Wheeler points out that Flynn’s lawyers, who are very competent, likely had another reason for trying to get the judge to look at the government’s behavior in that interview. Judge Emmett Sullivan is one of the few federal judges who is typically skeptical of government power and will often look more deeply into such cases to ensure that defendants get a fair shake. It’s not that Sullivan was especially suspicious in this case. This is how he works. Flynn’s lawyers undoubtedly knew that and felt it was in their client’s best interest to take this shot.

Flynn is scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday and since the prosecutors have asked for leniency there is very little chance that he will receive any significant punishment. Whether the judge finds that the FBI frightened that callow young bumpkin, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, into repeatedly lying to everyone in sight about his contacts with Russians, is unknown. Even if he does, this Republican insistence that such a finding would spell the end of Donald Trump’s troubles is a fairy tale. He has so many legal problems facing him right now that even if Bob Mueller’s office was shut down tomorrow, he’d still be in a world of hurt. There’s no way out.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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Exports up as missiles rain down
by Tom Sullivan

“Does anyone remember Congress voting to authorize a war in Somalia? Did I miss that?” Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes in a tweet this morning. Bunch was reacting to an Associated Press report on U.S. air strikes in the Horn of Africa:

In a statement issued Monday, the U.S. military’s Africa Command said it carried out four strikes on Dec. 15 in which 34 people were killed and two more on Dec. 16 which killed 28. All the air attacks were in the Gandarshe coastal area south of the capital, Mogadishu, it said.

No civilians were injured or killed in the attacks, it said.

All six strikes were carried out in close coordination with Somalia’s government, it said. The airstrikes were “conducted to prevent al-Shabab from using remote areas as a safe haven to plot, direct, inspire, and recruit for future attacks,” it said.

With these attacks, AP reports, the U.S. has carried out “at least 46 airstrikes” so far this year in Somalia against the al-Qaeda-linked group.

The CNN account adds:

In March 2017, President Donald Trump authorized the US military to carry out precision strikes targeting al-Shabaab in an effort to bolster the federal government of Somalia.

Prior to that, the US military was only authorized to carry out airstrikes in self-defense of advisers on the ground.

Self-defense is no longer “operative,” as this older tweet shows.

A US airstrike in Somalia kills more than 100 al-Shabaab militants https://t.co/EjrRwcbIDV pic.twitter.com/wpWfRTnHg7— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) November 22, 2017

Like Bunch, I guess I missed all that too. Where has my mind been?

Even with yuge Trump defense budgets “the likes of which the Pentagon has never seen,” exporting death and destruction to “Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Niger, Libya, Somalia and an untold number of other global hot spots” largely goes as unnoticed at home as The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism at the New York Times.

This post will stay pinned to the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down for newer stuff. Thanks — digby


Doing some talking as well as writing

by digby

Holiday soother: baby elephant walking the walk

First, let me thank those of you who have donated to the annual holiday fundraiser so far. As always, I’m overwhelmed by your support and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I’m not all that good at self-promotion and I’m sure I often let my friends and colleagues down by failing to promote them adequately as well. But it occurs to me that I haven’t been doing my part to promote a weekly podcast/radio show that I do with my friend Sam Seder. And I’ve been doing it for almost two years! I also appear somewhat regularly on his other podcast Majority Report, usually on casual Fridays.

If you care to put it on your list of podcasts, you can do that by joining Ring of Fire.

Here’s this week’s Majority Report:

It’s a labor of love for me because I adore Sam and love to talk politics with someone so smart and well-informed but it’s also provided me (and his audience, I hope) an hour or so each week with a good overview of the week’s major developments. We often hit on topics that I don’t necessarily write about and because it’s Sam, who is brilliantly funny, it’s often very entertaining.

All of this is to say that aside from writing here every day and contributing to Salon, I do other things like these podcasts and activism work for Blue America PAC, all of which are an honor.  But this blog is what keeps me going and your support is vital.

We are, as you know, at the beginning of a presidential campaign (oh my dear god …) and it is the most consequential presidential campaign of our lifetimes. They’re all important, of course. But this one will tell the world whether the most powerful nation on earth has the wherewithal to right itself from the worst electoral mistake it’s ever made or if we’ve taken a very dark turn that is leading the world to catastrophe. This man in the White House and the party that is enabling him are both malevolent and ignorant. It is a lethal combination and it’s only a matter of time before we reach the point of no return.

So, I hope that we all pull together and do whatever it takes to ensure that the next generations are able to look back at this and say “what the hell were they thinking?” from the perspective of a safer, more decent world.

I’ll keep plugging away here and wherever else I can. And I hope that you’ll keep stopping by and reading and listening. Your support means the world to me and if you are able to throw a few bucks in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, I’d be most grateful.

The paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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Trump is making America better, just not the way he thinks he is

by digby

I don’t know about you, but this surprises me a little bit. Maybe we’re not as isolationist and insular as we thought:

A 2016 HuffPost/YouGov poll, taken just after the U.K.’s vote for Brexit, found support for a similar set of isolationist attitudes percolating in the U.S. Nearly half the public agreed that the U.S. should step back from world affairs, and said that the inflow of newcomers from other countries “threatens traditional American customs and values.”

Two and a half years later, there’s been distinct movement away from both those ideas, coupled with increasing support for free trade ― all, to some extent, a repudiation of White House talking points. The share of American public that believes the country should pay less attention to overseas issues has decreased from 49 to 39 percent, and the share who are unhappy with free trade agreements from 29 percent to 21 percent. Most starkly, the percentage of Americans who say they feel the nation’s values are threatened by newcomers fell from 48 percent in 2016 to just 36 percent today.

Obviously, I’m not saying that unfettered free trade is something that’s always good. But Trump’s simple-minded “trade” policies which are really just schoolyard posturing without any sense of how the modern world actually works has probably illustrated for a lot of people just complex this issue really is.

And as much as we might like to withdraw behind our borders that just is not happening. We are part of the world and the world is part of us and it behooves us to try to make it a better place. We’ve done a very half-assed job of that in past but there’s no reason we can’t improve in the future.

The greatest challenge of our time is climate change and despite our president’s imbecilic talk about the oceans being small so other countries need to stop polluting (or something) every country on this planet is going to have to work together to solve it.  And that’s just the beginning.

There’s no turning back from globalism. We have no choice so we might as well embrace it and try to make it works for all of us.

And then there’s this which makes me think there is some hope for this country after all:

Americans across the political spectrum have warmed in their attitude toward immigration: Although Republicans still say by a 46-point margin that the number of newcomers to the country threatens U.S. values, that’s down from 58 points in the previous survey.

The results join a growing body of evidence that public sentiment in the Trump era has swung away from nativism. The belief that immigration hurts the U.S. is at a low ebb since at least 2006, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal polling. Support for free trade appears to have grown.

America becoming a better place? Looks like it’s at least possible. Maybe Trump’s ugly example has shamed most people in this country into taking a good look at themselves and deciding they want to go another way.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

The country isn’t buying it Trumpie

by digby

This new NBC/WSJ poll shows that Trump and his majordomo Rudy Giuliani aren’t helping themselves with all this snotty caterwauling about witch hunts. It turns out that acting like a six year old in public isn’t ver effective at reassuring people that you haven’t done anything wrong:

Six in 10 Americans say President Donald Trump has been untruthful about the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, while half of the country says the investigation has given them doubts about Trump’s presidency, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

The survey, conducted a month after the results of November’s midterm elections, also finds more Americans want congressional Democrats — rather than Trump or congressional Republicans — to take the lead role in setting policy for the country.

And just 10 percent of respondents say that the president has gotten the message for a change in direction from the midterms — when the GOP lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives but kept its majority in the U.S. Senate — and that he’s making the necessary adjustments.

“The dam has not burst on Donald Trump,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, whose firm conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “But this survey suggests all the structural cracks [that exist] in the dam.”

The NBC/WSJ poll — conducted Dec. 9-12 — comes after new developments in the Russia probe and other investigations involving the president, including evidence and allegations that:

Trump and his team were offered “synergy” with the Russian government.

Trump directed an illegal campaign-finance scheme to make payments covering up two alleged affairs in the last days of the 2016 campaign.

Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort continued to communicate with Trump administration officials well after his indictment.

Former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen was sentenced to prison for three years.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump denied directing Cohen to make the payments covering up the alleged affairs.

“I never directed him to do anything wrong,” Trump said. “Whatever he did he did on his own. He’s a lawyer. A lawyer who represents a client is supposed to do the right thing that’s why you pay them a lot of money.”

Asked in the poll if Trump has been honest and truthful when it comes to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and related matters, 62 percent of all adults say they disagree. That includes 94 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of independents and a quarter (24 percent) of Republicans.

By contrast, 34 percent believe Trump has been honest and truthful about the investigation, including 70 percent of Republicans, 29 percent of independents and just 5 percent of Democrats.

These numbers are a slight shift from August, when 38 percent of registered voters agreed Trump has been honest and truthful about the investigation, and 56 percent disagreed.

“Last week’s Cohen and Manafort news clearly hurt the president — no dramatic movement to be sure, but incremental erosion in President Trump’s credibility,” said Democrat pollster Fred Yang of Hart Research Associates.

Also in the poll, a combined 50 percent of Americans say the Russia investigation — led by special counsel Robert Mueller — has given them “major,” “fairly major” or “just some” doubts about Trump’s presidency, versus 44 percent who say it hasn’t given them more doubts.

McInturff, the GOP pollster, says that the 44 percent without doubts is a “powerful reminder about the status of his political base.”

What’s more, a plurality of respondents — 46 percent — say the convictions and guilty pleas of members of Trump’s 2016 campaign suggest potential wrongdoing by the president, compared with 23 percent who believe the wrongdoing is limited only to those individuals; 28 percent don’t know enough to say.

And asked if Mueller’s investigation should continue, 45 percent believe it should, while 34 percent think it should come to an end — essentially unchanged from August’s NBC/WSJ poll.

MORE AMERICANS WANT DEMOCRATS — NOT TRUMP — IN CHARGE OF POLICY
A month after the results from the 2018 midterm elections, 48 percent of Americans say they want Democrats in Congress to take the lead role in setting policy for the country, versus 21 percent who want congressional Republicans to take the lead and 19 percent who want Trump in charge.

The numbers are consistent with past results on this same question from the June and October 2017 NBC/WSJ polls.

Asked about Trump’s response to the midterm elections, 10 percent of Americans say Trump has gotten the message that voters wanted a change in direction and that he’s making the necessary adjustments; 22 percent say he got the message but is not making those adjustments; 33 percent say he didn’t get the message; and 31 percent maintain the elections were not a message for a change in direction.

“The voters believe they sent a message, and they believe the president hasn’t gotten it yet,” said Yang, the Democratic pollster.

But McInturff counters that Trump is simply reflecting the overwhelming number of Republicans who feel positive about the results from the midterms and who don’t believe it sent a message.

Trump’s job rating in new NBC/WSJ poll stands at 43 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove among all adults. (Right before the midterms, it was 46 percent approve, 52 percent disapprove among registered voters.)

And looking ahead to 2020, a combined 38 percent of registered voters say they’d “definitely” or “probably” vote for Trump in his re-election, compared with 52 percent of voters who would “definitely” or “probably” vote against him — unchanged from December 2017.

PUBLIC IS INCREASINGLY PESSIMISTIC ABOUT THE ECONOMY
Finally, the poll finds the percentage of Americans believing the U.S. economy will get worse in the next 12 months is at its highest point since 2013.

Overall, 28 percent say the economy will get better in the next year, 33 percent think it will get worse and 37 percent believe it will stay about the same.

(Those numbers were essentially reversed last January: 35 percent said the economy would get better, 20 percent said it would get worse and 43 percent said it would stay the same.)

“For the first time in Trump’s presidency, his safety net of a robust economy shows signs of unraveling,” said Yang, the Democratic pollster.

“And remember, the booming economy didn’t prevent voters from turning against Republicans in November,” he added.

I think some of Trump’s supporters thought he would sober up and start acting like a president eventually. It’s clear he is incapable of doing that. So even if they want to give him the benefit of the doubt his behavior is eroding his support.

Moreover, there are still a few hard-assed, law ‘n order, “just the fact ma’am” types in the GOP coalition who are undoubtedly starting to feel the dissonance of people like Rudy Giuliani and the President, not to mention the entire wingnut media apparatus, trashing cops and prosecutors. That’s a new one for them. (Granted, usually the lefty types are the skeptics of the cops, but in this case the graft, corruption and rank criminality of the persons being targeted is so obvious that most of us are hoping that they aren’t treating them the way they often treat suspects without means. Let’s just say they very rarely go after white-collar criminals and they aren’t exactly liberals which lends some credibility to the idea that there is something very bad going on here.)

I think the majority of Americans can see that Trump and his corrupt cronies are unfit and that adopting the (formerly uncompromising prosecutor) Giuliani approach letting them get away with all this would irrevocably damage our society.

Trump whining all day long about it is just making things worse. Not that he’ll stop. He is compelled to do it because he is a damaged and unstable person.

The annual holiday fundraiser is happening right now and your support means the world to me. If you are able to throw a few bucks in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, I’d be most grateful.

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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