Month: December 2018

Saboteurs not statesmen
by Tom Sullivan

Poster from exhibition preview, Chicago History Museum.

Following a script written in North Carolina two years ago, Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in a lame-duck session on Friday introduced a package of legislation sharply curtailing the authorities of incoming Democrats elected statewide. During a hearing Monday, state Rep. Katrina Shankland (D) called the effort “a slap in the face of every voter who voted in record turnout in the midterms.”

On November 6, Democrat Tony Evers won the governorship, turning out Republican Scott Walker after two terms. Democrat Josh Kaul defeated Brad Schimel, Wisconsin’s incumbent attorney general.

Republicans proposed moving the 2020 presidential primary date in an effort to advantage a conservative state Supreme Court justice. Other proposals would weaken the governor’s power to appoint members to the Group Insurance Board and Walker’s scandal-wracked Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation Evers has pledged to dissolve. The attorney general’s office is also the focus of legislation to minimize its powers by shifting them to the legislature still dominated by the GOP.

Opponents shouting “Respect our votes!” and “Shame!” filled the hallways of the state capitol in a scene reminiscent of rallies held eight years ago to resist Walker’s anti-union legislation.

The Progressive describes the effort bluntly:

The Republicans’ plan is fairly obvious—to keep Wisconsin’s government in an unchanging zombie state until 2022, when the Republicans hope to regain control of the governor’s mansion and attorney general’s office.

And to help make sure this happens, they’re also aiming to change the rules of early voting. In 2018, there was record turnout for a midterm election. And, as we know, more people voting is to Republicans as Dorothy’s pail of water was to the Wicked Witch.

“The partisans behind this preemptive lame-duck coup d’etat are beyond shame,” declares a Beloit Daily News editorial, calling the move an effort by Republicans to kneecap Walker’s successor:

Proponents will claim governors have had too much power and this is only an appropriate rebalancing of power with the legislature. The lie in that line can be found in the fact Republicans have controlled the legislature since the 2010 election, and not once noticed Governor Walker was wielding too much power.

Wisconsin Republicans who called the lame-duck session to rescue 390 jobs at a Kimberly-Clark plant moved on to targeting the incoming Evers administration. After the re-election defeat of Gov. Pat McCrory in 2016, North Carolina Republicans called a similar session to address Hurricane Matthew disaster relief, but quickly pivoted to passing a sweeping package of legislation to hobble the incoming Democrat Roy Cooper.

John Weaver, a former strategist for the John McCain and John Kasich presidential campaigns blasted the Wisconsin GOP effort in a tweet:

What a fucking outrage. When you can't win, cheat. When you lose, cheat for the next election. Then whine and whine. Jesus. https://t.co/6orFzmpKa7— John Weaver (@jwgop) December 1, 2018

Similar efforts against incoming Democrats are underway by the GOP in Michigan, prompting MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to declare the GOP “a party that is increasingly declaring war on democracy itself.”

The late President George H.W. Bush lies in state in the Capitol rotunda. Allies and adversaries alike will pay their respects and offer plaudits for his career as a statesman. The party he once led, however, is burying more than one man. The GOP might as well be burying whatever legacy it once had.

Republicans demonstrate again and again they do not want to govern. They want to rule. They have abandoned all pretense of respect for democratic principles. Their decline did not begin under Donald Trump, but it has accelerated, as well as their disrespect for any rule of law or democratic process that would hold them to account. Laws are for punishing their adversaries. They are no longer America’s statesmen, but its sabotuers.

Meanwhile in Bizarro World

by digby

I think it’s important for everyone to know just how brainwashed these right wingers are — and how likely it is that’s they will completely lose their minds if and when Dear Leader is forced to confront the evidence against him and the whole wingnut media apparatus claims it’s a coup perpetrated by the Deep State and the Fake News.

I honestly don’t know what will happen.

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The Banana Republicans have been on this track for a long time

by digby

MAD Magazine FTW

If you are not aware of the Banana Republican tactics being practiced first in North Carolina and now replicated in Wisconsin and Michigan, check out this article. It’s chilling.

But let’s not pretend that this sort of thing just came out of nowhere. Paul Waldman gives us a helpful history lesson on the escalation of this sort of dirty politics:

You can date this era of democracy-rigging back to the 2000 Florida debacle, which taught Republicans a number of lessons, including that voter purges are an effective way to keep large numbers of Democrats from the polls, intimidating election officials can stop vote counts, it’s important to have a secretary of state in place who can put her thumb on the scales in a close election, and if all else fails, the Supreme Court will bail you out.

Put them all together and you have a meta-lesson that Republicans took to heart: We can get away with anything. It doesn’t matter whether we’re the target of a stern editorial from The New York Times, or whether Democrats squawk. What matters is winning.

So in subsequent years they just kept on pushing, particularly after Barack Obama became president. Can we just filibuster everything? Sure, why not! Can we threaten to default on America’s debt? Go for it! Shut down the government? Have at it! The breaking of norms culminated in the refusal to allow Obama’s nominee for a vacant Supreme Court seat to get so much as a hearing. One can’t help but wonder if at the time someone said, “Can we really just refuse to hear the nomination of a Supreme Court justice? Won’t we be punished?” And the answer was, “Who’s going to punish us? The voters? Give me a break.”

They were right, in 2016 at least. And let’s be honest: Voters in 2018 weren’t rejected the bottomless cynicism of the GOP nearly as much as they were rejecting Donald Trump. And now there’s a partisan Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which will be happy to rubber-stamp just about any move Republican states take to rig the game in the GOP’s favor.

We often hear laments in the media about how unrelentingly nasty and partisan American politics has become. But as it is today, only one of our two great parties demonstrates such outright contempt for democracy. The Republican Party simply does not believe in the idea that the candidate who gets the most votes is the one who should govern, should that candidate be a Democrat. And in the years to come, as the people they represent make up a smaller and smaller proportion of the American population, they’ll come to believe it even less than they do now and rely even more on rigging the game in order to hold power. After all, who’s going to stop them?

Exactly. In Wisconsin, there are protests at the capitol and around the state. Voters are up in arms. But the Republicans aren’t budging. hey simply don’t care. And they are likely counting on short memories and short attention spans to alleviate them of any accountability for this stuff. It’s obvious that the people have to take responsibility and remove these people from office and keep them out until they sober up and agree to follow the rules. To do that will likely require some rather radical structural changes.

We’ll have to see whether or not anyone has the will to do that.

(By the way, I would actually trace the modern GOP’s descent into blatant undemocratic behavior to the 1998 impeachment. The public wasn’t with them and their case was insanely thin to justify removing a democratically elected president from office. But they did it anyway. It didn’t work out for them but they got their boy Bush installed two years later anyway. Nobody paid a price for any of it. .)

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The rump establishment on the grift

by digby

This piece by Sam Stein at the Daily Beast is fantastic. Read it all:

According to internal documents obtained by The Daily Beast, No Labels encouraged financiers known for backing hyperpartisan causes to back its own super PACs. Among those courted were individuals who’ve bankrolled massive parts of the Republican Party’s infrastructure, including David Koch, former AIG head Hank Greenberg, and billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer; as well as top supporters of President Donald Trump, including PayPal founder Peter Thiel, businessman Foster Friess, and Home Depot founder Ken Langone. No Labels also courted liberal-minded moneymen, including Michael Vachon, a top political adviser to George Soros (one of the biggest funders of Democratic and progressive causes) and Reid Hoffman, an investor and entrepreneur who has called Trump “worse than useless.” The group also targeted Wendi Murdoch (ex-wife of Rupert and rumored Ivanka Trump pal), uber-agent Ari Emanuel, and Dallas Mavericks owner and oft-rumored presidential aspirant Mark Cuban. Another possible 2020 candidate, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was also among dozens of high net-worth individuals approached about donating to No Labels’ super PACs.

Most of those targeted for financial support didn’t end up donating to No Labels super PACs. But some notable names did, including former Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, who was encouraged to donate by former Democrat-turned-independent Senator Joe Lieberman, according to internal records.

The attempt to recruit these financiers was, according to sources, part of a concerted effort by No Labels to steer emphasis away from its nonprofit arm and toward campaign operations designed to boost preferred political candidates and target those deemed too extreme or impediments to its policy agenda.

By the end of the 2018 cycle, six No Labels-affiliated super PACs—No Labels Action, Forward Not Back, United Together, Govern or Go Home, Citizens for a Strong America, and United for Progress—had collectively raised more than $11 million from 53 individual donors. The average contribution to the groups was about $124,000, illustrating their reliance on high-dollar donors rather than grassroots financial support.

To court those deep-pocketed donors, No Labels leaned on individuals with ties to other prominent potential givers. The group appears to have sought support from Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate who was just elected to the U.S. Senate, though it’s unclear whether it hoped that support would be financial, political, or both. In internal company notes, No Labels proposed having Lieberman contact Brad Bloom—the leader of the private-equity firm Berkshire Partners and a high-dollar donor to a pro-Romney super PAC in 2012—“to discuss Mitt” and arrange a meeting with other potential supporters in Boston. Internal documents also note that another super PAC donor prospect, financier David Nierenberg, is a “close friend of Mitt Romney.”
[…]
Officials tied to the organization said they are disillusioned with how much emphasis has been placed on raising and spending money.

“The more one looks under the rock, the more one turns over that rock, it is not an attractive picture. It is a big fundraising operation run with limited results,” said one former No Labels official. “You go in first, there are donors, they’re having discussions and you think it’s healthy. And then you’re in it for a few months and you wonder, what are we doing?”

The overtly political approach has also landed No Labels in legal drama. The group is being sued by the firm Applecart, formerly one of its top political consultants, which has accused No Labels of not paying them for millions of dollars of work and of firing them in favor of consultants with personal ties to Jacobson. No Labels alleges Applecart’s performance was error-filled and ineffective and in an emailed statement, Dan Webb, counsel for No Labels’ political groups, blamed Applecart for the leaks of internal documents.

I’m not sure it’s ever been anything but a grift but they seem to have launched into high gear now, hovering the huge bucks. It’s no surprise to me. Those who’ve read this blog for years know that I’ve never exactly been a fan since “no-labels” is, even without the money-grubbing, a nonsensical, ineffectual notion. The problem is that the establishment is addicted to the idea that there exists some “sensible” halfway point between the two parties when that’s not how it works. That’s not how it’s ever worked.

Like I said, read the whole thing. This article exposes them for what they are. And the only thing that’s “sensible” about it is that they’ve found a way to sensibly enrich themselves by tapping into rich people who are mostly, by definition, looking out for themselves.

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Roger and the Donald, a love story

by digby

A juicy little tid-bit from Emptywheel:

So to sum up: unlike Trump’s 37 other potential co-conspirators, he — Trump’s longtime political advisor and a lifelong ratfucker — Stone claims that he’s not in a JDA, but won’t testify against Trump out of the goodness of his own heart.

I find that all very interesting against the context of a recent WaPo article about how (and how frequently) Stone and Trump spoke during the campaign.

In recent months, the Trump Organization turned over to Mueller’s team phone and contact logs that show multiple calls between the then-candidate and Stone in 2016, according to people familiar with the material. 

The records are not a complete log of their contacts — Stone told The Washington Post on Wednesday that Trump at times called him from other people’s phones. 

Stone said he never discussed WikiLeaks with Trump and diminished the importance of any phone records, saying “unless Mueller has tape recordings of the phone calls, what would that prove?” 

Stone and WikiLeaks have denied collaborating with each other, and Stone has decried the Mueller investigation as a “political witch hunt” to punish him for supporting Trump. 

Trump has told his lawyers — and last week said in written answers to Mueller — that Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks’ upcoming release and that he had no prior knowledge of it, according to people familiar with his responses.

After a period, by Stone’s admission, Stone and Trump communicated via cut-outs.

From January through March 2016, Stone said he had a cellphone number for Trump. But he said the phone number got into too many hands, and Trump’s staff changed it. After that, a pattern developed for their calls, Stone said: Trump would call Stone from a blocked number or from the phones of associates or campaign aides. 

“He would initiate the calls,” Stone said. “I didn’t call him.” 

Once, Stone said, he answered his iPhone because the caller ID said he was getting a call from Christopher Ruddy, a Trump friend who is the CEO of Newsmax, a conservative television network. But the voice on the line was Trump’s. 

“I believe there was one time when he asked me to call Roger,” Ruddy said in an interview Wednesday, adding that he did not believe “there was any discussion related to Russians or improper activities.” 

The calls from Trump came at odd hours, Stone said, because Trump “gets almost no sleep.” Trump usually wanted to get a sense of how the campaign was going, Stone said, or just to “touch base.” Stone sometimes offered suggestions, but often he could barely get a word in.

Perhaps in response to Stone’s ABC appearance, Rick Wilson tweeted that he had alerted Mueller about an on-going back channel between Stone and Trump.

Stone recently made Bruce Rogow his lead attorney on these matters. Rogow has represented Trump Organization in various disputes over the years (including one that will elicit scrutiny in NY State’s lawsuit against the Trump Foundation.

In 1992, Rogow represented former KKK leader David Duke in a case brought by the ACLU to have Duke reinstated on the Florida Republican presidential primary ballot.
Those still traumatized by the 2000 election recount might recall Rogow representingTheresa LePore, the Palm Beach county election official responsible for the area’s butterfly ballots.
[snip]
Rogow began to pick up more cases for the Trump Organization.
[snip]
Rogow represented Trump in a federal complaint that arose from the case, arguing that the town ordinances “unconstitutionally restrict its ability to fly a large American flag at Mar-a-Lago.” 

Trump eventually settled the case, agreeing to move the flag inwards on his property and pay $100,000 to an Iraq War veterans’ charity in exchange for the town waiving its fines. 

The donation was made, but not by Trump himself or Mar-a-Lago — rather, the Trump Foundation gave the $100,000. That donation has now become one part of a New York State Attorney general’s lawsuit against the charity.

Call me crazy, but all this suggests that Stone and Trump are in as close touch as — say — Manafort and Trump, but for some reason, Stone and Trump are working harder at hiding their ongoing ties.

That would be truly remarkable. It would say an association with Stone — and whatever it is Mueller seems to know he did during the election — is even more toxic than Trump’s ties with a guy apparently being handled by a GRU officer.

There are many strands to the Russia counterintelligence investigation, many of which involve Trump. But this is one of the most interesting.

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A Decent Man

by tristero

As the media compare him to the ghastly Republican presidents who came after him — including, of course, his own son— George H W Bush comes off as a pretty decent man. If you overlook the racist Willie Horton ad H W Bush approved. And if you overlook the McCarthyite fear-mongering when he called his opponent a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” And if you overlook the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

And if you overlook H W Bush’s participation in a crime, recently discussed on Rachel Maddow’s podcast Bag Man. Here’s the story:

Back in the early ’70’s, Vice President Spiro Agnew was being investigated for extortion and bribery by some Baltimore prosecutors, crimes he perpetrated not only in Maryland but also continued while Vice President. Agnew even accepted cash bribes in his White House office.

Nixon and his men tried hard to shut down the investigation into Agnew. They decided to pressure Republican US Senator Glenn Beall, the brother of George Beall, the US Attorney from Maryland to talk to us brother to get the Baltimore prosecutors to back off.

The term for this kind of behavior is “obstruction of justice.” It’s a crime.

Who did they send to pressure Senator Beall to get his brother to shut down the investigation?

Who they end up using for this obstruction effort is the Chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time. A man by the name of… George Herbert Walker Bush. 

The future President of the United States– George Bush– gets enlisted in this effort to reach out to Senator Glenn Beall to have him pressure his brother to shutdown this investigation. 

Listen to this phone call between Richard Nixon and Al Haig. 

The audio here is a little bit distorted, but the first voice here is Nixon and he’s talking to Haig about enemies of the White House who are now going after everybody: 

NIXON: It’s amazing, isn’t it? By golly, the way they start to go after everybody, don’t they? 

HAIG: Yeah, they’re after everybody. And the Vice President has been very nervous, he called me three times here. 

NIXON: I know and you decided to have Harlow try to, well he’s isn’t here— 

HAIG: He isn’t here, so I did it through George Bush on the first run. 

NIXON: That’s good, that’s good. 

“I did it through George Bush on the first run.” 

This didn’t ever stick to George HW Bush… maybe because these audio tapes have just been collecting dust for the last four decades. But George Bush was brought in to a potentially criminal effort organized and directed by the then-President of the United States Richard Nixon to obstruct an ongoing investigation into his Vice President.

And George Bush did it.

Did it work? Well…

…the first part of it worked. Senator Glenn Beall himself took all of that pressure that he was getting and he did, in fact, reach out to his little brother George about it. 

In that same memo to file in his papers in the Frostburg State archive, George says his older brother “relate[d] to him … expression[s] of concern” from George Bush and Agnew and others. 

His Senator brother was contacting him telling him about all the powerful and important people in Washington who had been in touch with him “concerned” about George’s investigation. 

The obstruction effort got to George Beall. And George Beall memorialized that pressure that he was getting for the record… for history… but he stopped it there.
We now know he never once passed a word of any of it along to his team of young federal prosecutors who were just quietly working that case. 

And there, my friends is a decent man: George Beall, who refused to buckle to pressure from both the Chairman of the RNC and the White House, who refused to shut down an investigation into the vice president’s crimes because powerful people including George H W Bush wanted it shut down.

Few people except his family remembers George Beall today. But we are all remembering H W Bush, the media falling over itself to remember him as a decent man.

And that is a commentary on American values.

Instructions from the oval

by digby

Your president, ladies and gentlemen, witness tampering in broad daylight:

“Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time.” You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get…..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2018

….his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free. He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2018

“I will never testify against Trump.” This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about “President Trump.” Nice to know that some people still have “guts!”— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2018

Bob Mueller (who is a much different man than people think) and his out of control band of Angry Democrats, don’t want the truth, they only want lies. The truth is very bad for their mission!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2018

Even Mafia godfathers don’t go after the wives.

What a malevolent scumbag.

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How Devin Nunes screwed the pooch again

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

As President Trump was getting ready to take off for the annual G-20 meeting in Argentina he let fly at his former lawyer and Trump Organization executive Michael Cohen, calling him a liar and characterizing him as weak for cooperating with the government. He made a point of complimenting “others” (obviously former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and their mutual longtime pal, Roger Stone) for refusing to do so, an unprecedented comment coming from the man who is formally in charge of the US Department of Justice. But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte laid out in this recap of the week’s events,  he was sore at the surprise guilty plea Cohen had entered on Thursday in which he admitted to lying about his dealings with Russia on Trump’s behalf during the presidential campaign. After all, he was jetting off for a long-anticipated reunion with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Bueno Aires and this latest news was bound to make that just a tad uncomfortable.

As it happened, Trump canceled the scheduled meeting with the Russian president, citing the ongoing confrontation with Ukraine but nobody believed it. He was uncharacteristically sullen and subdued at the summit, although he and Putin did manage to squeeze in some face time after all. (Nobody knows what they spoke of, as usual, although it’s not hard to guess.) He signed the new NAFTA deal and had a meeting with Chinese premier Xi Jinping which he is boasting resulted in  the greatest trade deal in history but which experts say, aside from an agreement to control the export of fentanyl, is really just an agreement to keep talking. Like the North Korean “deal” it’s all a lot of talk and flattery to make Trump feel like a real president.

It was obvious his heart wasn’t in it. He was still obsessing over the Cohen plea on Saturday morning:

Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2018

….Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2018

He ended up canceling his planned press conference, for which he should be grateful. Those never end well for him. It would almost certainly have featured many questions about the current state of the investigation, including the very interesting memorandum filed by Michael Cohen’s attorneys on Friday night in anticipation of his sentencing this week. In what is perhaps the first of its kind in the whole Russia scandal, it appears to have been done by competent defense lawyers.

First of all, it explains why Cohen didn’t seek a cooperation agreement of the kind taken by others like Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and the aborted Manafort deal. It turns out that he has been talking to Mueller since before he pled guilty in the hush money case and has been speaking with the office of Special Counsel regularly ever since. Not only that, but he’s continuing to cooperate with the US Attorney of the Southern District of New York as well as New York State Attorney General in an investigation into the Trump Foundation and something to do with the New York tax authorities. He’s been very busy.

And the reason he didn’t ask for a formal cooperation agreement was that his lawyers apparently convinced him that the smarter move was to cooperate willingly and preemptively so as to begin his sentence as soon as possible. The memorandum suggests that the prosecutors have been convinced that he will continue to cooperate and that he plans to do so. Whether that’s true or not, now that he’s pled guilty to lying, most observers feel he’s “locked in” on the Russia conspiracy side of the Mueller investigation. And what he lied about is substantial, regardless of Trump’s characterization of it as “lightly looking at doing a building in Russia” as he was talking up the Russian president on the campaign trail and the Russian government was sabotaging his opponent on his behalf.

His defense is probably relying on the case of John Dean who, for all his cooperation, was never granted immunity, pled guilty to obstruction of justice and was sentenced to one to four years in federal prison. He never went to jail, however, and was instead held in a “safe house” used for mafia witnesses so he could testify against the other Watergate conspirators. He ended up having his sentence reduced to time served which was four months. He got his life back and is now considered one of the good guys, something Cohen clearly wants to achieve for himself.

This guilty plea for to lying to congress has also opened up a huge can of worms for a whole lot of people who came before the congressional committees.  Cohen admits that he “remained in close and regular contact with White House-based staff and legal counsel to Client-1 [Donald Trump]” in advance of giving testimony which he now admits was false. There is a lot of evidence that others did the same thing. In fact,  the GOP Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Richard Burr of North Carolina said that they have referred “a lot” of them to the Justice Department for doing so. It’s an open question as to whether or not they also were conferring with the president’s staff and legal counsel before they testified.

But you can’t solely blame the White House staff, if a lot of people lied to the committee, particularly the House Intelligence Committee which acted as agents of the president and have helped all along to engineer the cover-up.  As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye pointed out this week-end, the unethical behavior of the GOP leadership led by Devin Nunes pretty much told anyone who testified that they could lie with impunity. Indeed, the partisan “report” they issued exonerating the president exonerated them as well since they never referred any of these witnesses to the Justice Department.

But that doesn’t mean they are in the clear. The incoming Chairmen of both the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff D-CA and the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler D-NY made it clear on the Sunday morning shows that they plan to release all the testimony t the Special Counsel’s office, which the Republicans have refused to do. Ironically, because of Nunes and his fellow Trump henchmen’s willingness to scheme with the White House on behalf of the president they may have created a sense of false security for witnesses such as Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Eric Prince, all of whom could soon find themselves in the kind of hot water Cohen just got himself out of.

Both chairmen had ominous words for Trump and his circle. Nadler rightly pointed out that Trump keeping the Moscow Trump Tower deal gave the Kremlin “leverage” over the president and wondered if they still were using it. Schiff said Trump and his business were obviously “compromised.” And, of course, many more questions still remain.

Keep in mind that the partner in that Trump Tower deal that everyone associated with it lied about was a man named Felix Sater. And this is what he told Michael Cohen when they were putting together the deal:

I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy, our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.

Perhaps this was just “salesmanship” as Michael Cohen originally claimed. But no one has ever adequately explained the line of thinking that says a Trump Tower deal in Moscow would get Trump elected? I’d guess Schiff and Nadler will be calling Felix Sater back in to fill in the blanks.

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NC 9th’s Aunt Bee pickle
by Tom Sullivan

The strange tale of election-rigging in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District gets stranger. Courtesy of Judd Legum’s
newsletter, “Popular Information,” the state Board’s decision to put on hold certification of the race in which Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes just got stranger:

The decision comes after substantial evidence of improprieties involving absentee ballots. A series of affidavits submitted suggests that a man named Leslie McCrae Dowless, who was hired by the Harris campaign through a contractor, systematically falsified, manipulated, and potentially destroyed absentee ballots — particularly in Bladen County. Harris won Bladen County by 1,557 votes, more than his margin statewide. [districtwide, TS]

In fact, requests for absentee ballots in Bladen ran at 7.5 percent, while elsewhere in the district it was under 3 percent. Furthermore, the high percentage of the requests that went unreturned in Bladen and Robeson Counties — as many as 3,400 — suggests ballots collected by contractors working with Dowless were falsified or destroyed. Of voters in Bladen requesting absentee ballots, 19 percent were Republicans, yet Harris received 61 percent of the absentee vote.

Affidavit from Bladen County absentee voter suggests something a little strange. #ncpol #nc9 #ncga pic.twitter.com/DrLuLhp5oa— Jim Morrill (@jimmorrill) November 29, 2018

Here's another affidavit from a Bladen absentee voter. One reason why state officials apparently looking into such cases. #ncpol #nc9 #ncga pic.twitter.com/qC1EpVLsXp— Jim Morrill (@jimmorrill) November 29, 2018

Helping people request absentee ballots is permissible. Collecting absentee ballots is illegal and known as harvesting.

Another person filed an affidavit saying McCrae Dowless said he was hired by Harris to work the absentee ballot operation in Bladen County. If Harris won, McCrae Dowless said he would be paid $40,000 in cash.

As the problems in North Carolina’s 9th District have garnered national attention, one important aspect of the story has gone unreported: McCrae Dowless’ criminal record. Records from the North Carolina Department Of Public Safety obtained by Popular Information reveal McCrae Dowless has been convicted of multiple crimes.

Kiting checks, insurance fraud, parole violation, etc. … just the sort you want running an absentee ballot program.

Vox’s Dylan Scott adds:

This isn’t the first time Dowless’s name has come up in relation to voting shenanigans: In 2016, several people filed complaints about campaign workers hired by Dowless who were collecting absentee ballots, as WECT reported at the time. (Confusing matters even further: Dowless was, at the time, alleging voter fraud undertaken by Democrats. There’s a lot going on here.)

Dowless was paid as a contractor by the Harris campaign in 2018, the Charlotte Observer reported. He denies any wrongdoing.

Michael Bitzer of Old North State Politics provides a handy chart to display how Bladen’s and Robeson’s absentee non-return rates diverge from the rest of the district:

The key takeaway is if the state Board decides to call for a new election, it may if there is evidence the election was conducted unfairly, even if the amount of fraud might not have been substantial enough to alter the outcome.

“By my statutory reading and interpretation, it doesn’t matter whether there are enough votes that may or may not necessarily change the outcome,” Bitzer told Vox.

That outcome is, as they might say in Mayberry, an Aunt Bee pickle, and may well land parties back in court again. Republicans have spent quite a lot of time there since taking full control of state government in 2013.

They will be back there again anyway. Voters approved a “blank check” voter ID constitutional amendment in November, the blanks to be filled in by Republican legislators during the current lame-duck session. That work is in progress. As soon as Republicans override Gov. Roy Cooper’s expected veto, they will be back in court defending it. One estimate puts the costs of that defense at $12 million. (The state spent nearly $5 million defending its last voter ID law, and losing.) For reference, their 2012 Amendment One prohibiting same-sex marriage did not survive court scrutiny after passage.

“This tells me that the election system is broken, even ore [sic] reason voter ID is needed,” one commenter wrote on the state Democratic Party chair’s Facebook page.

That, despite presenting IDs having no role in absentee ballot fraud or this kind of suspected election-rigging. But like tax cuts being their economic cure-all, whatever the election malfeasance, voter ID is the Republican answer. Even though impersonation fraud, the only kind voter ID might reliably catch at the polls, is all but an imaginary problem.

Don’t believe me? How about the Heritage Foundation’s accounting from a period covering about 2 billion general election votes? I took a look through it the other day.

Pathetic Potemkin

by digby

Sad! (For America)

President Donald Trump said his trade agreement with China was “one of the largest deals ever made.” He dubbed his new accord with Canada and Mexico the “most significant, modern and balanced trade agreement in history.” And he insisted that the world leaders he’s lambasted on the world stage had become great friends.

As he crisscrossed Buenos Aires, posing for photos with dignitaries and boasting about his accomplishments, Trump left behind a trail of exaggerations meant to paper over the fractious first half of his term and rebrand himself as a globe-trotting statesman.

It’s the Art of the G-20, by Donald Trump. The 45th president is writing his own rulebook on how to claim credit and respect on an international stage where many leaders have looked down on him for years. But just as his famous 1987 book counseled, Trump’s global deal-making was as much about style as substance, with grandiose talk the most important ingredient of all.

The president arrived back in Washington on Sunday feeling triumphant, believing his latest international trip to be a resounding success. During his overnight flight on Air Force One, Trump seemed vindicated after dealing with a long buildup of pressure to the summit in Argentina.

“It’s an incredible deal,” he told reporters of his agreement with China to temporarily pause new tariffs. “It goes down, certainly — if it happens, it goes down as one of the largest deals ever made.”

White House aides had reason to be happy, too. The gaffe-prone president managed to avoid a diplomatic snafu and even canceled a Saturday news conference that could have sent the entire trip off the rails. He laid off Twitter for more than 24 hours until later Sunday afternoon, when he chimed in with good wishes for Hanukkah.

But behind the veneer is a more complicated reality. His deal with President Xi Jinping of China was effectively an agreement to continue trying to agree. The president’s critics argue that the new North American trade agreement is little more than NAFTA 1.1. And behind all the smiles, many world leaders still have a strong distaste for Trump.

This isn’t new, of course. This is the great “nuclear disarmament deal” with North Korea too. Big pageant, all bullshit. It’s better than wars, nuclear, trade, or otherwise. But it’s making everything worse.

The most we can hope for is that his phantom “victories” don’t make everything so bad we can’t go forward.

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