Skip to content

Month: January 2019

Spinning out of control

Published by digby on January 18, 2019

Spinning out of control

by digby

That Buzzfeed story has the Trumpies off-balance.

Poor White House spokesman Hogan Gidley was dancing on the head of a pin this morning:

Asked about the story, published late Thursday evening, Gidley initially deflected from it by using misleading talking points in an attempt to discredit BuzzFeed.

“This is absolutely ludicrous, that we are giving any type of credence or credibility to a ‘news outlet’ like BuzzFeed,” Gidley said. “They are responsible completely and totally for the release of a discredited, disproven, false dossier [the Steele dossier], and now the author of the piece in question that you’re talking about went on air this morning and said he couldn’t corroborate any of his own evidence. He ran it anyway.”

What we learned from the BuzzFeed News report that Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress

The Steele dossier — a report written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and commissioned by Fusion GPS, an opposition research group hired by Clinton-tied Democratic campaign lawyer Marc Elias — was initially published by BuzzFeed shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The dossier contains many explosive allegations — including the infamous “pee tape” — and includes claims that the Trump campaign has extensive ties to Russia.

Though it is true that the six major claims in the Steele dossier are still unproven, some parts of it have since turned out to be substantiated. But there is still a lot we don’t know about Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election and Trump’s secretive business dealings.

It’s not the case that the journalists behind BuzzFeed’s bombshell report about Trump directing Cohen to lie “couldn’t corroborate” the allegations in their story. During an interview on CNN on Friday morning, Cormier said that while he hasn’t directly seen evidence that Trump directed Cohen to lie, his sourcing goes beyond the two law enforcement sources mentioned in the story.

“This 100 percent happened,” he said.

Gidley’s deflection, however, did not amount to a denial of the claim that Trump directed Cohen to lie. Host Bill Hemmer press Gidley on the key question.

“So you’re saying the president did not tell Michael Cohen to do that?” he asked.

Gidley again refused to answer the question.

“I’m telling you right now this is why the president refuses to give any credence or credibility to news outlets, because they have no ability to corroborate anything they’re putting out there. Instead they are just using innuendo and shady sources,” Gidley said.

But Hemmer noticed that Gidley still hadn’t addressed the matter at hand, telling him, “That was not a denial of my question.”

Gidley still refused to deny that Trump directed Cohen to lie.

“No, but the premise is ridiculous,” he said, before pivoting to trying to discredit Cohen.

“But the headline from that report, Hogan, is that the president personally directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations involving Trump Tower,” host Sandra Smith interjected. “Is that true or false?”

Gidley again refused to answer.

“Right, the president’s attorneys also addressed this,” he said. “I’m not going to give and credence or credibility to Micheal Cohen, who’s a convicted felon and an admitted liar. That’s just ridiculous, and I’m not going to do that from the White House.”

Ok whatever.


CNN broke down all connections between Mueller court filings and the Buzzfeed story. You’ll see that they correlate quite closely.

.

The Only Argument Against Impeachment by tristero

Published by digby on January 18, 2019

The Only Argument Against Impeachment 

by tristero

Given the latest evidence of obstruction and suborning perjury, the only reasonable argument against impeachment is this:

Every moment that Trump remains in office is a moment that dramatically accelerates the long-overdue and necessary demise of the modern Republican party. He makes the incompetence and absence of ideas in the GOP so palpable that nearly the entire country can see that the party as a whole is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

The moment Trump leaves office, it becomes less obvious to many people (who don’t follow politics that closely) that the entire party (and not just Trump) is terribly sick and needs to go. We’ll still be able to make that case, but it will become much harder.

In short, impeaching Trump lets the Republican party — the party of McConnell, Graham, Kavanaugh, Pence, Cruz etc etc etc, — off the hook.

Now, I didn’t say that was a good argument against impeachment, did I? It isn’t. Because the obvious rejoinder is that as bad as Trump is for the Republicans, he is far worse for all the rest of us, here and abroad. As long as Trump is in the White House, the world is an immeasurably more dangerous world than it would be if he was out of there.*

And so, regardless of the consequences, including the near-certain delay of the demise of the modern Republican party that his impeachment will cause, Trump must be impeached.

*Would Pence be an improvement? One step at a time, please. No reason to stop with Trump.

Meanwhile in Bizarroworld

Published by digby on January 18, 2019

Meanwhile in Bizarroworld

by digby

I just thought you’d want to know.

This is what Trump watches avidly to find out what’s going on in the world.

.

The Great Negotiator strikes out. Again.

Published by digby on January 18, 2019

The Great Negotiator strikes out. Again.


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Looking at polling during the Trump era, researchers have discovered that many voters are misinformed regarding something important about the president. They actually believe he’s a massively successful self-made billionaire. Trump’s lifelong penchant for hype and the exposure he got with the scripted reality show “The Apprentice” convinced many people that he was a tremendously gifted businessman.

As the New York Times reported in its massive exposé of the Trump family business going back to the 1960s, Trump was a millionaire before he was out of diapers — and his repeated failures in business were all because of his lack of business acumen. The researchers discovered that had they known about this, it would have changed the minds of a meaningful percentage of Trump voters.

He gets a 5% boost in public approval when people think he came from humble roots because they believe he has empathy toward people like them. But when people learn that isn’t true there is a big shift:

[A]ttitudes toward Trump may be polarized along party lines, but this information does have noticeable and statistically significant effects on evaluations of Trump’s character. For Democrats, who already see Trump as lacking empathy, this information makes them think of him as even less empathetic. But among Republicans, the information is even more damning, reducing perceptions of empathy by more than 10 percentage points.

The effects on people’s perceptions of his business acumen, which are actually fairly high in both parties, are also significant. When they find out that his daddy bailed him out his whole life, Republicans reduce their admiration for his skills by 9 points and Democrats by 6. These are small differences but considering how close the election was in 2016, it’s something worth thinking about for 2020.

They didn’t know that then. He claimed to be the best negotiator in the world. He must have said it a thousand times. He even paid a ghostwriter to write his original book “The Art of the Deal” and all the subsequent ghosted books about his alleged negotiating prowess. Just before he announced his run, he put it this way:

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.

I’m sure he preferred “big” deals but in the end all of his big deals were massive duds so he was reduced to getting his kicks making dozens and dozens of small deals, slapping his name on dicey condo developments and cheap consumer products for a few bucks to keep the cash flowing. He was smart enough to get his money up-front and when the products failed to sell, as they usually did, he and the family had already pocketed their profit.

Americans shouldn’t have to refer to any of that in making a judgment about Trump’s abilities today. We’ve seen him in action for two years now. And unsurprisingly, his particular expertise has turned out to be completely useless for a president. (He may have been able to put it to use with the illegal emoluments from businessmen seeking favors, but that’s really not actually in the job description.) Despite his incessant bragging about non-existent accomplishments, so far we are seeing  failure in the negotiating department of epic proportions.

He said it would be “easy” to end Obamacare and create a new and better health care plan virtually overnight. Clearly, that didn’t happen. That negotiation was a train wreck. He promised to end the nuclear threat in North Korea and even staged a big phony pageant that showed to the world what a fool he is when it produced an empty agreement which he didn’t seem to understand. He insisted that he could end the Israeli Palestinian conflict. He did “renegotiate NAFTA which all the experts say was just a waste of time that resulted in very little change for no good reason. His trade war has produced nothing but bad feelings and rotting crops. And, needless to say, his big promise to make Mexico pay for his wall is turning out to have been his Waterloo.

Even his immigration muse Ann Coulter said this week that it turns out his negotiating skill was “exaggerated.”

Trump doesn’t seem to realize that simply demanding what he wants and then getting up and saying “bye-bye” when the other side doesn’t immediately agree isn’t actually negotiating. And he’s shown more than once that his word is no good so nobody can trust him. Last year he had agreed to a very complex and difficult immigration deal in which both sides were able to win some priorities and he not only backed out after having agreed, he did it in a rude and dismissive fashion. This year he signed off on a Republican continuing resolution to avoid a shutdown and then cowered in the face of right wing media commentators like Coulter and reversed himself at the last minute. How do you make a deal with someone like this?

I must admit that I too gave him more credit for savvy than he has shown in this latest stand-off. I thought for sure he would take the available off-ramp and declare the emergency, thereby throwing the issue to the courts. His base would see him as a big hero taking matters into his own hands and the rest of the government could re-open. Sure, it would have set a bad precedent but since when does Trump care about such things?

It’s fairly obvious that at this point it’s as much about beating Nancy Pelosi as it is the wall. And he is outmatched there, I’m afraid. Pundits have taken to referring to her rescinding the invitation to give the State of the Union Address as some kind of  PR move. But she knows Trump was looking forward to it so denying him his platform until he agrees to open the government is a pressure point.  Trump’s response was just petty retaliation with no other purpose.

The New York Times reported this week that he’s taken to whining to his chief of staff, “we are getting crushed! Why can’t we get a deal?” so it’s pretty obvious he has no plan, no strategy or any idea how to get out of this mess.

The Democrats can’t give in or this will be the only way he “negotiates” for the rest of his term. It would be a disaster. So, if he refuses to declare his bogus emergency and save face with Ann Coulter, it’s going to be up to Mitch McConnell to bring him the bad news that he is going to have to call the vote and override his veto if necessary to get the government open again. So far, McConnell’s been AWOL on the whole thing, but he may have to step up to get the Greatest Negotiator The World Has Ever Known out of his jam —  just like Trump’s daddy always did .

Schooling his henchmen

Published by digby on January 18, 2019

Schooling his henchmen

by digby


Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski:

“When I went up there,” he says, recalling his installment as Watergate prosecutor, “I thought he had been victimized by his staff. I thought he had a staff that had done things on their own. That they had not let their chief know that they were participating in these cheap doings. I thought they had been doing this on their own primarily, and that Nixon was not aware of it. I thought he should have been aware of it, but that’s a far different question from active participation in it, you know.

“What happened is, when I heard this tape recording where he was schooling [ chief of staff H. R.] Haldeman on how to lie, when I got to that part of it — boy! I’ll tell you! — was it a new ball game as far as I was concerned! I just shuddered at the thought of what this was going to lead to.”

Welp:

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying about the deal in testimony and in a two-page statement to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Cohen’s false claim that the project ended in January 2016 was an attempt to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — widely understood to be Trump — “in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”

Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.

Rudy said you can’t believe Cohen, but according to this article, nobody has to take Cohen’s word about this:

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.

They knew about it before Cohen admitted it.

William Barr made it very clear in his testimony that a president was subject to legal sanction for suborning perjury. I wonder if he’ll still be the nominee by this time next week.

.

“This is exactly the Watergate model…” by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 18, 2019

“This is exactly the Watergate model…”
by Tom Sullivan


Image by Philip Cohen via Flickr.

All Thursday long, pundits reacting to Rudy Giuliani’s antics on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” Wednesday insisted they fit a pattern.

“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign,” the president’s attorney told Chris Cuomo, remarkably implying in public that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election. There was just no collusion by the now-President of the United States, Giuliani insisted.

Pundits suggested Giuliani may not simply be crazed or the worst presidential lawyer ever. He knows something bad is coming out and wants to distract from it or in part inoculate his client from it. Last night after 10 p.m. Eastern, they were proved right.

In yet another BussFeed News scoop, Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier reported, “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.”

If true, that is conspiracy by the President of the United States to suborn perjury and obstruct justice in the Russia investigation. Plus, perjury and lying to Congress by Cohen.

Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks reacted on MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” saying, “This is exactly the Watergate model…” that brought down the Nixon presidency.

For context, BuzzFeed adds:

On the campaign trail, Trump vehemently denied having any business interests in Russia. But behind the scenes, he was pushing the Moscow project, which he hoped could bring his company profits in excess of $300 million. The two law enforcement sources said he had at least 10 face-to-face meetings with Cohen about the deal during the campaign.

BuzzFeed’s sources report the evidence for the accusation is not simply Cohen’s statements:

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.

This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

BuzzFeed claims, however, this is “the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.” Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) contests that characterization, tweeting there is other evidence extant that Trump suborned perjury from subordinates, and that seems right. Expect more on that from Wheeler this morning. This onion has just begun peeling.

It is important to remember, Trump was a private citizen when these Trump Tower Moscow negotiations involving Cohen took place. Those discussions were not illegal. Yet, Trump lied about the deal and, if reports are confirmed, directed Cohen to lie about it to Congress. One might suspect there is a reason Trump and associates might have committed crimes to conceal it.

Leopold and Cormier have been tracking that, giving a close look to a series of suspicious 2016 money transfers. Following the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 and immediately after Trump’s election, two “bursts” of transactions occurred between foreign and U.S. banks connected to “at least two people who attended the Trump Tower meeting,” federal investigators found. Those cash transfers and their timing might be innocent. So might be Trump’s reasons for his unprecedented confiscation of his translator’s notes of his meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg. And his concealment of what was said in four other of their conversations.

Mueller will tell. Before then, the House Intelligence Committee will investigate whether Cohen lied to Congress at the behest of the sitting President of the United States. (I use that phrase to remind myself this presidency too will pass. It seems even more likely this morning to expire before its due date.)

Update: Marcy’s take here.

Fox and Friends has a live audience now. Oh my.

Published by digby on January 18, 2019

Fox and Friends has a live audience now

by digby

It went as you might expect:

This is where Trump gets his daily briefing.

.

Trump didn’t really know Bill and Bob were best buds. Ooops.

Published by digby on January 18, 2019

Trump didn’t know Bill and Bob were best buds. Ooops.

by digby

Remember this?

“Are you best friends with Robert Mueller?” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked Comey, according to a transcript of the hearing released Saturday by Goodlatte and Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

“I am not,” Comey said. “I admire the heck out of the man, but I don’t know his phone number, I’ve never been to his house, I don’t know his children’s names.”

Comey added: “I think I had a meal once alone with him in a restaurant. I like him. I am not a — I’m an associate of his who admires him greatly. We’re not friends in any social sense.”

Hours before Comey’s session with members of Congress, Trump tweeted: “Robert Mueller and Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey are Best Friends, just one of many Mueller Conflicts of Interest.” The president went on to call the special counsel’s investigation “A total Witch Hunt” in that same post.

Trump previously referred to Mueller as Comey’s “best friend” in a September interview with The Daily Caller, and claimed to have “100 pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other.”


Then there’s this:

The president’s pick to replace Jeff Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department has known and admired the president’s bête noire, Robert Mueller, for 30 years — and somehow President Donald Trump seems fine with that.

The relationship, which Barr described in public Tuesday during his Senate confirmation hearing, is both a source of reassurance to Democrats worried about Barr’s attitude toward Mueller’s probe and a reminder of the small size of Washington’s legal and law enforcement worlds.

Why it isn’t more troubling to Trump, who, Barr said, is aware of the relationship, remains a mystery.

Barr and Mueller first crossed paths at the Justice Department during the George H.W. Bush administration. But the relationship goes further: Their wives are close friends who attend Bible study together, and Mueller attended the weddings of two of Barr’s daughters.

“They have a high level of respect for each other,” said Paul McNulty, a former senior DOJ official who led the department’s policy and communications shop while Barr was attorney general and Mueller served as the head of its Criminal Division. “They have maintained a good friendship ever since.”

He must have been focused on a Fox News story about him when Barr told him this because it turns out he didn’t know about it:

President Donald Trump was startled Tuesday as he watched television coverage of his nominee for attorney general describing a warm relationship with the special counsel Robert Mueller in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to three people familiar with the matter.

During the first day of his confirmation hearing, William Barr described telling the President the first time he met him in June 2017 that he was friends with Mueller, referring to him on a first name basis.

“I told him how well I knew Bob Mueller and that the Barrs and Muellers were good friends and would be good friends when this was all over,” Barr said. “Bob is a straight-shooter and should be dealt with as such.”

While Barr said during his hearing that Trump “was interested” in hearing about the friendship, the details that emerged this week caught the President off guard, the three sources said. He bristled at Barr’s description of the close relationship, complaining to aides he didn’t realize how much their work overlapped or that they were so close.

Oops.

They report that Trump subsequently rationalized this by saying that Barr and Mueller were just part of the GOP establishment from way back and at this point he doesn’t want to withdraw his name.

I wondered about this when Lindsey Graham first mentioned it. It was hard to believe Trump would be ok with it. And he isn’t. You know he isn’t …

.

People think Trump is a self-made millionaire. They change their minds about him when they learn the truth.

Published by digby on January 18, 2019

People think Trump is a self-made millionaire. They change their minds about him when they learn the truth.

by digby

I can’t say I’m surprised about this. Throughout the campaign I heard his supporters say they trusted him becuse he was such a successful businessman. Many were “Apprentice” fans, of course. But Trump ran as the greatest businessman in the world and dismissed his father’s involvement in his career as being irrelevant.

This article discusses a study showing that when people find out that Trump was a trust fund baby who had to be bailed out repeatedly by his daddy, some, at least, are disillusioned:

Who is Donald Trump? Ask Americans and many of them will describe a self-made billionaire, a business tycoon of unfathomable success. In research recently published in Political Behavior, we found that voters are not simply uninformed about President Trump’s biographical background, but misinformed—and that misinformation has serious political consequences.

Large swaths of the public believe the Trump myth. Across three surveys of eligible voters from 2016 to 2018, we found that as many as half of all Americans do not know that he was born into a very wealthy family. And while Americans are divided along party lines in their assessment of Trump’s performance as president, misperceptions regarding his financial background are found among Democrats and Republicans.

The narrative of Trump as self-made is simply false. Throughout his life, the president has downplayed the role his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, played in his success, claiming it was “limited to a small loan of $1 million.” That isn’t true, of course: A comprehensive New York Times investigation last year estimated that over the course of his lifetime, the younger Trump received more than $413 million in today’s dollars from his father. While this exact figure was not known before the Times’ report, it was a matter of record that by the mid-1980s, Trump had been loaned at least $14 million by his father, was loaned at least $3.5 million more in 1990, had borrowed several more million against his inheritance in the 1990s after many of his ventures failed, and had benefited enormously from his father’s political connections and co-signing on loans early in his career as a builder.

Of course, someone born into wealth may have great business acumen, and the question of whether Trump is “a great businessman” is a subjective evaluation. The focus of our work, however, is on whether indisputable facts regarding candidate biographies—which are often invisible to voters over the course of a campaign—affect public opinion.

It turns out that they do. Using a 2017 University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, we found that believing Trump was not born “very wealthy” leads to at least a 5-percentage-point boost in the president’s job approval, even after considering the many factors that can influence public approval ratings. This shift is rooted in the belief that his humble roots make Trump both more empathetic (he “feels my pain”), and more skilled at business (he is self-made and couldn’t have climbed to such heights without real business know-how).

What happens when Americans learn of the president’s privileged background? In a 2018 survey, we provided half the respondents the following question, which was intended to impart Trump’s biographical information: To what extent were you aware that Donald Trump grew up the son of wealthy real estate businessman Fred Trump, started his business with loans from his father, and received loans worth millions of dollars from his father in order to keep his businesses afloat?

As the figures below show, attitudes toward Trump may be polarized along party lines, but this information does have noticeable and statistically significant effects on evaluations of Trump’s character. For Democrats, who already see Trump as lacking empathy, this information makes them think of him as even less empathetic. But among Republicans, the information is even more damning, reducing perceptions of empathy by more than 10 percentage points.

On perceptions of business acumen, which are higher across both parties, the information regarding Fred Trump’s role in his son’s business success is equally important. Democrats reduce their perceptions of Trump as a good businessman by 6 points, while Republican perceptions decline by 9 points.

These effects may seem small, but the results demonstrate that this misperception was consequential. And among undecided voters or those on the fence, they could make a serious difference in the 2020 election.

Many Americans were and remain misinformed about the central aspect of Trump’s business career, which was his sole credential in his bid for office. Why are so many Americans so mistaken on this seemingly basic point? Given that a significant—if smaller—minority of Democrats answered incorrectly, we cannot attribute it entirely to partisan rationalization.

Many studies have shown that, for better or worse, candidates’ race, gender and incumbency affect voters’ assessments. Voters also care about less visible characteristics of candidates—such as their religion, occupational background and veteran status—but may be less aware of the facts concerning them. This is made worse when there is a concerted effort to build a counternarrative.

Trump’s persona in the 2000s—the image of him as a world-conquering tycoon—was not shaped by his business record, which was pockmarked with bankruptcies, but by his hit TV show, “The Apprentice.” As The New Yorker recently put it, the show “mythologized him anew, and on a much bigger scale, turning him into an icon of American success.” As a politician, Trump built on this narrative, claiming, “I built what I built myself, and I did it by working long hours and working hard and working smart.”

Another factor is media coverage of Trump. A LexisNexis search of leading newspapers from January 1, 2016, until Election Day 2016 found more than six times as many articles referring to Trump’s divorces than those mentioning his father. The problem is not just that the media prefers the salacious to the substantive; the practices of even serious journalists may not always produce an informed public. By 2016, Fred Trump’s aid to his son was in the distant past. It had been reported over the years, so barring revelations like those in the 2018 New York Times exposé, it just wasn’t “news” to reporters. Yet without repeated coverage, many voters who do not follow politics closely will not absorb the facts that journalists take for granted. Similarly, reporters are often reactive, and Trump’s rivals in 2016 seldom noted the centrality of Fred Trump’s financial support in keeping his son’s businesses afloat.

They point out the fact that the media neglected to cover this aspect of his history or confront him with facts about it. That was a big failure.

Now we can all see with our own eyes how inept he is. (Well, most of us anyway.) This shouldn’t besomething people need to know about going forward. But it wouldn’t hurt to make sure it’s out there anyway. As long as people think this guy was some kind of yuge success by dint of his own talents he maintains some undeserved power.