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Month: February 2019

A bad Valentine’s Day for Donnie

Published by digby on February 15, 2019

A bad Valentine’s Day for Donnie

by digby

My Salon column this mprning:

Valentine’s Day 2019 was a day to remember. Americans woke up with news about Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI and his new book outlining the details of the wild days in May of 2017 when members of the Justice Department considered ways to evoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.  By that night we had word that the president was going to go through with his threat to declare a national emergency so that he could circumvent the will of the US Congress.

And just to add to the general chaos, in between breaking news stories,  legal and national security experts were still poring over earlier news from the Manafort case that had everyone who is following the Russia scandal closely just a little bit breathless. A federal judge has affirmed that the president’s former campaign chairman lied to the special prosecutor about some damning evidence that we can infer may implicate Donald Trump.

As House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-CA, explained on MSNBC:

It appears the judge has largely agreed with what the special counsel argued and that not only did he lie, but the motivation here is that if he told the truth about his relationship with someone with Russian Intelligence while he was the campaign chairman that would be so damaging  to Trump that it would negate his chance of a pardon. 

I have never subscribed to the theory that the president is a wily operator who’s always strategizing how to distract the media and the public from bad news about him. He’s got a strong feral survival instinct so he’s always bobbing and weaving but I doubt that he’s making any conscious choices. However, occurred to me that he seemed a bit too eager to draw attention to the McCabe story considering how damning it actually is.

Perhaps he really was upset. But it’s also the case that he knew upon waking up yesterday that he had just lost the biggest legislative fight of his presidency. He closed down the government for the longest shutdown in history and wound up getting less than he would have gotten had he taken the border funding deal they agreed to last December.  He also undoubtedly realized that in order to save face, even a little, was to call for the national emergency and create a rift among allies in congress, possibly changing the dynamic.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte pointed out on Thursday, Trump had already been in the unusual position of having to court his usually slavering media supporters to get them to accept the inevitable. McCabe’s book probably seemed like the better of all the bad news cascading down on him in this very bad week.

Needless to say, Trump’s defenders on Fox News and elsewhere in the right-wing media find this to be convincing evidence of an attempted “deep state” coup. But coming on the heels of this news about the Manafort case and the accumulated evidence of the last three years, it was a reminder to he rest of us of the craziness around the Comey firing when Trump had the Russian Ambassador up to the Oval Office the very next day and telling them:

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” 

Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.” 

Imagine how that looked to law enforcement and intelligence officials at the time. And consider that they also knew that Trump  shared “code-word information”  one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies,  which one official characterized as “more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

McCabe made some news in an excerpt of a CBS interview to air this weekend, by saying that he not only opened a counter-intelligence investigation, as reported earlier, but he also opened an obstruction of justice investigation around the same time based upon the president’s behavior and his insistence that the Justice Department was to do his bidding. He appears to have been right to do so.

One of the president’s most fervent defenders inadvertently made the point very clear with a tweet yesterday:

All of those firings have to do with the Russia investigation.

Former US Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman said on MSNBC, “Is it a slow-motion Saturday night massacre? That’s what they were worried about at the time. In some ways, it’s worse. It is as McCabe says, a fall-off in standards of presidential accountability such as they’ve never had before.”

It must be noted that there is always a concern about powerful federal law enforcement investigating a president whether for the purpose of blackmail as Hoover was suspected of doing, or because of political bias against his policies. But, if anything, the law enforcement and intelligence communities in Washington tend to be conservative GOP so it would be very odd if they decided to go after a Republican administration right out of the gate for political purposes, even if they thought the president was a nut or a fool. They would most likely trust that the party and the bureaucracy would assert itself. In this case, with the evidence they had of Russian interference along with the president and his campaign’s bizarre behavior, they took some protective action some of which was reckless and got them into trouble. But it’s not hard to see why they would go there.

We’ve now had a United States federal judge in the Manafort case affirm what appears to be a central piece of the Special Counsel’s theory which may implicate the president in a conspiracy. We earlier saw another United States federal judge look at the evidence in the Flynn case and get so agitated he accidentally threw out the word treason. And as of Thursday evening, the United States has a new Attorney General, William Barr.

We don’t know as yet if Barr’s years in private life were spent being brainwashed by right-wing media (and there is some evidence that they were) but he was, at one time, thought of as a man who cared about the Department of Justice and saw himself as a patriot. He too will probably be seeing all the evidence as early as today. Much depends upon whether this lifelong Republican lawyer sees what all these other otherwise conservative cops, G-Men, spies, US Attorneys and federal judges have been seeing over the past couple of years.

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The wall was never the issue by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 15, 2019

The wall was never the issue
by Tom Sullivan


Haskell Free Library and Opera House, Derby Line, VT.

The rich live in a different world. Sycophants won’t tell them they are wrong or that they don’t know what they think they know. Michael Dell, for example. Or Howard Schultz. Or Donald Trump, who told the country El Paso, TX was one of the most dangerous cities in the country until they put up a border fence. It’s news in El Paso.

“El Paso has been a safe city, one of the safest in the US, for the last 20 years, former congressman Beto O’Rourke told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes last night, adding, “Prior to having a wall. Post having a wall. In fact, a little less safe after we had a wall.” Later in the show, Republican mayor Dee Margo concurred.

Whatever. The sitting president wants a wall to keep out the hordes of violent criminals, drug dealers, and rapists that are pouring across the border in his fever dreams.

This morning we expect the president to sign the budget bill to avoid another government shutdown, then declare a national emergency so he can divert military funding towards building his wall-fence-slats-barrier.

Those who prefer facts to fear have observed that the largest number of undocumented immigrants in the country are those who overstay their visas:

Contrary to popular belief and political rhetoric vilifying Mexicans and other communities as the culprit of most immigration violations and social ailments, when it comes to people who illegally overstay their visas, many of which become undocumented immigrants, the crown belongs to Canadians.

Canada, by far, is at the top of the list of countries whose nationals remain illegally in the U.S. after their permit expirations, with a total of 101,281 visitors doing so last year after coming with any or the nonmigrant visas. Mexico follows, but with almost half the number of Canadians for a total of 52,859.

Yet no concern from the White House for securing the 5,500 mile northern border. No scaremongering that without a big, beautiful wall, terrorists will come creeping.


Alaska/Yukon border at Little Gold Creek, Top of the World Highway. Photo: Milepost website.


US./Canada border on Alaska Highway.


US./Canada border, U.S. 89 North, Piegan, Montana.

As Hayes said last night, the wall was never really the issue for Trump. “We need to secure the border,” politicians say. Really?

No crisis, no national emergency.

Published by digby on February 15, 2019

Trump’s already used national security as an excuse to abuse his power

by digby

This is a reprise of my Salon article from last January when this first came up:



Why wouldn’t he do it again?

We are in the third week of the Trump shutdown and reality is starting to bite. According to the Washington Post, nobody in the White House had given any consideration to the consequences of a protracted standoff, and were surprised that it resulted in actual disruption and human suffering. That report concludes that administration officials are now focused “on understanding the scope of the consequences and determining whether there is anything they can do to intervene.” It’s not going well.

Meanwhile, our national parks are drowning in toxic human waste, security lines at the airport are miserable with TSA agents refusing to work for no pay and even airline pilots are begging the presidentto stop the insanity. That’s just the beginning. At the end of this week federal workers all over the country will miss their paychecks and may start to run out of funds for food and housing.

President Trump insists that federal workers are happy to go without pay in order for him to get his wall. He says they’ll “adjust.” After all, he can relate:

Brit Hume

✔@brithume

I wonder if the author of this story is aware that Trump accepts no salary as president.

The Daily Beast

✔@thedailybeast

Trump: “I can relate” to federal workers not getting paid during the shutdown https://trib.al/vKEuPH2 

22.2K

11:59 AM – Jan 6, 2019
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19.4K people are talking about this



I don’t think I have to explain how absurd that is.

As their first order of business, House Democrats passed the Senate bill which allows the government to reopen by funding the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 8 and the rest of the government through the end of the year. That would end the shutdown while they try to work something out on this inane wall issue. Trump had signaled support for that very deal, you’ll recall, until Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh scared him into submission. Now he’s stuck with a shutdown he obviously thought he could bluff his way through.

And from the looks of things, Trump’s allies in the Senate are terrified of Coulter and Limbaugh too. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was formerly a driving force behind bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform but has now joined the screaming banshee caucus, telling Trump that caving in on the wall would end his presidency and hysterically demanding that Democrats sideline negotiators who “see the Border Patrol agents as gassing children.” I don’t know who he’s talking about but it’s worthwhile to point out that Graham once understood that Trump’s wall was folly. During the 2016 campaign he said,“Donald Trump’s plan on immigration is stupid. I find him offensive. … I think the wall Donald Trump is building is between us and Hispanics.”

Right now Trump seems to be trying a two-pronged strategy. The first step is this preposterous notion that he’s offering a big “compromise” by building a wall made of steel rather than concrete, as if that had ever been any kind of sticking point. The man who wrote “The Art of the Deal” seems to think that rather than offering any real concessions in a negotiation he can just make up something the other side never wanted and give it to them. No wonder his businesses went bankrupt four times and he was reduced to marketing his name on cheap consumer goods and playing the fictional character of “Donald Trump” on TV.

If that doesn’t work (and it won’t) he’s threatening to declare a national security state of emergency and unilaterally deploy troops with Pentagon funding to build the wall. This is a shocking idea, but it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. After all, Trump invoked a rarely used national security provision in trade law to unilaterally slap tariffs on steel and aluminum. His recent deployment of troops to the border in response to the so-called threat of poor and desperate women and children seeking asylum is another example. He has already demonstrated a willingness to declare a phony national security crisis which he will then “solve” by invoking extraordinary powers granted to the presidency. There is little reason to doubt he will do it in this case.

Of course, there is no crisis. According to the Pew poll, unauthorized immigration and refugee claims are way down from their historic levels, as is the share of undocumented workers in the labor force. Even Fox News was compelled to challenge the White House on its numbers over the weekend.





Matt Shuham@mattshuham



“I studied up on this”: @FoxNewsSunday fact checks @PressSec on terrorism and border security:
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The so-called terrorist threat at the border is even more fatuous than the administration’s claims about rampant criminal behavior by immigrants. This latest hysteria began with Trump’s baseless assertion that “Middle Easterners” were marching on the border with the migrant caravan, which suggests this “national security” gambit has been in the works for a while.

Nonetheless, there’s a school of thought that says this is really Trump’s best way out. He can declare himself a strong leader and a big winner while essentially punting the decision to the courts, allowing the government to reopen while the legal issues are hashed out. There is considerable disagreement as to whether or not he will ultimately prevail.

Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman writes in the New York Times that if Trump goes through with using the military for this purpose he would be committing an unconstitutional abuse of his power as commander in chief, adding that if troops obey his command, they’d be committing a federal crime. But according to this chilling article by Elizabeth Goitein in The Atlantic, any president’s ability to evoke these sorts of emergency powers is practically unfettered. After all, Congress has delegated these powers to the president for decades — and for decades presidents have pushed the envelope in dozens of different ways. This time we may finally have a president who is willing to do it for blatantly political purposes and dare anyone who opposes him to do something about it.

There is a long history of judicial deference to the executive branch on national security issues. It will ultimately be up to the five conservative Supreme Court justices to decide if they have the power to step in when the president is clearly concocting a fraudulent emergency for his own reasons. I wouldn’t bet money on them making the right decision.

An asset?

Published by digby on February 15, 2019

An asset?

by digby

He is. The only question is whether he’s a witting or unwitting one.

I vote for witting. Aside from the fact that he was negotiating a deal for a Trump Tower Moscow during the campaign and lied about it for years, there are a number of weird things he said at important moments. For instance, two days before the Trump Tower meeting he said this:

“I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”

They didn’t turn over the information at the meeting, which he clearly expected, so the big speech didn’t happen.

And then there’s this one, newly revealed in the latest Manafort stuff. In early August, Manafort, Gates and former FSB agent Kilimnik met clandestinely in New York, we now know to turn over valuable polling information and discuss the “Ukraine peace plan.” Right around that time, Trump was saying some really bizarre stuff:

“But you know, the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were. And you have to look at that, also.”

The move would be a reversal of the Obama administration’s policy of refusing to recognize Russia’s occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014.

“Just so you understand. [Putin is] not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down and you can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want,” before admitting, after prodding by the program’s host, that, “OK, well, he’s there in a certain way, but I’m not there yet,” an apparent reference to the U.S. presidency.

We don’t know who was “advising” him about all this at the time but it was way out of the foreign policy mainstream to put it that way. It was, as Clinton put it in the debate< “the Putin line.” We know that Trump had not come to any of this by himself because he made it clear that he didn’t even know that Russia had invaded. Someone fed him this and we still don’t know who.

More recently he’s been spouting the Putin line about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan being a righteous response to terrorism which is a view of history only proposed by Russian propaganda.

It’s possible that he just genuinely believes whoever is feeding him these ideas just has America’s best interest at heart. But it’s reasonable to suspect that even he isn’t quite that stupid.

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Here’s a real emergency

Published by digby on February 14, 2019
Here’s a real emergency

by digby

All this handwringing over Trump’s non-emergency at the border and meanwhile, this is still happening and we are required to pretend that there’s nothing we can do about it:

Fourteen students died on Feb. 14, 2018, in Parkland, Fla., inspiring marches, new laws and widespread calls to stop the onslaught of gun deaths. But in the year since one of the worst school shootings in the United States, nearly 1,200 more children have lost their lives to guns in this country 

The number alone might stop most people in their tracks. But editors at The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that reports on gun violence, wanted to remember the dead not as statistics, but as human beings with rich histories. This week they launched “Since Parkland,”a website compiling profiles of every one of the victims. To tell their stories, The Trace turned to those who could relate most closely to the victims: other young people.
That’s how Mary Claire Molloy, 18, found herself trying to sum up the life of a 9-month-old boy, Jason Garcia Perez, who — along with two of his siblings — was shot and killed in August in Clearlake, Calif., by his father, who then shot and killed himself. 

Ms. Molloy, a high school senior in Indianapolis, turned to developmental milestones to try to recreate Jason’s life of crawling and learning to talk. She was one of 200 teenagers to write the profiles.

“This is the most haunting and the most powerful thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “I’m a vessel for these kids’ stories that they can never tell. How can I be their voice?”
Ms. Molloy wrote 48 profiles; the youngest victim she wrote about was Jason, and the oldest was Alaina Maria Housley, who died when a gunman opened fire in a bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif. 

The Trace worked on “Since Parkland” with the Gun Violence Archive, The Miami Herald and the McClatchy newspaper group, whose member newsrooms will be publishing some of the profiles this week and over the weekend.

Click over to “Since Parkland.” Gird yourself. It’s just horrifying. 

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What do Tucker Carlson and Viktor Orban have in common?

Published by digby on February 14, 2019

What do Tucker Carlson and Viktor Orban have in common?

by digby

Tucker Carlson recently made a bit of a splash by adopting a sort of right-wing populism that a fair number of progressives found intriguing. I’ve been watching Carlson for a very long time and I don’t see anything but malicious trolling in virtually anything he does so I’m not the best judge of his “ideas.” Maybe this is the first time he’s ever been sincere about anything in his life, but I doubt it.

Anyway, I thought of these comments of his in a recent Salon article this morning:

I know you said you’re not trying to advocate specific policies, so let’s be a little more abstract. What type of society would you view as ideal, in terms of how a human being should be able to live from birth until death? What should the function of government should be in nurturing that human and protecting them from harm?

This is all a fairly delicate balance between freedom and coercion and central planning and organic growth. All the intentions that are inherent in life and certainly that are inherent in policy. OK, so there’s never any kind of bumper sticker that solves the problems. What I’m arguing for is a reorientation of the way we think about this stuff.

Formulation of policy needs to begin with a clear-sighted picture of what the goal is: What do we seek to achieve by doing this? What’s the final stage of awesomeness we’re hoping to get to? In the final stage, in my opinion, it is a society in which most families — which is to say married couples with children — can subsist and thrive to some extent on one income, because one thing that no one ever mentions, which is a defining factor in people’s lives, is raising your kids, and people kind of want to do that themselves.

There’s been a huge debate over how much money we should give people to hire someone else, usually from another country, to raise our kids. Without even weighing in on that debate. I would just make the obvious point, which is that we’re falling pretty far short of where most people would like to be, which is how can parents stay at home and raise the children? If you allowed people the freedom to do that, if you said, I’m going to give you enough money so that when you have kids, a parent can stay home and raise them while they’re little? My sense is that an awful lot of people will take advantage of that. An awful lot.

Like everything, it would be a trade-off. I mean, there are certain perks that you get from working that you don’t get from staying at home. I mean, I get it. OK, but I’m just saying if the average person has the choice, I sincerely believe that a very large number of people would take that option, and I think they should be allowed to. By the way, I’m with Elizabeth Warren on this. She wrote a whole fucking book about it. She wrote a whole book on this called “The Two-Income Trap,” and she made the case that when our society changed in such a way that it took two incomes to support a family, everybody got poorer and less happy. I agree with that.

“There are certain perks you get from working that you don’t get from staying at home.” Yes indeed. It’s called financial independence which is what freed women from having to stay married for economic reasons. But whatever. No biggie, right?

If you want to see the Tucker Carlson model in action look at right wing populist hero Viktor Orban:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has called for larger Hungarian families to combat the country’s low birth rate and shrinking labor force.

In exchange for all the baby-making, he’s willing to provide financial benefits and programs for women. Benefits include loan expansion programs, subsidies for cars, and for women with four or more children, no required income tax.

Related: These women are challenging Hungary’s ‘men in suits’ politics

“In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the West to this is migration. They want as many migrants to enter as they are missing kids, so that the numbers will add up,” Orbán said in his annual state of the nation address. “We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.”

Orbán and his wife have five children.

The World’s Marco Werman sat down with Kim Lane Scheppelle, an expert on Hungary and a professor at Princeton University, to chat about the motives behind Orbán’s latest pro-baby policy (this is not the first time) and how women fit into Hungarian society. 

What do you make of Orbán’s announcement over the weekend that women with four or more children won’t have to pay income taxes? What’s that about?

Orbán has backed himself into a corner and he’s using a way to get out of that corner that we’ve seen before. So the corner he’s in is that Hungary really has a failing economic model. His policies have driven, some say, up to a million Hungarians out of the country and yet he’s also come down very hard against any form of immigration. So, the question is: “How [can] Hungary maintain a labor force if it’s losing its population?” And his answer is: “Let’s get women to have more kids so that there will be Hungarians to actually hold up the economy.” Now, it’s all very familiar because Orbán has a terrible track record on women and so the idea that women are going to bail him out of this problem is something that I think is familiar to a lot of us who watched him in action for a long time. So, women are going to bear the burden of Orbán’s failed economic policies. 

I mean, it’s obviously oppressive for women. Is Orbán also trying to create kind of, Hungarian human facts on the ground, kind of an anti-immigrant policy?

Yes. Well, this is part of his policy to shore up Hungary for the Hungarians. I mean Hungary, like many of the countries in Eastern Europe and, for that matter, like many advanced democracies around the world, is having a declining birthrate. And if they don’t have immigration or some other way of bolstering the population numbers, they’re going to be a declining country and now that Orbán has come out so strongly against immigration, this is his way back. One thing I think it’s important to say about Orbán and his policies about women is that he’s long been an advocate of big families. He himself has a big family. This is something that very much comes with the territory of Hungarian nationalism. And right now, the group in Hungary that has the largest families are the Roma minority who have really taken a hit under the Orbán government. So it’ll be interesting to see whether his policy really applies universally or whether it applies only to the Hungarians.

Related: As Orbán rises, Hungary’s free press falls

How does Hungary’s treatment of women in 2019 compare to the Communist era?

Well, in the Communist era, of course, women were recruited into the workforce and were actually promoted at much higher levels than they are now. So, in some ways, the Communist era was a golden age for women. Now, it was a golden age and it wasn’t — since it was so awful for everybody — having a great fate in a golden age means that you’re not so well-off. So, you know women were overwhelmingly all of the all of the judges, all of the doctors, some professions that we think of as relatively prestigious professions were actually completely dominated by women during the Communist time. Now, of course, they were dominated by women because they weren’t such high-status professions then. But still, women have really had a lot of education and a history of great accomplishment in Hungary. The post-Communist period saw women really getting knocked back into very traditional roles.

Job ads started being highly gendered. So, you know there would be an advertisement for a manager and it would literally say “we want a man for the job” or “secretaries with flirtatious abilities.” And those would be jobs for women. So this kind of segregation of men and women has happened throughout the post-Communist time and Viktor Orbán’s party has simply made that worse.

Right-wing “populists” are snakes and progressives should beware of being seduced by their alleged economic determinist rhetoric into ignoring their underlying agenda.

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Don’t listen to GOP “analysis” of who they think can beat Trump

Published by digby on February 14, 2019

Don’t listen to GOP “analysis” of who they think can beat Trump

by digby

Eh, whatever:

Donald Trump’s political advisers are homing in on three declared Democratic candidates who they believe are the most viable at this early stage of the campaign.

The reelection campaign has begun compiling opposition research on Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and is eyeing opportunities to attack them. The effort began over the weekend when the Trump campaign sent out a news release ahead of Warren’s launch criticizing her past claims of Native American heritage.

Trump’s advisers are certain the list of announced Democratic candidates will grow exponentially before the first primary debate in June, and that their targets are certain to fluctuate over time. Yet the early assessment provides a window into how Trump world views the emerging Democratic field — a sprawling, largely undefined group that lacks a clear front-runner.

Interviews with more than two dozen of the president’s closest advisers reveal that the Trump operation is watching the opening days of the Democratic primary with a mix of relief over the field’s sprint to the left, surprise over Harris’ impressive launch, and trepidation over the prospect of Joe Biden and Sherrod Brown threatening Trump’s Midwest stranglehold.

Trump has told allies he sees Biden, who remains undecided on a 2020 bid, as the most formidable potential general election rival. The president has said privately that Biden would appeal to a wider swath of voters than other Democratic hopefuls.

Yet among the president’s inner circle, there’s widespread doubt that Biden could survive a primary, after a three-decade political career and positions on issues such as the Iraq war and crime that are anathema to liberals. Many are convinced that whoever emerges from the Democratic primary will be an out-of-the-mainstream liberal — someone who either hails from that wing of the party or has taken pains to align themselves with it.

“Based on what we’ve seen so far, between the direction of the party and pressure, it will be difficult for them not to take a position which won’t be counter to their base,” said Brian Walsh, the president of the pro-Trump America First Action super PAC.

Well that’s something they certainly know a thing or two about, isn’t it? They all cower in fear of the cult followers of Orange Julius Caesar.

But that’s the rub. They’re applying the dynamic within their own coalition to the Democrats and that’s a mistake. The two coalitions are very different and the voters within it have different motivations that unite them. I don’t think they have any idea who is the most formidable against Trump — and neither does anyone else at this point. That’s why the field is so huge. We’re just going to have to see it play out.

As for Trump allegedly “fearing” Biden, I doubt it. Trump doesn’t fear anyone because he’s a narcissistic loon who figures he can beat anyone and doesn’t even have to think about how to do it aside from coming up with insulting nicknames and rallying his base. There is no meaningful “analysis” coming from Trump.

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The administration is sabotaging the election cyber-security task forces

Published by digby on February 14, 2019

The administration is sabotaging the election cyber-security task forces

by digby

Sure. This is fine.

Two teams of federal officials assembled to fight foreign election interference are being dramatically downsized, according to three current and former Department of Homeland Security officials. And now, those sources say they fear the department won’t prepare adequately for election threats in 2020.

“The clear assessment from the intelligence community is that 2020 is going to be the perfect storm,” said a DHS official familiar with the teams. “We know Russia is going to be engaged. Other state actors have seen the success of Russia and realize the value of disinformation operations. So it’s very curious why the task forces were demoted in the bureaucracy and the leadership has not committed resources to prepare for the 2020 election.”

The task forces, part of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), were assembled in response to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. One focuses in part on securing election infrastructure and the other focuses on foreign influence efforts, including social media disinformation campaigns.

One of the task forces is now half the size it was a few months ago, according to two DHS officials familiar with the task forces, and there’s no indication that DHS senior political leadership will staff it up or sustain it. Instead, there are concerns it will completely wither away. The other task force also shrunk significantly shortly after the midterms, according to that official, and before its members produced a thorough assessment of what happened during the 2018 elections.

“Our key allies are wondering why the U.S. is not more coordinated and not more proactive in dealing with this,” said the DHS official. “They don’t understand why the U.S. is not getting its act together.”

A DHS spokesperson confirmed that some people have been taken off the task forces and moved to other roles in the department. The spokesperson added that the department is bringing on new people to do election security work.

Maybe it’s that joint cybersecurity “task force” Putin suggested to Trump in the first G20 meeting (and brought up again in Helsinki.)

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With the republic in peril… by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 14, 2019

With the republic in peril…
by Tom Sullivan

Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar has had a busy week of stirring controversy that focused the Beltway press on proper decorum rather than on more direct threats to the republic.

First, a pair of Omar tweets that skewered the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) played into anti-Semitic tropes about wealthy Jews. She subsequently apologized for them. Then on Wednesday she used her House Foreign Affairs Committee questioning of Trump special envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams to suggest his responses could not be trusted. Abrams in 1991 pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair. Somewhere in that testy exchange about Abrams role in support of the Salvadoran military and Nicaraguan insurgents during the Reagan administration, Omar was attempting to highlight Abrams’ propensity for destabilizing rather than stabilizing foreign hot spots.

Sarah Jones comments at New York Magazine:

Omar is right, of course. In 1993, a lengthy New York Times report detailed the dedication with which members of the Reagan administration defended their material support for El Salvador’s military, even though they knew some atrocity had occurred. The U.S. government’s role in the steady destabilization of El Salvador is not only directly pertinent to the question of Abrams’ suitability for his role, it is the subtext to a familiar piece of agitprop. Trump loves to stoke fear about immigrants, including many Salvadorans, who cross the southern border. Not only are the vast majority peaceful, they’re fleeing a violent political climate that we helped create.

Charlie Pierce was more blunt: “My advice to Venezuelans? Dig shelters immediately.”

The freshman Democrat’s overarching political “crime,” if any, was taking press focus away from more serious stories.

Here’s one. Federal teams assembled to fight foreign meddling with the 2020 elections are being downsized:

“The clear assessment from the intelligence community is that 2020 is going to be the perfect storm,” said a DHS official familiar with the teams. “We know Russia is going to be engaged. Other state actors have seen the success of Russia and realize the value of disinformation operations. So it’s very curious why the task forces were demoted in the bureaucracy and the leadership has not committed resources to prepare for the 2020 election.”

[…]

“The Trump administration intelligence chiefs in their worldwide threat assessment clearly stated that the use of influence operations from countries like Russia, China and Iran poses a significant threat to the country,” said John Cohen, the former deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS. “If these reports are true, it’s highly disturbing that the department and the administration are not more focused on dealing with that threat.”

Here’s another:

Instead, we get coverage of spluttering, right ring hissy fits over Ilhan Omar.

On the upside, we got this overdue takedown of their phony outrage:

Paulie lied

Published by digby on February 14, 2019

Paulie lied

by digby

This doesn’t mean they proved conspiracy. I just means they proved Manafort lied about all this.

It’s a big step.

Now go check out this post at CNN:

How Team Trump keeps changing its story in the Russia investigation

Lies upon lies upon lies…

.