Month: February 2019

The caffeinated “man of means” turns out to be jerk. Surprise.

by digby

The billionaire Howard Schultz (excuse me “man of means” Howard Schultz) turns out to be different than his public persona:

Though he stepped down last year as Starbucks’ chairman and CEO, Schultz’s political pitch is deeply rooted in the company’s carefully cultivated image as a progressive, benevolent employer that cares for its employees, which it calls “partners,” and acts as what he calls a “gathering spot, a Third Place that draws people together.” He presents himself as a rare combination of archetypes: a visionary entrepreneur who’s built an $84 billion global empire on pricey lattes, and a bleeding-heart do-gooder who lavishes health coverage, college tuition and other benefits on those 330,000 “partners,” has them undergo racial-bias training and write “Come Together” on customers’ coffee cups. In response to President Donald Trump’s immigrant-bashing, the company promised to hire 10,000 refugees.

This pitch is also steeped in the mystique of progressive, affluent Seattle, Starbucks’ hometown, celebrated around the world as a capital of coffee culture, innovation and progressive policy. In an op-ed in the Seattle Times last week, Schultz praised his adopted home effusively, oddly crediting its “diversity of thought” with helping inspire him to (maybe) run as a centrist independent.

But there’s a disconnect here, one that will become increasingly evident as national media outlets dig harder into Schultz’s history than 60 Minutes did. His “come together” pitch may ring weakest here in Seattle, where he’s proved a singularly divisive figure and left a long, unhappy trail of civic and community disengagement. The rest of the world might know him as the father of the Frappuccino, but here he’s known for treating a public park like private property and throwing away the city’s NBA team. Schultz acknowledged in his op-ed that “Seattle and I have had a complicated relationship.” But that was putting it mildly.

He’s instinctually defensive and self-protective. … He’s not an honest person.”

One of Starbucks’ founders, speaking publicly about Schultz for the first time, has scarcely a good word to say. Gordon Bowker, who helped Schultz launch his first espresso bars before selling Starbucks to him, and whom Schultz has hailed as a mentor, says he was shocked to find himself and the other founders the subjects of vicious gossip and, after they started a small, competing coffee roaster, effaced from the company’s official history.

Schultz, who slams the Republican and Democratic parties for engaging in “revenge politics,” is himself “vindictive,” says Bowker. “He’s instinctually defensive and self-protective. … He’s not an honest person.” Schultz’s office did not respond to requests for comment on this and other accusations arising from his decades in Seattle.

That’s from a devastating Politico profile of the MOM that really rips the mask off this fellow. It’s well worth reading.

It’s certainly not impossible for “men of means” to be good leaders. Franklin Roosevelt comes to mind. The Kennedys had their moments. There have been countless other wealthy people who did public service with decency and fairness.

But billionaire businessmen are a special breed, and they require a very, very close look before anyone should put their faith in their ability to run government or even understand the basic tenets of democracy. They don’t operate under the same rules.

It’s easy to dismiss Trump as an anomaly because he’s such a dolt and really got where he is because of his celebrity more than any business success. But however much of a phony he is, the man spent his life as a very rich man trying to get richer, which is what most of these guys do. Hopefully we can at least all now agree that “private sector” experience is wildly oversold as a qualification for president.

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Voter ID as electoral eugenics
by Tom Sullivan

It’s a wonder more voting rights advocates haven’t been charged with sedition. It was an accusation leveled at Joseph Mulloy, Alan McSurely and Carl Braden by the state of Kentucky in 1967. It was Braden’s second sedition charge. The first was in 1954 for helping an African American couple buy a home in Louisville. Kentucky treated that as an attempt to overthrow the commonwealth. Braden served eighteen months in prison before the Supreme Court in another case ruled state-level sedition charges unconstitutional.

That made the 1967 charges in Pike County, KY illegal, historian Elizabeth Catte writes in “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018).” But legal, schmeagal. None of that mattered to the sheriff and local power brokers put out with anti-poverty and anti-coal activists they accused of attempting to “take over Pike County from the power structure and put it in the hands of the poor.” That was just over blocking Puritan Coal Company bulldozers. Heaven forbid they helped poor people vote.

Catte’s fierce little book rebuts myths perpetuated about “Greater Appalachia” by J.D. Vance (“Hillbilly Elegy”) and others. Catte’s Appalachia is more than “Trump Country.” Her Appalachia includes dogged organizers like Braden, the United Mine Workers of the Battle of Blair Mountain, and communities organized against mountaintop-removal mining. The Knoxville native argues the hollow-eyed, barefoot-and-impoverished, black-and-white images from federally funded photo essays dating from the Depression to the War on Poverty amount to a “willful representation of a community” as backward, violent, and chronically dependent. All the more reason for extractive capitalism imposed from without (and supported by elites within) to retain its monopoly on power.

Selling the 1960s War on Poverty to the rest of the country meant giving white, middle-class Americans images they would find relatable. Photographers sought images of white poverty and portrayed them as representative of an entire region, Catte argues. They eschewed photographs of “more ‘modern’ residents who owned gas stations and restaurants.” Or of African Americans. Or of Native Americans. Vance is simply the most recent popularizer of the hillbilly stereotype that enabled coal barons to spin wholesale destruction of the land, air, water, and the exploitation of a people as modernization.

But something darker, Catte believes, lies beneath the established narrative Vance perpetuates of hillbillies as a genetically distinct (read: inbred), white Scots-Irish monoculture. Catte traces the efforts of outsiders to improve the region’s “less-evolved” human stock through relocation or sterilization:

Virginia was already at the forefront of the American eugenics movement thanks to the efforts of the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The New York collective helped Virginia’s politicians draft sterilization and racial integrity laws. In 1927 the fruits of their labor blossomed when the infamous Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell effectively legalized compulsory eugenic sterilization nationwide which was practiced in Virginia until 1979.

Seen as unresponsive after years of War on Poverty assistance landed Appalachians among the ranks of the undeserving poor. Conservatives painted them as born into a culture of poverty. The hillbilly myth “allows conservative intellectuals to talk around stale stereotypes of African Americans and other nonwhite individuals while holding up the exaggerated degradations of a white group thought to defy evidence of white privilege.” Scots-Irish heritage is there, Catte acknowledges. But exaggerating its influences in Appalachia and blaming Appalachians for their own exploitation provides cover for explaining persistent poverty among nonwhites elsewhere as a function of defective genes rather than entrenched systems of power.

Vance hopes readers will take from “Elegy” an understanding “of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.” Catte counters that race is exactly the point. The National Review’s response to “Elegy” was “positively gleeful,” Catte writes, telling its readers, “The white working class has followed the black underclass and Native Americans not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort.” Vance proposes bringing in venture capitalists to show hillbillies how it’s done.

Catte punches back, arguing the hillbilly narrative “would retroactively vindicate [conservatives] for viciously deploying the same stereotypes against nonwhite people for decades.”

Catte tells Guernica, “For those who like to indulge in that brand of self-righteousness, it is always the poor who fail our country, never a country that has failed the poor, and race and class work together in that regard to make poverty seem innate among certain populations.”

As for popular depictions of a region populated by hillbillies, Catte writes, “It turns out that if you create and sell a version of Appalachia as a place filled with defective people, eugenicists start paying attention to your work.” She introduces readers to Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Records Office, to writer, attorney and eugenicist Henry Caudill, and to Stanford scientist William Shockley’s Foundation for Research and Education of Eugenics and Dysgenics.

What is striking in Catte’s exploration of their influences in Charles’ Murray’s “The Bell Curve” and J.D. Vance’s account of Greater Appalachia is the matter-of-factness about eugenicists’ efforts at improving the gene pool of the undeserving poor. In addition to sterilization, Caudill suggested moving in army camps. Caudill believed soldiers impregnating mountain women would be “to the everlasting benefit of the region as a whole.”

More striking for voting rights activists are the parallels Catte does not draw between efforts to improve the Appalachian gene pool and lofty-sounding efforts “to clean up the voter rolls” in the name of election integrity. Purging voter rolls, erecting registration hurdles, denying voting rights to ex-felons, demanding photo IDs for voting — those efforts to purify the voter pool are not about race either(!), but enacted under the public rationale of strengthening American democracy as a whole.

To extend Catte’s account of American eugenics, manipulation of voting laws to retain a monopoly on power appears as simply another manifestation of a racial stratagem that resurfaces decade after decade in cunning variations.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Peanut!

The baby Tamandua born December 20, 2018 at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden now has a name! Although the pup’s sex is yet-to-be-determined, the Zoo announced that it would be called “Mani”.

“We wanted to give the pup a Spanish name, since Tamanduas are primarily from Spanish speaking countries, and both of its parents have Spanish names. We chose the name Mani, which means “peanut,” because we were able to watch Mani grow from the size of a peanut via weekly ultrasounds on mom, Isla,” said Cincinnati Zoo Interpretive Animal Keeper Colleen Lawrence. “We fell in love with the pup when it was only a blip on a screen.”

Five-year-old Isla, a first-time mom, has taken care of the pup exactly the way she should, so it is healthy and growing fast. Care team members think the baby is a boy, but it’s difficult to be 100% certain of the sex of Tamanduas when they’re this young.

Keepers report that little Mani can be seen through the windows of the Zoo’s Animal Ambassador Center (AAC), clinging to Isla.

Also called the “lesser anteater”, the Tamandua uses its long snout to sniff out ant, termite and bee colonies. Long claws enable it to dig into nests, and a long sticky tongue licks up the insects. A single Tamandua can eat up to 9,000 ants in a single day!

Via Zooborns

Ivanka lies just like her daddy

by digby

What are those parrots doing?

She learned at her daddy’s knee:

Ivanka Trump says in a new interview that she knew “literally almost nothing” about the Trump Tower Moscow project that’s become a central focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, adding that she has “zero concern” about the probe or the possibility that anyone close to her could be implicated.

“Are you concerned about anyone in your life that you love being involved?” ABC’s Abby Huntsman asked the President’s daughter and White House adviser in a taped interview that partially aired Friday on “Good Morning America.”

“No. I’m not,” Trump said. “I’m really not.”

Donald Trump’s real estate company was pursuing a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow while he was campaigning for the presidency, but Ivanka Trump said she knew “literally almost nothing” about it.

“There was never a binding contract. I never talked to the — with a third party outside of the organization about it. It was one of — I mean, we could have had 40 or 50 deals like that, that were floating around, that somebody was looking at. Nobody visited it to see if it was worth our time. So this was not exactly like an advanced project,” Trump said.

“There’s nothing there, yet it’s created weeks and weeks and months of headlines,” she said. “So no, I have zero concern.”

She also downplayed doing business in Russia, arguing that it’s “not like it’s a strange thing” to have property in Russia.

“We’re not talking about Iran. It was Russia,” she said. “And we weren’t even advanced enough that anyone had even visited the prospective project site. So it really was just a non-factor in our minds. I’m not sure that anyone would have thought of it.”

Then-candidate Donald Trump signed a letter of intent in October 2015 to move forward with negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Russia, despite his attorney Rudy Giuliani’s claims late last year that the document was never signed. The project and the length of discussions around it have been subject to a changing narrative and is a key part of the legal saga facing Michael Cohen, the President’s former attorney. The project also came up in written questions that Trump answered for Mueller as a part of the broader investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

This is proposterous. No matter how smooth her tone it doesn’t change the fact that her daddy lied over and over and over again denying that he had any business in Russia. Putin knew he was lying. And daddy knew Putin knew he was lying as did Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric.

Everything they have done and said regarding Russia since the summer of 2015 has to be seen in that light.

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The definition of chutzpah

by digby

Trump made a fetish of demonizing undocumented immigrants, to the point of obsession. Nothing has been more important to his presidency.

So this is nearly unbelievable:

At his home on the misty slope of Costa Rica’s tallest mountain, Dario Angulo keeps a set of photographs from the years he tended the rolling fairways and clipped greens of a faraway American golf resort.

Angulo learned to drive backhoes and bulldozers, carving water hazards and tee boxes out of former horse pastures in Bedminster, N.J., where a famous New Yorker was building a world-class course. Angulo earned $8 an hour, a fraction of what a state-licensed heavy equipment operator would make, with no benefits or overtime pay. But he stayed seven years on the grounds crew, saving enough for a small piece of land and some cattle back home.

Now the 34-year-old lives with his wife and daughters in a sturdy house built by “Trump money,” as he put it, with a porch to watch the sun go down.

It’s a common story in this small town.

Other former employees of President Trump’s company live nearby: men who once raked the sand traps and pushed mowers through thick heat on Trump’s prized golf property — the “Summer White House,” as aides have called it — where his daughter Ivanka got married and where he wants to build a family cemetery.

“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Angulo said. “This golf course was built by illegals.”

The Washington Post spoke with 16 men and women from Costa Rica and other Latin American countries, including six in Santa Teresa de Cajon, who said they were employed at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. All of them said they worked for Trump without legal status — and that their managers knew.

The former employees who still live in New Jersey provided pay slips documenting their work at the Bedminster club. They identified friends and relatives in Costa Rica who also were employed at the course. In Costa Rica, The Post located former workers in two regions who provided detailed accounts of their time at the Bedminster property and shared memorabilia they had kept, such as Trump-branded golf tees, as well as photos of themselves at the club.

The brightly painted homes that line the road in Santa Teresa de Cajon, many paid for by wages earned 4,000 miles away, are the fruits of a long-running pipeline of illegal workers to the president’s course, one that carried far more than a few unauthorized employees who slipped through the cracks.

Soon after Trump broke ground at Bedminster in 2002 with a golden shovel, this village emerged as a wellspring of low-paid labor for the private club, which charges tens of thousands of dollars to join. Over the years, dozens of workers from Costa Rica went north to fill jobs as groundskeepers, housekeepers and dishwashers at Bedminster, former employees said. The club hired others from El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala who spoke to The Post. Many ended up in the blue-collar borough of Bound Brook, N.J., piling into vans before dawn to head to the course each morning.

Their descriptions of Bedminster’s long reliance on illegal workers are bolstered by a newly obtained police report showing that the club’s head of security was told in 2011 about an employee suspected of using false identification papers — the first known documentation of a warning to the Trump Organization about the legal status of a worker.

Other supervisors received similar flags over the years, including Bedminster’s general manager, who was told by a worker from Ecuador several years ago that she entered the country illegally, the employee said.

Eric Trump, a son of the president who runs the Trump Organization along with his brother Donald Trump Jr., declined to comment on the accounts by the former workers. Bedminster managers did not return requests for comment.

I wrote earlier about how stunning it is that Trump thought he could run for president and not draw tremendous scrutiny to his businesses. That for two years as president neither he nor his spawn ever considered that hiring undocumented immigrants might surface in the news is simply mind-boggling.

I doubt that his “he can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and I’ll love him even more” followers will care. But damn…

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Pecker miscalculated

by digby

I don’t know if he and his lawyers committed a crime but from what I understand, Pecker’s immunity agreement required him to keep his nose clean for three years…

Federal prosecutors are reviewing the National Enquirer’s handling of its story about Jeff Bezos’ extramarital affair to determine if the company violated an earlier cooperation deal with prosecutors, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office were provided with information about key exchanges concerning Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com Inc., who went public in a jaw-dropping public blog post Thursday night. In it, Bezos detailed exchanges with American Media Inc. and accused the company of extortion.

They are now reviewing whether there was any criminal activity or whether AMI, the National Enquirer’s parent company, violated an earlier agreement not to engage in criminal conduct. AMI reached that deal to avoid prosecution over its role to silence women who had relationships with President Donald Trump, agreements negotiated with his former lawyer Michael Cohen.

If you haven’t followed this story, you can get a good overview here. It’s really something …

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and chief executive, published an explosive blog post Thursday evening accusing the National Enquirer of blackmail and extortion.

In that post was one line that stood out.

Bezos wrote that “numerous people” have contacted his investigative team about “similar experiences” with the National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc.

Who are those people? And, more importantly, what other “similar experiences” were they referring to?

A person familiar with the National Enquirer’s operation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told CNN Business that there were indeed similar situations between the National Enquirer and other individuals. 

In the blog post published on Medium, Bezos alleged that AMI threatened to release more compromising photos of him if he didn’t stop his probe into how the National Enquirer obtained private text messages between him and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez. To back up his claim, Bezos published what he said were the full text of emails his representatives received from executives at AMI.

American Media said in a statement on Friday morning that the company “believes fervently that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story of Mr. Bezos.”

“Further, at the time of the recent allegations made by Mr. Bezos, it was in good faith negotiations to resolve all matters with him,” the company said. “Nonetheless, in light of the nature of the allegations published by Mr. Bezos, the Board has convened and determined that it should promptly and thoroughly investigate the claims. Upon completion of that investigation, the Board will take whatever appropriate action is necessary.”

The person who spoke anonymously to CNN Business said that other shoes are likely to drop.

“It will all come out now,” the person predicted.

Indeed, the dominoes may be starting to fall.

Ronan Farrow, the New Yorker’s Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has reported on the National Enquirer, said in a tweet Thursday night that AMI attempted to blackmail him.

“I and at least one other prominent journalist involved in breaking stories about the National Enquirer’s arrangement with Trump fielded similar ‘stop digging or we’ll ruin you’ blackmail efforts from AMI,” Farrow tweeted.

Farrow said that he “did not engage” because he does not “cut deals with subjects of ongoing reporting.” CNN Business has reached out to AMI for comment regarding Farrow’s claim.

Farrow isn’t the only one who has spoken out.

In June 2017, MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski accused President Donald Trump of threatening them with a hit piece in the National Enquirer in order to gain more favorable coverage on him on their show “Morning Joe.”

Trump denied the allegation from Scarborough and Brzezinski at the time, calling it “FAKE NEWS.”

Dylan Howard, the chief content officer for the Enquirer’s parent company American Media, said at the time that “we have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions.” Howard also said that AMI did not level any threats against “either Joe or Mika or their children in connection with our reporting on the story.”

Remember, in 2015 Trump called pecker to Trump Tower and asked him what he was prepared to do for the campaign. The Enquirer has operated as a partner of the Trump Organization. It’s part of their mutual business models.

And when Trump became president they got their hands on some of that Saudi money …

Jesus.

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Just rolling with the Nazis

by digby

“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — okay fine… so in thinking about how it could go bad down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism.”😳😳😳 https://t.co/9iSfFKhbhC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 8, 2019

Candace Owens of Turning Point USA is having a big impact on politics in our Country. She represents an ever expanding group of very smart “thinkers,” and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on…so good for our Country!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2018

Update: If you want the whole story on Owens and this “nationalist” organizaton, this Buzzfeed piece will fill you in.

The Trump youth are just … oy.

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They can’t conceive of anyone disagreeing with them

by digby

I have been declaring the concept of hypocrisy dead for a long time. Amanda Marcotte takes it a step further and exposes their motive and I think she’s nailed it:

Republicans are something worse than hypocrites. They are political nihilists, who use scandals like this to further their agenda of emptying politics of any morality, hope or substance, clearing the path for a naked power grab.

First, the facts: Last week, a trolly right-wing website published a photo, taken from Northam’s personal page in his 1984 medical school yearbook, that shows one man in blackface and another in a KKK-style hood. At first, Northam admitted to being in the photo and apologized. Then backtracked, claiming that neither of the people in the picture was actually him, while also admitting to have done blackface at another point to impersonate Michael Jackson.

Then allegations were published — by the same website — that Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who would replace Northam if he resigned, had been accused of sexual assault. Shortly after that, Fairfax’s accuser, a California academic and a Democrat who seems to have no relationship to Fairfax outside of this one encounter, released a public statement that is both credible and disturbing.

Third in line is Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who then stepped forward and admitted to doing blackface in college. This time, the story isn’t being driven by right-wing blogs, but it seems likely that Herring decided it was wise to get ahead of the story before any photos came out.

Without a doubt, these scandals are the result of a coordinated political attack by right-wing forces who are mobilizing to prevent Democrats from passing legislation supporting women’s equality. So even as many Democrats agree there should be serious political consequences for these three men, they are also calling Republicans hypocrites for their outraged denunciations.

They have a point. After all, the same conservatives who are professing outrage over stories of racist behavior and sexual misconduct supported Republicans Ed Gillespie and Corey Stewart in their statewide campaigns — for governor and U.S. senator, respectively — even though both made overt appeals to racism and Stewart has ties to fringe white nationalist groups. These same conservatives largely support Trump, of course, and were quick to defend Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh from allegations that were strikingly similar to the ones now raised against Fairfax.

But I’d argue that what Republicans are up to here is more sinister than garden variety hypocrisy. Their larger purpose is to push the idea that no one actually cares about racism or sexism, and that all protestations to the contrary are just postures that liberals adopt for political gain. Their strategy is to seed the notion that everyone is a bigot motivated by greed and naked self-interest, so they can then turn around and hold Republicans out as slightly better because hey, at least they’re honest about it.

That’s what all the discourse about “political correctness” is ultimately about. Intrinsic to these complaints about is the idea that people who seek to enforce social norms against racist or sexist slurs are not motivated by sincere moral conviction but by a will to power. That’s why the related term “virtue signaling” has taken off in right wing  circles. That refers to the idea that no one actually believes in their professed egalitarian values, but only say they do in order to gain status and power.

This was the premise of Donald Trump’s entire campaign and now his presidency: He was smashing through the strictures of “political correctness” and freeing people to admit their true racist and sexist nature. This premise requires painting his opponents as disingenuous. Otherwise, the “politically incorrect” would have to admit that they’re just bigoted bullies, rather than righteous freedom fighters struggling against hypocritical moral scolds.

The idea that everyone is a bigot but only conservatives are man enough to admit it was essentially the argument Trump made in his State of the Union address to defend building a border wall.

“Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards,” Trump said. The implication was clear: Liberals are a pack of hypocrites who say they want  racial diversity but actually wall themselves up in enclaves of privilege. So conservatives should build a border wall as a way of sticking it to those phonies.

One of their most delusional beliefs is that everyone secretly agrees with them.  Liberals’ unwillingness to admit that means they can be destroyed by any means necessary.

Yep.

That SDNY investigation is que RICO

by digby

This Daily Beast piece by former prosecutor Barbara McQuade about the SDNY investigation’s contours and what they may indicate about the case is fascinating. I am far from an expert but from what I read it certainly seems as if we are dealing with some kind of complex conspiracy case:

Referring to a cooperator as a “rat,” President Trump sometimes sounds like a mob boss. He may ultimately be prosecuted like one, too.

While some reports say that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is winding down, it appears that another investigation is just gearing up. According to reports in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, a grand jury in the Southern District of New York recently issued a subpoena to the Trump inaugural committee, seeking documents relating to donors and spending. According to reports, the subpoena indicates that prosecutors are investigating conspiracy against the United States, false statements, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and violations of campaign finance and inaugural committee laws. In addition, CNN has reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan have expressed interest in interviewing executives from the Trump Organization.

It is impossible to know exactly what the federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating, but the wide array of crimes brings to mind a case that was prosecuted in Detroit when I served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and several of his associates were convicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as RICO.
[…]
Kilpatrick was convicted at trial based on a great deal of evidence: the testimony of witnesses, bank records, business documents and text messages that corroborated the witness testimony. In SDNY’s investigation into the Trump inaugural committee and the Trump Organization, the evidence is unknown, and it may be that the investigation yields no charges. But it is not a stretch to think that the prosecutors are at least considering whether they can prove the type of enterprise and pattern of predicate acts that would amount to a RICO charge.

I have been asked before about whether the special counsel’s investigation could result in RICO charges, and I have thought that RICO was a bridge too far. Mueller’s investigation may yet uncover a conspiracy with Russia or WikiLeaks or obstruction of justice, but election interference does not seem to encompass the ongoing pattern of disparate crimes that RICO was intended to capture. Now that the Trump inaugural committee or the Trump Organization may be targets of SDNY’s investigation, however, the theory does not seem so far-fetched. Either one of those Trump entities could potentially be considered an “enterprise” for purposes of a RICO charge, if the evidence supported it. So, too, could a collection of Trump and his associates be considered an association, in fact, just as Kilpatrick and his associates formed the Kilpatrick Enterprise. The types of crimes that are being investigated–mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering–are all crimes listed in the RICO statute as eligible predicate offenses that can constitute a pattern of racketeering activity.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York seems particularly well-situated to investigate a RICO case here. It has a strong history of using RICO with great success. In the 1980s, when the office was led by Rudolph Giuliani, prosecutors used RICO prosecutions to take down organized crime families. SDNY reportedly has entered into an immunity deal with Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, someone who is well-positioned to provide valuable information to prosecutors about any illegal financial transactions. SDNY has already convicted former Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen of tax offenses, fraud, false statements and campaign finance violations, the last of which Cohen has said he committed at Trump’s direction. And, although he has fallen short of earning a formal cooperation agreement, Cohen has met with SDNY prosecutors to share information.

The search of Cohen’s home and office reportedly turned up a recording of some of his conversations, including one with Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who worked as a consultant on the inauguration. The Wall Street Journal has reported that, in the recording, Wolkoff expressed concern about how the inaugural committee was spending the record $107 million it had raised. Richard Gates, who has pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe, has also reportedly met with SDNY prosecutors. The Journal reported that as deputy chairman of the Trump inaugural committee, Gates asked vendors to accept payments directly from donors, a curious request that likely will draw the scrutiny of prosecutors at least in part because entities that bring in and distribute money can be used as vehicles for money laundering, a crime that may constitute a RICO racketeering predicate.

Even if SDNY follows the Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted, nothing prohibits the Trump Organization or Trump’s associates from being indicted. In addition, even if a sitting president cannot be indicted, a former president can be. Under the statute of limitations, a RICO conspiracy may be charged up to five years after its last predicate racketeering act is committed. If any predicate act was committed on or after Jan. 20, 2016, the statute of limitations would not preclude an indictment from being filed on Jan. 20, 2021, the moment a president is sworn in, so long as that president is not Donald Trump.

I will never stop being astonished that Trump was so narcissistic that he actually believed he could run for president of United States without exposing his entire life as a businessman to the most intense scrutiny possible. He seems to have assumed that he could control it by appointing a “Roy Cohn” or that he could finesse it with bullshit.

I’m reminded of a revealing comment he made during the fall campaign at one of his rallies:

“A blue wave would equal a crime wave, very simple,” Trump told the crowd at his second rally of the day, in Indianapolis. “And a red wave equals jobs and security.”

“It could happen, could happen,” Trump told the crowd of rally-goers in a Huntington airport hangar, with Air Force One in the background. “We are doing very well, and we are doing really well in the Senate, but it could happen.”

But if it did, said Trump, he’d be okay. “And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’ Does that make sense? I’ll just figure it out,” he said.

He’s been dancing on the head of a pin his entire adult life, tempting fate and always barely escaping catastrophe. He’s not the brightest bulb and he just assumed he’d get through this the same way. And maybe he will. He’s certainly a lucky guy. But he’s never faced the full force of the federal government bearing down on him before and it all is finally be catching up to him.

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Let the games begin

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Apparently President Trump woke up on the wrong side of the bed on Thursday and accidentally turned on MSNBC or CNN instead of Fox News. That was a mistake. Those two cable networks were covering the latest news about the House Intelligence Committee’s probe into the Russia scandal and it ruined his whole morning:

So now Congressman Adam Schiff announces, after having found zero Russian Collusion, that he is going to be looking at every aspect of my life, both financial and personal, even though there is no reason to be doing so. Never happened before! Unlimited Presidential Harassment….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2019

….The Dems and their committees are going “nuts.” The Republicans never did this to President Obama, there would be no time left to run government. I hear other committee heads will do the same thing. Even stealing people who work at White House! A continuation of Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2019

PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT! It should never be allowed to happen again!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2019

Trump was 28 years old during the Watergate hearings. He was in his 30s when the Iran-Contra investigation began, an investigation that went on for 2,978 days. Seven years of Whitewater and the myriad Clinton investigations began when was 46 and the 9/11 hearings into the Iraq war intelligence failures happened in his late 50s. He was in his 60s throughout the interminable Benghazi hearings in the Obama administration. In other words, there have been congressional investigations into presidential administrations his entire adult life. We know he watches the news so he must have heard of them. They all got big ratings.

Some of those probes were about personal behavior and alleged pre-presidential financial corruption. Others concerned major intelligence matters and policy failures. And in one case, it was about gross abuse of presidential power. But Trump’s petulant lamentations are true in one sense. No previous president has ever been suspected of all of that. And none were ever investigated for conspiring with a foreign government to sabotage his opponent’s campaign for money. He’s the first.

It’s interesting to see him wail about it at this late date. Perhaps he wasn’t paying attention when people pointed out to him that the loss of the House majority last November would inevitably lead to this. Or maybe he’s whining for the benefit of his audience, priming them to believe that a primal scream of “Presidential Harassment!” is the new “Witch Hunt!”

But he’d better get used to it. Today’s testimony by Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker is the first day of the rest of his presidency. It’s only going to get worse for him.

The House Judiciary Committee has a right to call the Attorney General up to the Hill and ask him questions. It’s perfectly normal. But Matt Whitaker isn’t a normal Acting Attorney General. The circumstances of his hiring to the Justice Department and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions Chief of Staff and his ascension into a position for which he is totally unqualified have never been fully aired in congressional hearings. The fact that he had been auditioning for a job in the administration by being a pro-Trump pundit on Fox News and CNN is hardly unprecedented. Trump has hired many people that way. But it is unusual for someone who was on record vociferously defending a president from a criminal inquiry to be hired into the job that oversees it. It’s even more unusual that he refused to recuse himself. All of that is of interest to the committee and the public has a right to hear Whitaker explain himself.

And there are other issues they’d certainly like to hear about from the Department of Justice. They’d like to be briefed on the legality of the child separation program and voting rights and the government’s position on defending the Affordable Care Act among other things. They may ask him about those issues but it’s unlikely they really care what Whitaker says. He’s on his way out the door and his influence on DOJ policy has almost certainly been nil in any case.

What they want to know from Whitaker in his last days in office is whether there has been any interference of the Special Counsel or the cases in the Southern District of New York by the White House. And it’s been pretty obvious that the administration doesn’t trust him to handle those kinds of questions very deftly. His performance in a recent sweaty appearance in the White House briefing room where he nervously answered a question inappropriately about the Mueller probe coming to an end certainly wouldn’t have set their minds at ease. So, there has been a tug of war between the committee and the Department of Justice over his testimony for good reason.

Whitaker had dodged the appearance by evoking the shutdown, clearly hoping to be out of office before the day of reckoning. But they finally settled on today’s date and the committee even sent over some of the questions  in advance so that Whitaker could anticipate whether to ask the president to evoke executive privilege. The committee asked to be notified 48 hours before the hearing if he planned to do so and told him that if he would otherwise be expected to answer. They did this because Trump’s minions  — including his former Attorney General — adopted a novel claim that they wouldn’t answer questions because the president might want to evoke executive privilege in the future. That’s not how this works.

Naturally, Whitaker ignored the deadline which is what prompted the committee to vote to subpoena him if he just blew off the committee altogether, which certainly seemed to be possible. The administration certainly doesn’t seem to be burdened by respect for decorum or the constitutional requirements of congressional oversight. The subpoena threat was a signal that the Judiciary Committee isn’t playing.

As for the questions themselves, they are actually very simple and shouldn’t be difficult to answer. Among other things, they want to know if Whitaker has briefed the president on the Mueller investigation and they want to know if the president has attempted to interfere with the investigations in the Southern District of New York, as has been reported. They also want to know if the US Attorney in Utah’s “review” of all the investigations of Hillary Clinton has been communicated to the White House and if Whitaker was in communication with the White House about the Buzzfeed article that said Trump directed former Trump Organization executive Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.

These are important questions that only Matt Whitaker can answer.  But it’s fair to guess that an Attorney General William Barr will also be up on the Hill in a couple of months and he’ll be asked similar questions by this committee. Trump still thinks the Attorney General is his personal fixer and he’ll almost certainly put Barr into the same bind he’s put Whitaker.  Barr is much more sophisticated and experienced but when the boss wants you to be his Roy Cohn you have a choice to make.

So far this morning, it looks as though Whitaker has made his.

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