Month: February 2019

Yes there was a quo

by digby

This piece by Emptywheel about the latest Buzzfeed dump of secret documents pertaining to the Moscow Tower deal is very interesting:

BuzzFeed has posted the documents showing Michael Cohen and Felix Sater organizing a Trump Tower deal until June 14, literally as the news of the DNC hack broke. The documents show how closely those negotiations interacted with the June 9 meeting.

The Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr and Russians promising dirt was scheduled for 4PM (Rob Goldstone posted on Facebook that he was at Trump Tower at 3:57). Natalia Veselnitskaya ran a bit late, but they would have started the meeting by 4:10PM.

Four witnesses to the meeting (the four whose responses weren’t coached by Trump Organization lawyers) said that the meeting ended with Don Jr saying that his father might or would revisit Magnitsky sanctions if he became President.

Natalia Veselnitskaya said Don Jr said they’d revisit the topic.

Mr. Trump, Jr. politely wound up the meeting with meaningless phrases about somewhat as follows: can do nothing about it, “if’ or “when” we come to power, we may return to this strange and confusing story.

Ike Kaveladze said that Don Jr said they might revisit the issue if his father won.

There was no request, but as I said, it was a suggestion that if Trump campaign wins, they might get back to the Magnitsky Act topic in the future.

Rinat Akhmetshin said that Don Jr said they would revisit Magnitsky when they won.

A. I don’t remember exact words which were said, but I remember at the end, Donald, Jr., said, you know, “Come back see us again when we win.” Not “if we win,” but “when we win.” And I kind of thought to myself like, “Yeah, right.” But it happened, so — but that’s something, see, he’s very kind of positive about, “When we win, come back and see us again.” Something to that effect, I guess.

Anatoli Samochornov, Veselnitskaya’s translator, who is the most independent witness and the only one who didn’t compare his story with others, said that Don Jr said they would revisit the issue if Trump won.

A. Like I described, I remember, not verbatim, the closing that Mr. Donald Trump, Jr., provided, but that’s all that I recall being said from the other side.

MR. PRIVOR: That closing being that Donald Trump, Jr., suggested —

MR. SAMOCHORNOV: If or when yes, and I do not remember if or when, but if or when my father becomes President, we will revisit this issue.

The meeting lasted somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes.

At about that time, Trump tweeted out a reference to Hillary’s emails, invoking 823 staffers, which was a good ballpark estimate for how many staffers (including unpaid advisors) she really had at the time.

At that same time, Felix Sater texted Michael Cohen to tell him he was working on setting up Cohen’s trip to St. Petersburg.

At that point, Sater told Cohen there was a “very strong chance” he would meet Russia’s President, which Cohen and Don Jr would have both believed meant that the Trump Organization could make $300 million by lending Trump’s name to the tallest tower in Europe.

Quid pro quo, all executed on social media.

Read on at this post for more juicy evidence. Emptywheel uncovered something even more interesting than that buried in the documents.

I think this is a real bombshell. The timing could be coincidence but the coincidences are now piled as high as Denali mountain.

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QOTD: SHS

by digby

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday said that any corrupt activities surrounding President Donald Trump’s inauguration had “nothing to do with the Trump White House.”

“Those things that have taken place have absolutely nothing to do with the president,” she said. “They have everything to do with the fact that people are spending their lives doing nothing but trying to find negatives when, in fact, the president has been incredibly successful.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders on the inauguration investigation:

The White House has nothing to do with the White House and anyone who says it does is a hater. Stop bullying us!

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Medicare-for-all is already lacking
by Tom Sullivan

Several times over the last decade, I have visited the Remote Area Medical free clinic held each July at the Wise County fairgrounds in southwest Virginia. (Stan Brock, RAM’s founder and patients’ patron saint, passed away last August.) Most of the free care people camp out in cars to receive is dental treatment.

With that in mind, let’s move on to Catherine Rampell’s consideration of Medicare-for-all. Despite the idea’s broad popularity, don’t make it a litmus test for progressive candidates, she cautions:

Here’s the problem. The things Americans are apparently envisioning when they tell pollsters they support Medicare-for-all turn out to be a different, vaguer and more varied set of ideas than the specific thing that Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and others in the progressive base are proposing.

Sanders, et al. want all Americans enrolled in a single, generous, government-run — or single-payer — plan with no private insurers offering their own similar, competing policies. Sanders said he envisions the role of private insurers only for “cosmetic surgery, you want to get your nose fixed.” (To be clear, this is not how Medicare currently works; the program relies heavily on privately run insurance plans.)

Complicating creating such a system, Rampell suggests, is the fact that while the public strongly supports the idea in theory, inform people that Medicare-for-all involves killing off their private plans and support plummets from 56 to 37 percent. There may be multiple ways of avoiding policy landmines in arriving at “affordable health care for every American,” Rampell cautions. The principle should come before the policy. Fine.

But getting back to dental care.

The reason RAM does such a brisk trade in pulling teeth, treating oral infections, and making dentures is because the U.S. government treats dental care as separate from the rest of a person’s heath needs.

“If you’ve got a mouth full of bad teeth and you can’t see to function, to get a job, for you it is a disaster,” Brock said, advocating that any kind of universal health care program had to include dental.

Nicole Karlis explains at Salon that about 74 million Americans in 2016 had no dental coverage, roughly three times the number that had no medical insurance. Congress created Medicare without including comprehensive dental coverage for a variety of reasons, some of them historical. That continues now, in part, out of institutional inertia:

However, if doctors knew back then what they know now, perhaps the course of history would have been changed. Dr. Gary Glassman, an endodontist, told Salon in an email that the mouth “is a window into what’s going on in the rest of your body, and can often serve as a helpful vantage point for detecting the early signs and symptoms of systemic disease.”

“Like many areas of the body, your mouth is overflowing with bacteria, most of them harmless, but with daily brushing and flossing the bacteria can usually be kept under control by way of the body’s natural defenses,” he said. “However, without proper oral hygiene, bacteria can reach levels that might lead to oral infections, such as tooth decay and gum disease.”

And Alzheimers disease, suggests a recent report:

Researchers say they’ve found more evidence linking bacteria found in a common type of gum disease to dementia. A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, found a key pathogen associated with chronic periodontal disease in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

The study authors say these results, plus additional testing in mice, provide “solid evidence” of a link between the two diseases and may offer a potential new way to treat Alzheimer’s. The devastating illness affects 47 million people worldwide, and there is no cure.

The usual caveats apply. The work is preliminary. Correlation is not causation. Nevertheless:

A 2017 study out of Taiwan found that people with chronic gum disease lasting 10 years had a 70 percent increased risk for developing Alzheimer’s. Another small study published in 2016 in the journal PLOS ONE found gum disease was associated with a six-fold increase in the rate of cognitive decline in people with mild to moderate dementia.

Rebecca Edelmayer, Ph.D., director of scientific engagement for the Alzheimer’s Association, reminds CBS News that “diet, exercise, a good management of cardiovascular health, getting good sleep” could help prevent cognitive decline. Maybe good oral care may one day be recognized as a factor, she adds.

Does bacteria migrating from the mouth to the brain cause dementia, or do people with dementia just tend to have bad oral hygiene? Show of hands. Who wants to volunteer to find out?

The point is, Medicare-for-all, while popular, is still ill-defined in public debate. The gaps in the way the U.S. handles medical insurance are less so. In concept, universal coverage is likely to be historically selective about what a federal program might cover universally. As a trip to any RAM clinic will make plain, those coverage gaps swallow up Americans left behind not just by the economy and existing programs, but by class.

Before we ask candidates to sign on in blood to a program that still leaves out important care for tens of millions of Americans, we might want to spend some time considering just who and what Medicare-for-all should cover.

Pay for Play at the inauguration

by digby

It looks like more suspiciously corrupt-looking behavior is being investigated by the SDNY:

Prosecutors in New York’s Southern District have reached out to President Donald Trump’s inauguration committee and plan to subpoena the organization for documents, sources with direct knowledge tell ABC News, indicating that even as the special counsel probe appears to be nearing an end, another investigation that could hamstring the president and his lawyers is widening.

The contact from the Southern District, which came from its public corruption section, is the latest activity focusing on Trump’s political fundraising both before and immediately after his 2016 election. Lawyers for the inauguration committee were contacted midday Monday and asked if they could accept a subpoena for documents from federal prosecutors, according to sources familiar.

The details of the request remain unclear, lawyers for the inauguration did not respond to ABC News.

Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen has been extensively interviewed by prosecutors in the Southern District office. Longtime family accountant and Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg has agreed to cooperate, though the extent of his help is unknown.

The Trump family business has also been in contact with prosecutors, but sources familiar with those discussions would not spell out the specific topics covered.

Those involved in discussions surrounding the inaugural fund, a nonprofit tasked with organizing festivities surrounding the president’s swearing-in, declined to detail specific questions from investigators. Trump’s inaugural fund raised $107 million – the most in modern history.

(MORE: Special counsel eyeing Russians granted unusual access to Trump inauguration parties)

A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.

ABC News has reported previously interest by federal investigators in the foreign guests at the inaugural event, and possible contributions by foreign nationals, which would be prohibited. Among those who attended were Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who is now on the Treasury Department list of sanctioned oligarchs.

Last year, special counsel Robert Mueller’s team had questioned several witnesses about millions of dollars in donations from donors with connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, sources with direct knowledge previously told ABC News. One Mueller target, a political consultant named Sam Patten, acknowledged as part of a plea deal that he accepted $50,000 to buy tickets on behalf of a Ukrainian businessman who wanted to attend inaugural events.

Despite the amount of money raised, the festivities surrounding Trump’s swearing-in were far more modest in scale than past inaugural events. The non-profit group established to oversee the celebration hosted only three major events with some small intimate private affairs. The record breaking fundraising was double of President Barack Obama’s first inaugural.

The committee was chaired by President Trump’s longtime friend, Thomas Barrack. It has been previously reported Barrack sat for an interview with Mueller’s office in late 2017.

Recently, internal documents obtained by ABC News showed the committee spent more than $1.5 million at the Trump International Hotel in Washington ahead of the president’s 2017 swearing-in. It is part of an array of expenditures there and elsewhere that included more than $130,000 for customized seat cushions at two gala dinners for the president-elect, $10,000 to provide makeup to the servers at another formal dinner, and $2.7 million to a company that produced a Broadway-style rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” using Las Vegas showgirls flown in by Trump pal Steve Wynn for a private event.

(MORE: President Donald Trump’s inaugural fund spent lavishly at his DC hotel, new docs show)

Questions about the inaugural spending were first raised last year when tax filings disclosed the five largest vendors included payments of nearly $26 million to an event planning firm run by a one-time adviser and close friend of Melania Trump. The adviser, Stephanie Winston-Wolkoff, created a company called WIS Media Partners based in California that handled some of the festivities. That firm paid out contracts to other sub-contractors that were hired and used some of the funds to hire sub-contractors.

Winston-Wolkoff was also paid $1.62 million directly for her work, ABC News has previously reported. The tax filing showed that the committee spent $104 million of the $107 million it raised. By way of comparison, for the 2009 inauguration, then-president elect Barack Obama’s team raised roughly $53.2 million and reported spending about $51 million.

The Trump Inauguration also donated $5 million to various charities including the American Red Cross, Salvation Army and the Smithsonian Institute among others.

There’s Russia stuff involved in this too. Presumably Mueller’s team is or has followed up on that part of it. But once they turn over the rock they always seem to find a whole bucnch of potential criminal activity.

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Roger Stone, hero at last

by digby

Good lord:

Roger Stone entering the Women for Trump 2020 campaign kickoff to thunderous applause. pic.twitter.com/Z3JItC5t9t— Luke Rohlfing (@lukerohlfing) February 2, 2019

Again, who are these people?

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Trump’s top toady issues a warning

by digby

Graham is really going the extra mile now:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned on Monday that there could be a “war” among Republicans if President Trump declared a national emergency to build the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Graham, speaking in South Carolina, acknowledged that the idea divides Republicans, who he argued should unite behind the president if he ends up circumventing Congress to build the wall.

“It seems to me that he’s gonna have to go it alone, but there could be a war within the Republican Party over the wall,” Graham said.

Graham added that he would “stand with” Trump if he declares a national emergency to construct the U.S.-Mexico border wall and urged his Republican colleagues to “get behind the president” if he goes down that path.

“To any Republican who denies the president the ability to act as commander in chief, you’re going to create a real problem within the party,” Graham said.

The border is not a national security issue and Trump should not have the “right” to act commander in chief to use troops to enact his domestic political agenda.

And keep in mind that He had a very different view of executive power not that long ago:

In my view, the DACA Executive Order issued by President Obama was unconstitutional and President-elect Trump would be right to repeal it.— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 9, 2016

My Salon piece about Graham from last week.

Update: McConnell has warned Trump about doing this:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cautioned President Trump privately this week about the consequences of declaring a national emergency to build his border wall, telling him the move could trigger political blowback and divide the GOP, according to two Republicans with knowledge of the exchange.

McConnell (R-Ky.) told Trump that Congress might end up passing a resolution disapproving the emergency declaration, the people said — which would force the president to contemplate issuing his first veto ever, in the face of opposition from his own party.

McConnell delivered the message during a face-to-face meeting with the president Tuesday at the White House, according to the Republicans, who requested anonymity to describe the encounter. The two men met alone and conversed with no aides present. Their meeting was not publicly announced.

The majority leader’s comments to the president came amid rising GOP concerns over the fallout if Trump were to declare a national emergency that would allow him to circumvent Congress and use the military to build new stretches of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump increasingly appears prepared to take that route, saying Friday that “I think there’s a good chance we’ll have to do that.”

Trump teased the possibility of making a definitive statement on the topic during his State of the Union address, telling reporters to watch the Tuesday speech closely. “I think you’ll find it very exciting,” the president said.

This idea that they are doing this out of some sort of “principle” is ridiculous. They don’t care about consistency and hypocrisy and they will fight anything the Democrats would do without blinking an eye. They just know that this stupid wall is very unpopular.

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Running his mouth and causing yuge problems

by digby

Trump’s interview on Face the Nation was a mess in every way. But he made news with this and because he is so dim and uniformed this is the kind of thing that could really cause some major problems:

Iraq’s president hit back at Donald Trump Monday for saying U.S. troops should stay in Iraq to keep an eye on neighboring Iran, saying the U.S. leader did not ask for Iraq’s permission to do so.

“We find these comments strange,” said Barham Salih, speaking at a forum in Baghdad.

Trump’s comments added to concerns in Iraq about America’s long-term intentions, particularly after it withdraws its troops from Syria. Trump has angered Iraqi politicians and Iranian-backed factions by arguing he would keep U.S. troops in Iraq and use it as a base to strike Islamic State group targets inside Syria as needed.

In an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” he said U.S. troops in Iraq were also needed to monitor Iran.

“He didn’t ask Iraq about this,” Salih said Monday. He said U.S. troops were in Iraq as part of an agreement between the two countries with a specific mission of assisting in the fight against the Islamic State group and combatting “terrorism.” He said the Iraqi constitution forbids the use of Iraq as a base to threaten the interests or security of neighboring countries.

“Don’t overburden Iraq with your own issues,” he added.

In the CBS interview, Trump said the U.S. has an “incredible base” in Iraq that he intends to keep, “because I want to be able to watch Iran.”

“We spent a fortune on building this incredible base,” Trump said. “We might as well keep it. And one of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem.”

He said the U.S. base in Iraq is “perfectly situated for looking at all over different parts of the troubled Middle East.”

He appeared to be referring to the Al-Asad air base in western Iraq, where he paid a brief visit to U.S. forces in December. The base hosts American troops but belongs to the Iraqi army.

Trump’s comments appear to have further inflamed tensions in Iraq over the continued presence of U.S. troops after the defeat of the Islamic State group. Curbing foreign influence has become a hot-button issue in Iraq after parliament elections in May in which Shiite militias backed by Iran made significant gains. The militias fought alongside U.S.-backed Iraqi troops against IS in recent years, gaining outsized influence and power along the way.

Now, after defeating IS militants in their last urban bastions, Iraqi politicians and militia leaders are increasingly speaking out against the continued presence of U.S. forces on Iraqi soil.

Trump has said he has no plans to withdraw the 5,200 troops in Iraq, which he says could carry out U.S. airstrikes inside Syria after American troops withdraw from that country.

American forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, but returned in 2014 at the invitation of the government to help battle IS after it seized vast areas in the north and west of the country, including Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. A U.S.-led coalition provided crucial air support as Iraqi forces regrouped and drove IS out in a costly three-year campaign.

Earlier this month, the leader of one of Iraq’s most powerful Iranian-backed Shiite militias told The Associated Press in an interview that he expects a vote in the coming months by Iraq’s parliament calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Qais al-Khazali, head of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous, also suggested U.S. troops may eventually be driven out by force if they do not yield to the will of the Iraqi people.

Former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi also weighed in on Monday, saying Iraqi sovereignty must be respected and its interests should not be compromised.

“Iraq should not be used as a spring board to attack its neighbors. We are not proxies in conflicts outside the interests of our nation,” he wrote in a Twitter post.

He showed how stupid he is about this issue in that interview in other ways, as I noted this morning. This one, however, is a dangerous and unforced error. If he would listen to someone besides Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs he might know to keep his mouth shut but he there’s no way he will ever understand the issue. He just doesn’t have the bandwidth.

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And yet Steve King is still in congress

by digby

Republicans are dancing on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s grave, smirking, laughing and gleefully declaring him a terrible racist who cannot be tolerated. They don’t mean it, of course. After all, half of their national officials are racist including the president. Of course they don’t mean it.

And keep in mind that this story was just published two weeks ago — about the only black official in the Virginia government, Lt Governor Justin Fairfax, who stepped out of the chamber while the legislature lauded the confederacy:

Heaping praise on Lee is nothing unusual in the former capital of the Confederacy. For most of the United States, Friday was the last workday before the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. In Virginia, it was a state holiday: Lee-Jackson Day.

The General Assembly works through both the Lee-Jackson and MLK holidays, and elected officials from both parties have traditionally used the occasions to tip their hats to the Confederates and King alike. Comedian Stephen Colbert lampooned the Virginia Senate in 2013 for adjourning its MLK Day session in honor of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson — on a motion from a Democrat, state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds of Bath.

Such tributes have become more politically fraught in recent years amid the push to remove monuments and rename schools and roads honoring Confederate leaders.
[…]
Sen. Richard H. Stuart (R-King George) marked Lee’s 212th birthday with praise for “a great Virginian and a great American.”…In his speech Friday, Stuart tried to separate Lee from the issue of slavery, noting the general’s efforts to bring about reconciliation after the war.

“I rise to celebrate his birthday because he was a great Virginian and a great American, and not because it has anything to do with slavery,” Stuart said. “I celebrate Lee on his birthday because he was a man with the strength of his convictions and that is a rare trait, either in yesteryear or today.

“He was a man that personified integrity, honor and commitment to duty, a selfless man that devoted his entire life to the service of his country, either in battle or in teaching people to be good citizens, and a man who always did what he thought was right,” Stuart said. “There were few people after the Civil War who did what Lee did to heal the wounds of this country and to try to reunite this country after that horrible war.”

Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy and shame (at least as pertains to themselves) so it’s useless to point this out in the hopes that they will STFU. But I still think it’s important to keep a record. With the proliferation of propaganda in our society it’s easy to get confused and forget what’s really going on. In this case, Northam will eventually have to vacate his office because he can no longer do his job without the support of his party and the electorate, which will not tolerate having such leaders in this position. The rest of the racists in the GOP will continue to win their offices at least partly because of their racism. That’s the status quo at the moment.

As Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times today we have a long way to go.

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“We have very fast airplanes”

by digby

My Salon column today:

Donald Trump came up with a lot of memorable lines during the 2016 campaign, from “build the wall” to “drain the swamp.” One of his most common, from the moment the general election campaign began, was a complaint that his rival Hillary Clinton didn’t have the “strength and stamina” to be president. He made it clear over and over again that he believed the job of president was too much for her, and she wouldn’t be able to handle the rigors of the job.

As it turns out, this was another case of Trump projecting his own weaknesses onto someone else. A White House source leaked some confidential official presidential schedules to Axios and they show that the man with the most important job in the world is barely working:

The schedules, which cover nearly every working day since the midterms, show that Trump has spent around 60% of his scheduled time over the past 3 months in unstructured “Executive Time.”

“Executive Time” (also known as free time) was created by former White House chief of staff John Kelly when it became clear that Trump just couldn’t handle a normal presidential schedule. Apparently, it takes up most of his day. (One Twitter wag pointed out that the schedule looks like a day in the life of one of his cats.)

Nobody is quite sure what the president does with all that time, but the last few days have shown once again that he isn’t spending any of it boning up on national security and foreign policy. His understanding of world affairs is actually getting shallower and more confused than it was when he was elected.

Recall last week’s presidential tantrum about the intelligence agencies’ annual threat assessment testimony before Congress, when Trump petulantly tweeted that his intelligence chiefs needed to go back to school because their professional judgment differed from his. He backtracked a bit the next day, saying that he’d spoken to them and they’d told him it was all fake news. He called them to the Oval Office for a photo op and tweeted out this message:

Just concluded a great meeting with my Intel team in the Oval Office who told me that what they said on Tuesday at the Senate Hearing was mischaracterized by the media – and we are very much in agreement on Iran, ISIS, North Korea, etc. Their testimony was distorted press…. pic.twitter.com/Zl5aqBmpjF

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 31, 2019

The testimony was broadcast live and the threat report was released for public consumption, so there can be no question that they disagree with Trump’s public pronouncements.

Then, in Trump’s interview with “Face the Nation” on Sunday, he explained why he doesn’t trust his own intelligence agencies:

I have intel people, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree. President Bush had intel people that said Saddam Hussein … in Iraq had nuclear weapons — had all sorts of weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? Those intel people didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and they got us tied up in a war that we should have never been in. And we’ve spent $7 trillion in the Middle East and we have lost lives …

This is the opposite of what happened, of course. The ideologues in the Bush White House, who needed an excuse to invade Iraq, put pressure on the intelligence agencies to tailor their assessments to help them make their case for war. It’s one of the most notorious examples of intelligence being slanted under political pressure in history. That Trump would use this, of all examples, is typical of the Bizarro World nature of his thought processes, particularly since one of the people he does purport to trust, national security adviser John Bolton, was a member of that administration.

According to this report in Time magazine, Trump may be creating exactly the same dynamic. A couple of senior level intelligence officials anonymously came forward in the wake of that confrontation with the intel chiefs to blow the whistle on a dysfunctional process:

Citing multiple in-person episodes, these intelligence officials say Trump displays what one called “willful ignorance” when presented with analyses generated by America’s $81 billion-a-year intelligence services. The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.

But the real problem is that Trump explodes in anger when they give him intelligence that doesn’t back up his decisions or beliefs. Some officers have even been told to back off on giving him information that contradicts his public pronouncements. (By that we can assume his impulsive, ill-informed tweets and stream-of-consciousness blather during press encounters.)

Considering what Trump said on a variety of foreign policy issues in that “Face the Nation” interview, it’s pretty clear that the brain trust isn’t getting through to him, one way or the other. He spouted volumes of nonsense, but did make news by saying that he planned for U.S. forces to stay in Iraq to keep an eye on Iran. After he saw that expensive base he visited recently, he decided “we might as well keep it.”

He claimed that if al-Qaida or any other terrorist group revives after the U.S. pulls out of Syria and Afghanistan we’ll just go right back in because “we have very fast airplanes.” And anyway, that big base in Iraq means that we control everything and he will know if anything bad is happening before it happens. He said he’ll be putting his own intel people he can trust in the region and they’ll keep a lid on it.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. From North Korea to Venezuela to Russia, the EU and China, Trump is just blathering off the cuff, with no idea of the consequence of his words. It’s possible that Bolton has his ear, but even that’s not really clear. It couldn’t be more obvious that Trump has given all of this no more than a moment’s thought and hasn’t reconsidered even one idea that came into his head 30 or 40 years ago in light of new information. It’s impossible to predict what he would do in the event of a real national security crisis but we can be sure of one thing: It won’t be the result of a thoughtful, rational process.

None of this is to say that the intelligence services are infallible or don’t sometimes have an agenda. Trump is of course correct that the president has the authority to ignore their advice if he believes they’re wrong. But for better or worse, given the choice between listening to the people who run those agencies at the moment and believing Trump’s “gut,” it’s pretty clear who has more credibility.

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History the hard way
by Tom Sullivan

Maria Gallagher and Ana Maria Archila cornered Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator (video) during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. (Image via @mgallagher822 )

After an elevator confrontation with Sen. Jeff Flake in September, Brian Williams declared on his MSNBC show, “It appears that in the last 24 hours, three women may have changed the course of history. They are Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher.” The latter two, captured in video, had confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) at the door of a Senate elevator and pressed on him their stories of sexual assault during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. It seemed their urgent pleas for Flake to relent in supporting Donald Trump’s nominee might even change the final outcome.

They did not. Blasey Ford’s story of abuse at Kavanaugh’s hands while in high school fell on deaf ears. In response to confrontation by Archila and Gallagher, Flake called for a one-week delay in the Senate vote, but ultimately voted to confirm Kavanaugh. Yet, the women will not fade away.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has rarely been seen publicly since the Kavanaugh hearings. Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier, however, will nominate her for the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award to be awarded in Washington, D.C. in May. Archila, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, will attend the State of the Union address Tuesday as the guest of her new congresswoman, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

The Intercept reports:

Members of Congress each bring a guest to the State of the Union address, and many choose to bring one who represents an issue or policy stance they prioritize. Ocasio-Cortez dropped a hint about her guest on Saturday, posting a picture of a “Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History” enamel pin she had picked up at a local shop.

Archila said she feels so much gratitude for Ocasio-Cortez and what she represents: “This idea that we all deserve a country where we can live with dignity, that we have so much wealth that is accumulated in such few hands and she is determined to bring that demand to Congress and to give voice to a demand that I think is very widely shared.”

An immigrant herself, Archila has spent the past two decades working on behalf of immigrant rights in Queens and said she feels a deep connection to Ocasio-Cortez because of their shared commitment to building “grassroots power with people who are excluded from our democracy.”

Money may talk, but courage speaks louder.