Month: February 2019

Infantile Diplomacy

by digby

Trump assumes all dictators are as dumb as he is:

President Donald Trump was looking to flatter his new friend in Singapore when he struck upon an unusual compliment.

He had known plenty of people who had grown up wealthy and whose families were powerful, Trump told Kim Jong Un, the despotic North Korean dictator whose father and grandfather held the same role.

Many of them emerged messed up, Trump said. But, he added, Kim wasn’t one of them.

Of course, Kim rules North Korea with an iron fist and a disregard for human rights. And his stature was gained through birth, not hard work. But Trump’s choice of praise for his new negotiating partner, relayed by a person familiar with the conversation, reflects the US President’s determination to flatter his way to nuclear peace in Asia.

As he embarks upon a second summit meeting with Kim in Hanoi, Trump appears poised to employ the same tactics as he seeks out a concrete road map for North Korea’s denuclearization. Before the formal talks begin on Thursday, the two men will sit for a small dinner with only a select number of aides — an intimate kick-off to a summit balanced on perhaps the world’s most improbable diplomatic friendship.

“It’s a very interesting thing to say, but I’ve developed a very, very good relationship,” Trump told the nation’s governors on Sunday evening before departing for Hanoi. “We’ll see what that means. But he’s never had a relationship with anybody from this country, and hasn’t had lots of relationships anywhere.”

Thirty years apart in age and separated by decades of enmity between the US and North Korea, Trump and Kim have forged a bond built on mutual displays of effusive praise. In back-and-forth letters over the past seven months, each has used flowery language to describe the other and appeal to his sense of ego, a trait both men carry in spades.

The practice, which has drawn eye rolls among some of the more seasoned national security aides at the White House and the State Department, nevertheless brought the two sides to another summit meeting in Vietnam. After the two men meet for dinner on Wednesday evening, they will sit for extended talks on Thursday, including a one-on-one session with only their translators present.

Some of Trump’s aides have expressed concern at what he might be willing to concede to Kim in his quest for progress on a nuclear arrangement. During last year’s meeting in Singapore, Trump agreed to suspend US-South Korea war exercises, viewed as a major concession to the North that caught both Seoul and the Pentagon by surprise. North Korea experts worry that behind closed doors Trump may have promised even more, like eventually pulling US troops out of South Korea in full.

This time, however, Trump is hoping to make more tangible progress toward ridding North Korea of its nuclear weapons, explain senior administration officials. He’s also competing with a narrative of scandal back home, as special counsel Robert Mueller concludes his Russia investigation and as Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testifies on Capitol Hill.

With political hostility running high in Washington, Trump will find a more favorable reception in Hanoi, where signs have been erected around the city hailing the prospects for peace. T-shirts emblazoned with the instantly recognizable silhouettes of the two bombastic leaders are for sale at shops around town. In front of the hotel where Kim is believed to be staying, a bed of roses has been fashioned into the US and North Korean flags, with two hands shaking in the middle.

That’s the type of reception Trump had been hoping for in calling for a second summit, which he believes will generate the same type of wall-to-wall television coverage of the first. Some of his aides have warned him that a second go-around would capture less attention, though Trump has largely discounted that advice.

Part of the attraction, Trump believes, is the unlikely affair he’s developed with Kim, particularly following a period of heightened rhetoric last year that culminated with the President boasting of the superior size of his “nuclear button.”

After agreeing to meet, the threats cooled off, but the relationship heated up. The first sign of the budding pen-pal arrangement came when North Korea’s spy chief arrived to the White House bearing a comically oversized envelope containing one of the first effusive missives.

Since then, Trump has taken to carrying around copies of his most recent letter from Kim in his coat pocket, withdrawing it to show both his friends and political adversaries. During heated talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer during this year’s government shutdown, Trump whipped out the letter and threw it on the table.

“Read this,” he instructed Schumer, before flinging the document over the table in the senator’s direction.

Trump has also bragged to his wealthy friends about his relationship with Kim, who is known to have adopted brutal tactics for consolidating power and who oversaw the detainment of American student Otto Warmbier, who returned to the US in a vegetative state and died soon thereafter.

“We have a terrific relationship, and we’ll see where it goes. Who knows where it goes. But we’ll see,” Trump said in a video recorded this weekend and played at an event held for the “Trumpettes,” a group of supporters at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club.

“The personal relationship between the leaders is important in sort of setting an overall tenor to the negotiations,” said Victor Cha, a veteran North Korea adviser who was once considered to be Trump’s ambassador in Seoul and is now senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But having said that, when that really works is when you have two sides that are tough — you know, negotiating very hard, and trying to align their positions.”

“The gap between the US and the North Korean positions is so wide between the two sides. I mean, we can’t even agree on what denuclearization is,” Cha added, citing administration officials who last week told reporters there did not yet exist a common definition of the key negotiating goal. “The gap is so wide that simply having a good relationship is not going to do it.”

Trump has countered that he is in no rush to execute a nuclear deal with North Korea, and the absence of missile and nuclear testing means his diplomatic gambit is working. He’s attributed the pause to his personal wooing of Kim, which in Singapore included warm moments like placing his hand on Kim’s back and later showing him the interior of his heavily armored limousine (to some consternation from the US Secret Service).

It was in that meeting that Trump first gauged his ability to deal with Kim in person. He had told reporters on his way there he was likely to appraise his interpersonal chemistry with Kim within the first minute of their encounter.
Asked how, Trump pointed to “just my touch, my feel.”

Kim, who had caught wind of the President’s comment as he made his own way to Singapore, raised the comment with Trump about an hour into their talks, according to the person familiar with the conversation.

Trump quipped back that it really only takes a few seconds to estimate a person. So what did he think of him, Kim asked. Trump offered his thoughts, including his determination that Kim was sort of sneaky — but not too sneaky.

“But do you trust me?” Kim asked. The President said he did, and that he must trust him if they were ever to forge a deal.
Displaying a quick wit, Kim turned to Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton — a hawkish skeptic of diplomacy with Pyongyang — and asked if he trusted him, too.

Bolton said if Trump did, then he did, too.

Everything about that is astonishing. He’s like a child who thinks if he brings an apple to the teacher she’ll give him an A. It’s infantile diplomacy.

We don’t know a lot about Kim Jong Un. Maybe he really is as shallow as Trump thinks he is and just wants to be a playboy real estate celebrity like he was. Anything’s possible.

We’d better hope this childlike bromance is real because the stakes are very, very high.

*Oh, and never mind the little issue of human rights.

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A spy by any other name
by Tom Sullivan

Marcy Wheeler ( @emptywheel ) appeared last night on “All In with Chris Hayes” to discuss what she has teased out of the Paul Manafort sentencing memo filed by Robert Mueller and the Office of Special Counsel on Saturday.

The memo had no direct mention of conspiracy between Manafort, the Trump campaign, and Russia. While bold in its depiction of Manafort as a career criminal, details were missing about the August 2, 2016 meeting at the Havana Room in Manhattan between Manafort, Rick Gates and Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian political operative with suspected ties to Russian intelligence. Allegedly, in addition to discussing a peace deal for Ukraine and Russian sanctions relief, Manafort provided Kilimnik with detailed internal polling data that might aid an operation to manipulate American opinion via social media.

Wheeler finds clues in a footnote that suggest there is more to come. (Audio here. There is no video yet):

Wheeler: Manafort’s lawyers in their very last memo, which is probably why no one noticed this, [present] here’s the email that Manafort sent to Rick Gates saying “print this out.” So we know that that’s the exhibit. And then it says here is the pages of the data that we are all discussing … It’s at least 75 pages long. So it’s a chunk of polling data. It wasn’t just toplines or something like that.

Hayes: Which does seem material to this, right? Because as you said, this question that had been hinted at by Mueller’s lawyers in the breach conversation about going to the heart of: What are they doing in this cigar bar, on this night, meeting with this guy, during the campaign, printing out polling data and giving it to him? And the idea that Manafort’s own lawyers are copping to the fact that what they gave him was a big, hefty chunk of whatever it was.

Wheeler: And his lawyers also say … “It was so complex and so focused that I don’t understand it.” And so the judge in the case, Amy Berman Jackson, is like that’s the point, right? And so her discussions about why it was material are actually really interesting. But Mueller isn’t saying that. Mueller has been silent about what that August 2, 2016 meeting is. We know it is central to the investigation. He just isn’t going to tell us what it means.

Another footnote (redacted) referencing Exhibit 233 refers to the material (also redacted) that Manafort gave Kilimnick. The page references in the footnote, however, are not redacted, Wheeler points out: See Gov. Ex. 233, pp. 4-79. “A big, hefty chunk of whatever it was,” as Hayes put it.

Wheeler writes at emptywheel:

It’s when you couple that data with what [OSC prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann and ABJ go on to say about it that the data is more damning. As I’ve noted before, Rick Gates testified that Manafort walked Kilimnik through the data at that clandestine August 2 meeting.

And the logic of ABJ’s judgment makes clear that this sharing of poll data amounts to a link to the Russian government.

Whether Kilimnick himself is an active spy or not, Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled.

Whatever Mueller delivers to Attorney General William Barr — whether it is next week or mid-March — will not end this investigation. “This is merely the end of chapter one,” says former Illinois federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti.

More to come.

Who is Muller’s corruption expert?

by digby

Andrew Goldstein with his former boss Preet Bharara

An interesting profile in the New York Times about a Mueller prosecutor we know nothing about:

The routine was always the same. President Trump’s lawyers would drive to heavily secured offices near the National Mall, surrender their cellphones, head into a windowless conference room and resume tense negotiations over whether the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, would interview Mr. Trump.

But Mr. Mueller was not always there. Instead, the lawyers tangled with a team of prosecutors, including a little known but formidable adversary: Andrew D. Goldstein, 44, a former Time magazine reporter who is now a lead prosecutor for Mr. Mueller in the investigation into whether the president obstructed justice.

Mr. Mueller is often portrayed as the omnipotent fact-gatherer, but it is Mr. Goldstein who has a much more involved, day-to-day role in one of the central lines of investigation.

Mr. Goldstein, the lone prosecutor in Mr. Mueller’s office who came directly from a corruption unit at the Justice Department, has conducted every major interview of the president’s advisers. He questioned Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer and lawyer, for dozens of hours. He signed Mr. Cohen’s plea agreement. He conducted grand jury questioning of associates of Roger J. Stone Jr., the former adviser to Mr. Trump who was indicted last month.

And he was one of two prosecutors who relayed to the president’s lawyers dozens of questions about Mr. Trump’s behavior in office that Mr. Mueller wanted the president to answer under oath. The questions showed the Mueller team’s hand for the first time: extensive, detailed lines of inquiry that could imperil the presidency.

“He knew the facts like I knew the facts,” John Dowd, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, said of Mr. Goldstein.
[…]
Now that Mr. Mueller is expected to deliver his report in the coming weeks, Mr. Goldstein’s past as a prosecutor offers a glimpse into how he might be helping the special counsel make a final determination.

Interviews with Mr. Goldstein’s colleagues and friends and an examination of his past work reveal someone profoundly at odds with the cowboylike image Mr. Trump has painted of Mr. Mueller’s team. He is one of the few in the group with a career outside the law — in addition to working for Time, Mr. Goldstein was a high school teacher — and is known for his nonconfrontational personality and cautious approach to prosecutions.

Before Mr. Mueller hired him, Mr. Goldstein, the son of a former Republican United States attorney, led the corruption unit in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan as the office made a highly unusual call to announce that it had declined to charge Mayor Bill de Blasio with a variety of crimes. The decision revealed how restrained high-level prosecutors often are in major political investigations.

“Investigating and prosecuting public corruption offenses can only go so far,” Mr. Goldstein said in a rare speech around the time he joined the special counsel’s team in 2017. “We can only police the outer bounds of misconduct: the really bad stuff, or at least the stuff that we can prove.”

That’s the first of several times this is mentioned in the article which begins to sound like a warning that everyone had better pour themselves a big drink because this thing probably isn’t going anywhere.

From the beginning, the byzantine structure of the Mueller investigation split its dozen-plus prosecutors into silos and specialties: money laundering, hacking, national security and public corruption.

Starting in the summer of 2017, when Mr. Trump’s closest White House advisers were summoned to Mr. Mueller’s offices, they typically met the same calm stare and gravelly voice of the man his former high school students still call Mr. Goldstein.

With James L. Quarles III, a former prosecutor in the Watergate investigation, Mr. Goldstein has led the office’s investigation into whether the president’s dismissal of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey — and Mr. Trump’s repeated assaults on the Justice Department — should be considered obstruction of justice.

He has tried to determine the president’s motives in Mr. Comey’s firing during dozens of hours questioning Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, and nearly seven hours with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, in April.

As evidence built over two years, Mr. Goldstein functioned as a repository of conversations that Mr. Trump had with lawyers, advisers and top law enforcement officials from early 2017 on. Among Mr. Goldstein’s jewels, according to Mr. Trump’s lawyers: exhaustive notes taken by Annie Donaldson, Mr. McGahn’s former chief of staff, which detailed in real time Mr. Trump’s behavior in the West Wing.

Did we know this before? I didn’t. It sounds … intriguing.

The article goes on to describe that case in New York in which Goldstein declined to indict Mayor Bill DeBlasio on corruption charges. And then:

The office made a highly unusual decision to release a public statement explaining why Mr. de Blasio would not be charged, citing “the high burden of proof” and the “difficulty in proving criminal intent in corruption schemes where there is no evidence of personal profit.”

“He was very much measure 10 times, cut once,” said Kan M. Nawaday, a prosecutor who worked with Mr. Goldstein in the corruption unit. “Nine times out of 10, you do a lot of investigation, and you realize the conduct is pretty terrible and foul. But since you’re here to do justice, it isn’t a crime, and you walk away.”

Mr. Goldstein has also gone out of his way to attack defendants who repeatedly fail to tell the truth. “And why do people lie?” Mr. Goldstein said in a closing argument against Sheldon Silver, the former Democratic speaker of the New York State Assembly, who had covered up illegal payments from a friend seeking favors and was found guilty on all counts. “Why do people hide things? Why do people keep secrets? Because they have something to hide.”

I don’t know what that tells us. But unless they have Trump on tape saying “I’ve got to fire that James Comey or my handler Comrade Putin will be so angry” it won’t be surprising if they decide that he’s so damned stupid that he didn’t indent to obstruct justice because he literally doesn’t understand what it is.

“You want to have people who have had experience not only bringing high-profile cases, but in walking away from them because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “The fact that you have a person who’s comfortable saying there’s nothing here, even though there’s a lot of clamor for it, is exactly the kind of person you want.”

See what I mean?

I guess we can hope this is all just a way of pointing out that this is not “an angry Democrat so if they do bring some charges and/or write a report that outlines impeachable offenses nobody can claim he’s some cowboy who loves to put people away. I hope no one thinks that will stop Trump from saying it anyway.

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Lindsay Graham unmasked

by digby

This profile of Lindsay Grahan in the New York Times Magazine doesn’t fully answer all the questions people have about why he’s decided to ecstatically lick Trump’s boots and attack Democrats like a feral dog but it does exlain some of it. It starts off with a political appearance in South Carolina where he gives Trump a run for his money in sheer, right wing viciousness. Then it wonders how he got there:

What did happen to Lindsey Graham? I raised the question directly to him the following afternoon in his Senate office in Washington. Graham was collapsed behind a cluttered desk, sipping a Coke Zero and complaining of exhaustion.

“Well, O.K., from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” he said.

I asked what “this” was. “ ‘This,’ ” Graham said, “is to try to be relevant.” Politics, he explained, was the art of what works and what brings desired outcomes. “I’ve got an opportunity up here working with the president to get some really good outcomes for the country,” he told me.

An outcome of particular interest to Graham, at the moment, is getting re-elected to a fourth Senate term in South Carolina, where Trump owns commanding approval numbers, especially among the hard-core Republicans who in the past questioned Graham’s devotion to their conservative cause. Sure, Graham allowed, you might emphasize some things more than others when you’re trying to appeal to the party base. “You just showcase your issues, right?” he said. During his last re-election campaign, in 2014, Graham asserted his base bona fides by railing against President Barack Obama’s White House “scumbags” and warning that “the world is literally about to blow up.” He has always been conservative, he emphasized. “But in our business, you’re not defined by the 80 percent agreement. You’re defined by the 20 percent” that the base might object to. (His relatively liberal position on immigration once led Rush Limbaugh to dub him “Lindsey Grahamnesty.”)

Graham reminded me that when McCain was facing re-election in 2010, he turned himself into “the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate.” That was the race in which McCain claimed that he never embraced the “maverick” label, and people were asking, “What happened to John McCain?” Graham chuckled at the memory.

In acknowledging this, Graham was speaking to me as a fellow creature of Washington, fully versed in the election-year “showcasing” he is now engaged in — one of the “people who are so smart” that he derided the day before. “If you don’t want to get re-elected, you’re in the wrong business,” he said.

Graham would shortly head over to the Capitol for Trump’s State of the Union address, about which the president called him a few hours earlier, seeking input. “Should I go conciliatory or to-hell-with-it?” Trump asked him, according to Graham. “What kind of tone should I take?” In recounting this latest exchange, Graham shook his head and half shrugged. “I have never been called this much by a president in my life,” he told me. His tone reflected a mixture of amazement and amusement, with perhaps a dash of awe. “It’s weird, and it’s flattering, and it creates some opportunity. It also creates some pressure.”
[…]
The price of relevance, for Graham, has been a willingness to defend the president on television and speak out on issues that he knows might be of minor consequence in the scheme of things but clearly animate Trump. In recent weeks, for instance, Graham — in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — has demanded a briefing on such Fox News snack food as whether the F.B.I. acted with too heavy a hand in its arrest of the longtime Trump political adviser Roger Stone. Graham also vowed to investigate a claim made by Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the F.B.I., that top Department of Justice officials had discussed circumstances in which Trump could be removed from office via the 25th Amendment. “An administrative coup,” Graham said ominously on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

When I asked Graham whether he ever worried about being seen as a toady to Trump, his voice assumed a slightly clipped edge. “No, here’s what I worry about,” he told me. “That we’re going to get it wrong in Syria and Afghanistan. I worry more about the policy stuff. And I have more influence than I’ve ever had.”

Graham credits his relationship with Trump with the president’s slowing down his decision to withdraw from Syria. He noted that Trump asked him whether the United States should use force in Venezuela. Graham said that he preached caution and that Trump became exasperated, or pretended to be. “He said to me, ‘You want to invade everywhere except where I want to invade,’ ” Graham said, laughing. And Trump, he insisted, knew where he stood on the special counsel’s Russia investigation. “I told the president that if you colluded with the Russians, if your campaign sat down and worked with foreign intelligence operatives to manipulate the results of the election, that’d be the end of us, ” Graham said.

NOtice that his criteria is extremely narrow — they had to sit down and work with foreign intelligence operatives to manipulate the results of the election. I’m guess that’s unlikely so Lindsay won’t be out there condemning the president for what he knows very well that he did.

But it’s worth it because Trumpie likes to call him:

Graham says he has achieved graduating levels of relevance with Trump. “I went from, ‘O.K., he’s president’ to ‘How can I get to be in his orbit?’ ”— “orbit” is another favorite Graham word — “to ‘How can I have a say in what’s going to happen today, tomorrow and next week?’ ” he told me.

I asked Graham if he considered himself part of the wider Trump orbit or the more select one. “Well, I’m getting into the smaller orbit now,” he said. I asked him who else was in that precinct of the Trump solar system. He mentioned Melania, Ivanka, Jared. “He’s got a bunch of old friends that still have a say, New York types,” Graham said. “But the circle is small.”

Trump is an entertainer and an agitator, which Graham says he can relate to, in a way. “The point with Trump is, he’s in on the joke,” Graham said. I asked Graham if he is in on the joke, too. “Oh, 100 percent, 100 percent.” He laughed. “Oh, people have no idea.” I asked him to explain the joke to me. “If you could go to dinner with us. … ” he said, shaking his head.

At the end of our second interview, in mid-February, I asked Graham if he trusted Trump. Graham’s eyes seemed to bulge for a split second. He sat back in his chair and paused. “That’s a good question,” he told me.

He paused some more. “Do I trust him?” he said at last. “I trust the president to want to be successful,” he said. The president’s mercurialness, he acknowledged, could be a problem. “He will change his mind in a New York minute,” Graham said. “You never know where he’ll be. I mean, I woke up one day, and we’re pulling out of Syria.”

But to this point, he and Trump have been able to work together. “He’s asked me to do some things, and I’ve asked him to do some things in return,” Graham said. Then, as if looking wistfully over his shoulder at his old maverick-sidekick days, he offered, “There’s sort of a Don Quixote aspect to this.” It was an odd thing for a man who was espousing the median Republican-circa-2019 position to say.

“At the intersection of all this theater is that he wants to be a successful president,” Graham said of Trump, “and I want him to be successful under terms that I think are good for the country.” Understood, but unspoken, was that these terms would also be good for Lindsey Graham.

Well, yeah. But the truth is that it’s only the latter. Nothing Trump does is good for the country on anyone’s terms and Graham knows it.

This is about Huckleberry being a star. But if he thinks Trump actually cares about what he thinks, he’s barking up the wrong tree.

I would just note this little “joke”

He noted that Trump asked him whether the United States should use force in Venezuela. Graham said that he preached caution and that Trump became exasperated, or pretended to be. “He said to me, ‘You want to invade everywhere except where I want to invade,’ ” Graham said, laughing.

Awww. They are both inveterate warmongers but they just want to kill different people. How nice.

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Trump’s pathetic “emoluments” contributions

by digby

Trump pretends he’s being ethical:

The Trump Organization said Sunday that it had donated the company’s 2018 profits from its business with foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury, the second year in a row that President Trump’s company has made such a move in an attempt to avoid running afoul of an anti-corruption provision of the Constitution.

The donation was for $191,538, up from last year’s donation of $151,470, according to a check dated Feb. 20 and made out to the Treasury, a copy of which the company provided. The check was signed by the president’s eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who are running the company while their father is in office.

“This voluntary donation fulfills our pledge to donate profits from foreign government patronage at our hotels and similar businesses during our father’s term in office,” Eric Trump said in a statement.

Although the Trump Organization and its legal and ethics advisers argue that the company is not legally required to make such a donation, the company has said the move should fend off any questions about whether Trump is violating the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which bars the president from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments.

However, the Trump Organization’s annual donation has not stopped legal challenges arguing that Trump is violating the foreign emoluments clause. The president and his company are contending with two lawsuits on that issue moving through the federal courts.

Arguments in one case, brought by the Democratic attorneys general of the District and Maryland, are scheduled to resume March 19 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond.

Huh. Now why would they do that if Trump is “donating” all his profits to the government?

Critics note that the Trump Organization does not explain how it calculates its foreign profits, identify its foreign customers or say how much those customers spent at the company’s properties.

Oh come on now. The President and his company are known for their integrity and commitment to the truth. Surely, we can take their word for it that the president isn’t influenced by any foreign countries lining his pockets? And they would never lie about such a thing.

This is the guy who said:

This seems like yet another thing for the Congress to investigate if you ask me. The inauguration investigation shows that they were padding their invoices. I have little doubt that what they call their “costs” is wildly inflated. And that includes all the spending at the golf courses and other properties where Trump makes his personal appearances nearly every weekend.

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Trumpie’s going to be mad

by digby

Another one of his minions contradicts him:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he believes North Korea remains a nuclear threat and disputes the fact that President Trump thinks otherwise. “What he said was … the efforts that had been made in Singapore … have substantially taken down the risk to the American people” pic.twitter.com/keXCFb4xtd— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) February 24, 2019

He just ignored what Trump said and acted as though he’d said something else, which he obviously knows is a lie:

Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether he believes North Korea remains a nuclear threat, Pompeo responded, “Yes.”

After last year’s summit with Kim in Singapore, Trump tweeted, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience.”

But Pompeo on Sunday disputed that Trump had said as much.

That may be too confusing for trump to understand so he may get away with contracting his Deal Leader in a way the Intel chiefs could not. But he’d better be careful. Mentioning that the emperor has no clothes can get you into real trouble.

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He doesn’t need no stinking strategy. He has MAGA!

by digby

Politico reports:

Late last month, more than 100 major Republican donors gathered at the Trump International Hotel for a presentation from the president’s campaign manager Brad Parscale and other top political hands on their plans to keep the White House in 2020 after a brutal midterm election.

But several of the GOP contributors left the two-day retreat in Washington dissatisfied, dogged by essentially the same concern: The president doesn’t really have a strategy to win reelection.

They are chiefly worried about how he intends to prevail again in the Rust Belt states that voted for Trump in 2016, but where Democrats performed strongly in last year’s midterms. But there are also concerns about whether the president’s fundraising apparatus is up to the task, and whether Trump will trample on any strategy or message the campaign does develop, as he frequently does.

This account is based on interviews with nearly a dozen people connected to Trump’s reelection, including two donors who attended the retreat and other Republican contributors who’ve given to Trump in the past. Several campaign aides, who say they have spoken with anxious donors, also spoke to POLITICO. Most of the sources spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid upsetting Trump.

Some level of nervousness is not uncommon at the outset of a presidential reelection effort. Trump’s campaign manager said the team is confident in its game plan and that any fears are misplaced.

But based on the interviews, the campaign plainly has work to do to assuage at least some of the Republican donor class, which he will need to finance a massive campaign infrastructure that he lacked in 2016. Several donors who regularly contribute to Republican presidential candidates and the political groups supporting Trump said his campaign didn’t learn from its mistakes during the2018 midterm elections, when Republicans lost control of the House and suffered other defeats nationwide.

“We took a shellacking in the midterms,” said Dan Eberhart, a major Republican donor and energy company executive who did not attend the conference but speaks frequently with other Trump givers. “Donors are concerned that the Trump reelect might draw the wrong conclusions from the Republicans’ defeat in the 2018 midterms and are stressing to administration sources and the nascent campaign that a more inclusive … strategy is needed” that reaches beyond the president’s core supporters.

Trump’s strategy in the midterms was mostly confined to rallying his base at raucous rallies in states that backed him for president, while largely ignoring moderates and independents.

“There’s a lot of anxiety,” said a longtime Republican donor and friend of Trump. “There isn’t a lot of confidence … among the donor group, the broader Republican group important to the reelection.”

Trump’s 2016 anti-establishment campaign was fueled by small donors and his own personal fortune. This time he’s an incumbent taking a more traditional approach to his 2020 election. He will need broad support from wealthy Republican donors cutting larger checks to the campaign and pro-Trump political action committees, including America First Action, the main super PAC that will support the president’s reelection in 2020.

“The first time around they didn’t have any major donors,” said Jonathan Felts, who served as White House political director for President George W. Bush and is close to people in the Trump White House. “Unless he wants to write a big check he can’t ignore them this time.”

Felts, who lives in North Carolina, said Trump’s campaign needs to do a better job cultivating donors — a task that both Bush and President Barack Obama did successfully. “Donors have been asking a lot of questions, the establishment Republicans,” he said. “I’ve talked to a lot of folks who don’t have a good impression.”

Trump filed for reelection on Inauguration Day, earlier than any president in modern history. The early start means he’ll need money to sustain his campaign for longer than his predecessors running for a second term did, creating a high demand for cash.

Right now the Trump campaign and the RNC continue to pull in large sums, but are also spending large amounts laying the groundwork for the 2020 elections.

They’re worried that he doesn’t have a good strategist so they’re talking about bringing in … Jared Kushner, who else? And they have their digital guru at the helm which, as we know, is a very important part of Vladimir Putin’s … er, Trump’s strategy:

While the appointment of someone with relatively little election experience to run Trump’s 2020 campaign has drawn attention, Parscale starts the campaign with the staunch backing of Trump, Kushner and other top people in the president’s orbit.

Another recurring complaint among donors is that Trump often strays from his own strategy. “The problem is the president can’t and won’t stay on message, push an issue in any kind of sustained way, stay out of trouble for more than 5 minutes,” said another Republican donor who attended the retreat at the Trump hotel.
[…]
“Donors are asking for the plan and they have no plan,” said an outside adviser close to the campaign. “There’s not a strategy.”

America First, which consists of a super PAC and a nonprofit group, will have to begin raising significantly larger amounts of money in order to keep pace with the demands of a presidential cycle. As of November, the group said it had raised $75 million overall since its launch after the 2016 election. Priorities USA Action, the Democratic super PAC that backed Hillary Clinton during her 2016 bid, raised $192 million during the 2016 election cycle.

But in the wake of the midterms, donors being courted by America First have questioned whether the group is the best place for their pro-Trump funds, according to one Republican fundraiser who speaks regularly with top donors.

Among other things they questioned is why the super PAC used $3 million of its $34 million in spending in 2018 to help Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who wound up losing reelection. The donors saw that spending as a sign the group lacked a strategy.

“There is true reluctance to give because there’s no plan or coherent structure to give to,” the Republican fundraiser said. “The campaign is doing really well with small-dollar donations, but it’s the high-end contributions [America First] is failing on.”

Nonetheless, these donors say they are sure they’re going to support Trump they just don’t want to write any checks right now. Why would they? Unlike the MAGA cultists, they know that what isn’t going into Trump’s pockets will be squandered. (And I’d guess more than a few wonder if he’s even going to be in the race a year from now …)

Still, they won’t sit it out because no matter what they need him to protect their tax cuts. Nothing in this world is more important.

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The Manafort memo tease

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Most of you probably didn’t stay up late on Friday night on pins and needles waiting for the sentencing memorandum in Paul Manafort’s case to drop. That would be because you are sane people who have lives. Quite a few journalists and news junkies obviously can’t say that, because we sat there in front of our phones and keyboards, checking Twitter every few moments in the vain hope that the “Big Reveal” was finally coming and Robert Mueller was going to lay out whatever he’s got.

As it turned out, the memorandum wasn’t filed until Saturday afternoon and it turned out to be a richly detailed 800-page document about Paul Manafort’s sordid history of criminality. There is little doubt that this man has spent a lifetime consorting with terrible people doing terrible things and making a lot of money at it. You’d think Donald Trump would have done a little bit of research before he tapped such a person to run his campaign, particularly since one of his major campaign promises was that he would only hire the very best people. Considering how many other corrupt, criminal, incompetent hires there have been to his campaign and administration, that clearly cannot be among those “promises kept” he likes to brag about. There has never been a more motley group of misfits populating one presidency in American history.

Unfortunately, as far as the sentencing memo revealing anything more about Russian collusion with the Trump campaign goes, it was a dud. In fact, the most intriguing fact was that some hints we had already seen in previous filings and court transcripts that point to the possibility of a broader conspiracy were left out of this mammoth filing. That’s actually quite unusual. Mueller’s previous sentencing memos have gone farther than strictly necessary in laying out details, creating a larger narrative that has unfolded in chapters as each case is presented to the courts.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote a fascinating article arguing that Trump has benefited greatly from the “frog slowly boiling in hot water” aspect of the case. He asks us to imagine how differently this story would look today if Mueller had kept everything under wraps for the last two years:

And then, after all of that, they suddenly produced a dozen indictments and plea deals running into hundreds of pages, detailing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s illegal and questionable financial dealings, those of his deputy Rick Gates, full details of Russia’s alleged efforts to influence social media and to steal electronic information from Democratic targets and detailed a half-dozen people who admitted to lying to federal investigators. Imagine if that had landed with a thud on the attorney general’s desk.

The slow-motion revelations, one after the other, have allowed the president and his henchmen, as Bump says, to “lump every new revelation into a big snowball labeled ‘no collusion,’ parroting the same refrain as the snowball grows.” You lose track of it, never really grasping the bigger picture because we lurch from one scandal and one revelation to the next in a sort of fog. But if you step back just a little, it’s clear this is a tremendous story of corruption and malfeasance.

Bump credits journalist Marcy Wheeler with making this point for many months, showing dozens of charges and dozens of people, Russians and Americans alike, prison sentences and guilty pleas, all of which overlap “at only one point: Involvement in the 2016 election.” In any ordinary administration it’s hard to imagine we’d be seeing the president who ran such a corrupt enterprise gearing up for a re-election campaign.

Nonetheless, all that leaves many important aspects of this case still outstanding, even some pertaining to Paul Manafort. This memorandum didn’t mention anything about what prosecutor Andrew Weissmann so intriguingly hinted at in the previous week’s court transcripts as “the heart of the case” — the alleged exchange of polling data with a man the FBI believes is associated with Russian intelligence. Rather than laying out all the facts as he has done in previous sentencing memos, Mueller simply wrote:

Manafort’s conduct after he pleaded guilty is pertinent to sentencing. It reflects a hardened adherence to committing crimes and lack of remorse. As the Court is fully familiar with this proof, we do not repeat the evidence herein.

And there were many, many redactions. Some of them had to do with grand jury material, classified information and unindicted people. But close observers like Wheeler suggest that much of it remains hidden because of the ongoing investigation — and the sense that Mueller perhaps has more faith in the new attorney general, William Barr, than the previous one. In other words, Mueller didn’t feel he had to use a sentencing memo to lay out the facts because he’s more comfortable laying them out in a future set of indictments or a report. It’s all speculation at this point, but that makes as much sense as anything.

Last week at this time journalists were excitedly reporting that because file boxes were being moved out of Mueller’s office and sources in the Justice Department were telling reporters that they were “expecting” to receive the Mueller report this week, this saga was wrapping up. The DOJ later released a statement saying that’s not happening. It’s not clear exactly why. It could be that the State Department asked that it not be done while the president is overseas, although it’s hard to see why the delivery of the report would make a difference. And anyway, Barr will presumably take his sweet time before he releases whatever he plans to release. So unless Mueller abruptly closes up shop on the same day, it’s not reasonable to believe that any of this is ending soon.

But the fact that Mueller didn’t include any details about a larger conspiracy argues for the idea that there’s more to come, either in new indictments or that big report. For this week, we’ll have to content ourselves with the first major public hearing since James Comey testified in June of 2017. Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen makes his appearance on Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee — on a split screen, while Trump meets with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi.

The Trump presidency gets more surreal by the day.

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Room 101
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from 1984 (1984).

‘Room 101,’ said the officer.

The man’s face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston would not have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.

Capitalist acts between consenting adults have been taking place since before Hammurabi. But they were virtually all small-scale and interpersonal, committed in the souk, in the town square, or one-on-one. Only in the age of unregulated, global capitalism have those acts themselves become commodities for trade. The Code of Hammurabi and older collections of laws recognized the need for rules governing men, particularly in trade. Unregulated capitalism does not, nor does surveillance capitalism.

Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff discusses with Noah Kulwin the threat she describes in her book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.”

The collection of personal data via the Internet represents a “coup from above,” the next phase of unregulated capitalism turning people (you) into products. This is more than simply harvesting who your friends are or your taste in music or products. There is invisible metadata in what we do online that, when aggregated, has “tremendous predictive value that you don’t know you’re communicating when you are posting or when you’re searching or when you’re browsing.”

How one structures or punctuates sentences, how one uses periods or ellipses or semicolons even, when processed through a five-factor personality model and combined with data from millions of others can generate “fine-grain predictions” about one’s other behaviors, Zuboff believes:

This is happening with parallel processing with millions and millions of data points and ends up being able to predict, as we say with Cambridge Analytica, just you know pivoting these methodologies which are the sort of normal “day in the life” methodologies of any self-respecting surveillance capitalist, just pivoting those slightly from commercial outcomes to political outcomes, and you get really robust predictions about how people will react to certain kinds of material, triggers, stimuli, and so on.

Surveillance capitalism is an adaptation to current technologies and forms a kind of “information panopticon” in which every element of interactions online and with “smart” technologies at home or on your phone become product:

We’ve had mercantile capitalism, and we’ve had factory capitalism, and mass-production capitalism, and managerial capitalism, financial capitalism. And typically what happens in these new concepts is that modifier, like “mass production,” or in my case “surveillance” capitalism, what that modifier is doing is pinpointing the pivot of value creation in this new market form.

Surveillance capitalism is coming for your personal experience so it might “tune and herd populations toward guaranteed commercial outcomes,” Zuboff warns:

It substitutes computation for politics, so it’s post-democracy. It substitutes populations for societies, statistics for citizens, and computation for politics, and so I read a lot about this experimental zone, the Facebook contagion experiments, where another experimental zone where when they wrote up those experiments in scholarly journals — very smart data researchers from Facebook combined with very smart academic scholars boasted that now we know that we can use the online world to create contagion that changes behavior in the real world. The first case it was voting, the second case it was emotional. And they bragged in their articles that we can do this in a way that bypasses the awareness of the user. Right? Always engineered for ignorance. Because you know, that’s the surveillance essence of this, you can’t do this by asking permission. You can only do this by taking it in a way that is secret, that is hidden, that is backstage.

So, a more digital form of disaster capitalism in which democracy is mere window dressing for furthering the commercial desires of financial interests. Computational governance becomes a new form of absolutism. Pivoting the ends of this kind of technology from commercial ends to political ones is a mere flip of a switch.

Zuboff believes there is still political maneuvering space for stopping it, but that will take a doubling down on democracy. It has advanced as far as it has because it is near-invisible. “Every single piece of research, going all the way back to the early 2000s, shows that whenever you expose people to what’s really going on behind the scenes with surveillance capitalism, they don’t want anything to do [with] it,” she says. But as with other forms of metastasized capitalism, people right now feel they have no choice. Capitalism is all about expanding our choices, remember?

This makes surveillance capitalism “a colossal market failure. Because it is not giving people what people want. It’s giving business customers what they want, to be able to manipulate people, but it’s not giving actual populations of people what we want.”

That has some rather serious political implications, as is already evident in China. But this is instumentarian rather than totalitarian power, Zuboff asserts. It doesn’t want to harm you, but make you better serve commercial interests. Combine that with an authoritarian state such as China, however? Zuboff warns, “[A]nd what we saw in America already is that anybody with enough money, any ambitious plutocrat, can buy the skills and the data to use these same methodologies to influence political outcomes.”

I don’t recall how the Ministry of Truth knew Winston Smith had an existential fear of rats. But in 2019, Robert Mercer or someone like him could probably sell them that information.

Oh, Grey Lady 

by tristero

As an ancient bard once said,  Don’t criticize what you don’t understand:

And on a rainy Saturday in Spotsylvania County, Va., one woman stood up in a town hall to remind Representative Abigail Spanberger that while she was the first Democrat to hold that seat in nearly 50 years, the majority of the rural enclave had voted Republican. 

“Since the Democrats are now the party of death and taxes,” the woman said, as Democratic supporters scoffed and grumbled, “just how do you propose to effectively represent the taxpayers of Spotsylvania?”

This was clearly a Republican plant, as are the other examples. It wouldn’t be the first time the Times has been punked.