Month: February 2019

Our new “populist” ally has a teensy little meltdown

by digby

Watch Fox News host Tucker Carlson call one of his guests a 'tiny brain…moron' during an interview. NowThis has obtained the full segment with historian Rutger Bregman that Fox News is refusing to air. pic.twitter.com/kERYPUaGLY— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 20, 2019

What a smarmy little twit.

The WaPo’s Eric Wemple:

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” is a binary production. Here’s how it breaks down: The host, Tucker Carlson, either welcomes a guest with whom he agrees, in which case the segment is a facile lovefest, or he welcomes a guest with whom he disagrees, in which case the segment is a gutter-scraping slugfest.

A chat with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman was supposed to fall in the former basket, a nice, easy segment in which the host and guest find common ground on the hypocrisy of the world’s elites. In a display of common-sense advocacy, Bregman had appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos and hammered all the rich people there for avoiding taxes. The Post explained, “He started by saying that he found the conference’s mix of indulgence and global problem-solving a bit bewildering. … ‘I hear people talking the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency. But then almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance. And of the rich just not paying their fair share. It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one is allowed to speak about water.’ ”

With that, an invite to “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was hatched. In a careful effort over the past two years-plus, Carlson has attempted to cast himself as the anti-elite elite, a guy who understands the hypocrisy of the ruling class because he was born into comfort in La Jolla, Calif., and Georgetown — followed, eventually, by a well-paid career on cable news.

But Carlson’s interview with Bregman didn’t go well, as we learned last week from Bregman’s Twitter account.

Good morning @TuckerCarlson, why didn't you air the interview with me last night? Couldn't handle the criticism? I think you should just show it. And try to resist the temptation to edit, I've recorded the full thing – including that moment when you start swearing profusely.— Rutger Bregman (@rcbregman) February 12, 2019

Also included in Bregman’s tweets was an email from Carlson alleging that Bregman had turned out to be “far dumber, more dogmatic and less impressive than I expected.” The combative cable-news host also called Bregman an “a——.” In any case, Carlson’s show declined to air the segment, a move that senior executive producer Justin Wells blamed on Bregman, who “turned an opportunity to have a substantive, informative discussion into an obviously calculated personal insult campaign. We were disappointed in the segment and respect our audience’s time too much to consider airing it.”

Now the whole world can judge whether Fox News was respecting its audience’s time or just suppressing a segment that embarrassed a star host.

Here’s the fascinating part of this clash: Carlson starts out by bathing Bregman in praise for his remarks at Davos, which the video replays. “That’s one of the great moments — maybe the great moment in Davos history,” Carlson said, chuckling about the hypocrisy of the folks who travel by private jet to talk about the world’s problems in Switzerland. “If I was wearing a hat, I would take it off to you,” Carlson said.

Thus was established the planned rhythm of the interview. Bregman, you see, was brought in as a friendly voice, a fellow who would presumably play along with the host. That very status gave Bregman enough space to turn the whole conversation into a referendum on Carlson’s own hypocrisy. “The vast majority of Americans, for years and years now, according to the polls, including Fox News viewers and including Republicans, are in favor of higher taxes on the rich. . . . It’s all really mainstream but no one’s saying that at Davos just as no one’s saying that at Fox News,” Bregman said in the discussion. Folks at Davos and at Fox News, he alleged, had been “bought by the billionaire class.”

Carlson didn’t immediately anger, though he did try to steer the discussion elsewhere. When Bregman persisted in his critique of Fox News, Carlson said it would be “interesting” to know how much Fox News the historian had watched.

After some more back-and-forth, Bregman showed that he’d really, really studied the programming values of “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: “I think the issue really is one of corruption and of people being bribed and not talking about the real issues. What the Murdochs really want you to do to is scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance,” he said.

As Bregman continued showing a command of Fox News’s pro-elite advocacy, Carlson blew up. He called Bregman a “moron” and couldn’t figure out how this fellow had even viewed the network’s programming. “Fox doesn’t even play where you are,” said Carlson. “Well, have you heard of the Internet?” replied Bregman. “I can watch things whatever I want.”

By this point, Bregman, thousands of miles away, was sitting where Carlson usually sits — in complete command of the interview, setting the pace, putting his interlocutor on the defensive. The host was verily gasping for air. The most telling words of the interview came when Carlson said, “Wait — but, but can I just say?” That was just shortly after Bregman said Carlson was a “millionaire funded by billionaires.”

Someone had to blow the whistle on Carlson’s high-wire attempts to portray himself as a hero of the regular guy, even as he enjoys the fat paycheck of a Fox News host. So scandalized was Carlson about the situation that he could resort only to nastiness, which he commonly deploys, and profanity, which rarely makes it onto Fox News’s air. “Why don’t you go f— yourself, you tiny brain.”

Beware of right-wing populists. They aren’t really populists.

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by digby

A U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist was arrested after federal investigators uncovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in his Maryland home that authorities say he stockpiled to launch a massive domestic terror attack targeting politicians and journalists.

Christopher Paul Hasson called for “focused violence” to “establish a white homeland” and dreamed of ways to “kill almost every last person on earth,” according to court records filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland. Though court documents do not detail a specific planned date for an attack, the government said he had been amassing supplies and weapons since at least 2017, developed a spreadsheet of targets that included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and searched the Internet using phrases such as “best place in dc to see congress people” and “are supreme court justices protected.”

“The defendant intends to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country,” the government said in court documents filed this week, arguing that Hasson should stay in jail awaiting trial.

Hasson, 49, of Silver Spring, is expected to appear before a judge for a detention hearing in federal court in Greenbelt at 1 p.m. Thursday.

Hasson was arrested on illegal weapons and drug charges on Friday, but the government says those charges are the “proverbial tip of the iceberg.” Officials with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland outlined Hasson’s alleged plans to spark chaos and destruction in court documents, describing a man obsessed with neo-fascist and neo-Nazi views.

“Please send me your violence that I may unleash it onto their heads,” Hasson wrote in a letter that prosecutors say was found in his email drafts. “Guide my hate to make a lasting impression on this world.”

A magistrate judge ordered the Office of the Federal Public Defender to represent Hasson and that office declined comment Wednesday.

Hasson has been working at the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington since 2016, according to court documents filed by prosecutors. He also served in the U.S. Marine Corps between 1988 to 1993 and in the Army National Guard for about two years in the mid-90s, the filings state.

Agents with the FBI field office in Baltimore and the Coast Guard Investigative Service arrested Hasson on Friday, FBI Baltimore spokesman Dave Fitz confirmed.

A Coast Guard spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride, said Wednesday that Hasson no longer works at Coast Guard headquarters.

“An active duty Coast Guard member stationed at Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C., was arrested last week on illegal weapons and drug charges as a result of an ongoing investigation led by Coast Guard Investigation Services, in cooperation with the FBI and the Dept. of Justice,” McBride said in a written statement. McBride declined to comment futher citing the open investigation.

[…]
Authorities seized 15 firearms, including several long guns and rifles, and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition from his cramped basement apartment after executing a search warrant this month. Over the last two years, he had made nearly two dozen purchases of firearms or related equipment and made thousands of visits to websites selling weapons or tactical gear.

“The defendant is a domestic terrorist,” the government said in court filings, “bent, on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect governmental conduct.”

In an email he drafted in June 2017, he contemplated biological attacks and targeting food supplies. He considered the merits of a “bombing/sniper campaign.” And included a “Things to do” list that included purchasing land “out west or possibly NC mtns” for family and researching tactics used during the civil war in Ukraine.

“During unrest target both sides to increase tension,” Hasson wrote in the email, according to the court filings. “In other words provoke gov/police to over react which should help to escalate violence. BLM protests or other left crap would be ideal to incite to violence.”

In another letter drafted months later to an American neo-Nazi leader, Hasson called for a “white homeland.” He sent the letter to himself nearly two months after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., where torch carrying white-supremacists clashed with anti-racist protesters.

“I never saw a reason for mass protest or wearing uniforms marching around provoking people with swastikas etc.,” Hasson said. “I was and am a man of action you cannot change minds protesting like that. However you can make change with a little focused violence.”

Hasson’s commitment to destruction appeared heightened in recent weeks, according to details from prosecutors. He created a list of “traitors” and targets on Jan. 19 in an Excel spreadsheet on his work computer. The spreadsheet was created two days after he conducted a series of internet inquiries:

8:54 a.m.: “what if trump illegally impeached”

8:57 a.m.: “best place in dc to see congress people”

8:58 a.m.: “where in dc to congress live”

10:39 a.m.: “civil war if trump impeached”

11:26 a.m.: “social democrats usa”

One of these days, one of these people is going to succeed in another Oklahoma City — or worse.

By the way, this was one of his target spreadsheets:

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It’s all in Barr’s court now

by digby

CNN is confirming yesterday’s Pete Williams NBC report that Robert Mueller is expected to deliver a report to William Barr as early as next week. I’m not shocked by this. I have to imagine if it’s true that he’s had it written for some time and was just waiting until the toadie Whitaker was gone and Barr was confirmed to turn it over.

If this is true, we’re at the point where all the questions about Barr are about to be answered so I thought it was a good day to reprise this piece I wrote when Barr was first nominated:

Monday, December 10, 2018

Will Bill Barr be Trump’s Roy Cohn? Or his Leon Jaworski?

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Shortly after the Saturday Night Massacre in October, 1973 Texas lawyer Leon Jaworski received a call from the White House Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig. Haig simply said, “He wants you, Leon.” This wasn’t the first time the White House had reached out to him. He’d been offered the job earlier but had turned it down. Now the president was calling and he felt it was his duty to take the job at this important juncture.

He was nominally a Democrat but in those days, especially in Texas, that meant he was a conservative. And he’d supported Nixon from the beginning, voting for him both times. So the president felt he finally had an ally in the Special Prosecutors office, someone who wasn’t one of those pointy-headed Harvard types whom he always thought hated the poor kid from Whittier.

Jaworski had a reputation for rectitude. He’d famously prosecuted War Crimes after WWII. (The truth is a little murkier — he was plenty political.) But he did take himself and the law seriously. Jaworski took office, looked over the evidence the prosecutors had amassed and was appalled by what he saw. He later explained that when he heard the “smoking gun” tape in which Nixon was heard telling his henchman Haldeman to commit perjury, in his mind, “the president, a lawyer, coached Haldeman on how to testify untruthfully and yet not commit perjury… It amounted to subornation of perjury. For the No. 1 law enforcement officer of the country, it was, in my opinion, as demeaning an act as could be imagined.”

The reason I bring this up is that President Trump has finally nominated someone to replace Jeff  Sessions permanently — William Barr who previously served as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush. There are some intriguing parallels between the Jaworski appointment and this one, although there’s no guarantee that the two cases will end up the same way.

This news of Barr’s appointment was received with relief by much of Washington, mostly because after the debacle of the Matt Whitaker temporary appointment, everyone had been afraid he was going to nominate someone from Fox News or a personal toady like Rudy Giuliani. At least this pick is qualified and (as far as we know) isn’t himself under investigation by the Justice Department.

Like Jaworski, Barr was also apparently interviewed earlier to be Trump’s personal lawyer. According to Yahoo News, the two met privately in 2017 to discuss Barr coming on a Trump’s personal  defense attorney and Barr turned him down, citing other obligations. They came back to him after Trump’s lawyer John Dowd resigned in 2018 and he put hem off again. It seems that Trump truly believes this man is someone he wants on his team and since he is entirely self-centered it’s entirely likely he believes he’s finally found his Roy Cohn.

It’s not hard to see why Trump would believe this. Barr told the New York Times that he thinks the phony Clinton “Uranium One” scandal should be further investigated suggesting that he’s rather deep into right wing media conspiracy nonsense, which is not a good sign:

“There is nothing inherently wrong about a president calling for an investigation,” said William P. Barr, who ran the Justice Department under President George Bush. “Although an investigation shouldn’t be launched just because a president wants it, the ultimate question is whether the matter warrants investigation.” 

Mr. Barr said he sees more basis for investigating the uranium deal than any supposed collusion between Mr. Trump and Russia. “To the extent it is not pursuing these matters, the department is abdicating its responsibility,” he said.

Barr is also on record complaining that the Special Prosecutor’s office lacks balance because some prosecutors donated to Democrats. (I’m not sure who made the rule that all presidential investigations have to be run by Republicans but after Archibald Cox hey all have been: Jaworski, Iran-Contra Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, Ken Starr, and Robert Mueller. Apparently, they are not allowed to even have Democrats on their staff in order to be credible.)

And he defended Trump’s decision to fire James Comey as FBI Director in an op-ed, saying that Comey had mishandled the Clinton email investigation. Notably, he did not say that Clinton should have been indicted but rather that Comey’s decision to go beyond FBI authority to “explain” why the case was being closed and the subsequent political mess that decision created was a firing offense. He also expressed faith in the integrity of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, saying the Russia investigation would be unimpeded by the firing.

The fact that he’s been approached by the administration before and has made these public comments means he very well may be Trump’s big ally in the Department of Justice. The comments about the Uranium One non-scandal are pretty worrying in that regard because he had the cockamamie idea that there was evidence that demanded investigation when that just isn’t true. And the idea that a president can ask for an investigation but the Justice Department doesn’t have to do it is fatuous and he surely knows that. Presidents should not be demanding investigations of anyone, but particularly not of their political rivals. It’s an abuse of the office and the DOJ should not be put in the position of having to defy him.

The fact that he seems to have been cozying up to Trump from the beginning in a way that many other Washington lawyers have avoided suggests that he’s not the old school straight-arrow type like Jaworski or, for that matter, Robert Mueller. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t be. When you look at all of his comments together most of them aren’t as totally Trumpish as they may sound. And his history is that of an establishment institutionalist which means that while he may say that Trump has the freedom to do as he sees fit in most circumstances, he may also defend the Department of Justice as an agency with inherent independence and decision making power. If you look at his language in those op-eds and commentary, he is quite judicious in the way he speaks even when he’s defending Trump.

But it’s hard to imagine Trump would have selected him for the job without the kind of guarantee he expected from his previous attorney general, Sessions, or from Comey, the man he fired from the FBI. Would he have hired anyone who refused to be his Roy Cohn?
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It’s possible that Mueller exonerates the president and his henchmen or, at least, concludes that there was no criminal intent in anything he did. And there is an equal chance that in that case, William Barr will decide that the report cannot be sent to congress or made public because it’s Justice Department procedure to keep confidential any reasoning behind a declination to prosecute. (Of course, the DOJ also states that a president cannot be prosecuted while in office, so the whole thing is a Catch-22.)

This policy is the correct one, of course. The DOJ should not be able to use their investigative power to smear citizens that have committed no crime but nonetheless may have done something stupid and wrong. This has been largely observed except in the case of Hillary Clinton where James Comey went public with the FBI’s belief that she had not committed a crime but nonetheless was “reckless” etc, exactly the sort of information that would be useful in an impeachment trial which has a broader scope than a criminal trial. The old Independent Counsel statute which the congress let lapse because of Ken Starr’s abuse, required a report in the case of a presidential investigation for precisely this reason.

It would be terribly ironic if the Mueller report proves that the president of the United States was a dupe and a stooge for a foreign adversary but because he is so dumb he didn’t know he was breaking the law so he can’t be charged with a crime and therefore the public will never know exactly how he and his henchmen sold out his country through sheer incompetence, greed, arrogance and stupidity.

It could happen. And he could even be re-elected.

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Trump threatens California again

by digby

Trump is threatening California again because Californians aren’t licking his boots energetically enough:

A day after California filed a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s emergency declaration on the border, the Transportation Department said it was exploring legal options to claw back $2.5 billion in federal funds it had already spent on the state’s high-speed rail network.

The Trump administration also said it was terminating a $929 million federal grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority, according to a letter the Transportation Department sent Tuesday.

The $77 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train, which has been a goal of California transportation planners for decades, has long faced opposition from Mr. Trump and other Republicans. But on Tuesday morning, the president explicitly tied the rail line to efforts to stymie construction of the Mexican border wall.

“The failed Fast Train project in California, where the cost overruns are becoming world record setting, is hundreds of times more expensive than the desperately needed Wall!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who announced last week that he was scaling back the project, said the Transportation Department’s move was retaliation for the border wall lawsuit, filed on Monday with 15 other states.

“It’s no coincidence that the administration’s threat comes 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the president’s farcical ‘national emergency,’” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “This is clear political retribution by President Trump, and we won’t sit idly by. This is California’s money, and we are going to fight for it.”

The battle over money is just the latest clash between California and the Trump administration, which have fought over immigration, environmental and criminal justice issues. Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, has been a vociferous critic of the administration and has filed 46 lawsuits against it so far.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump disparaged the way California had spent the rail money and the state’s role in the national emergency lawsuit. California, which “has wasted billions of dollars on their out of control Fast Train, with no hope of completion, seems in charge!” the president tweeted.

A White House spokesman declined to comment, referring questions to the Transportation Department. A spokesman for the agency said the reason for canceling the grant was clearly laid out in a letter from Ronald L. Batory, the administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration.

Mr. Batory wrote that the federal funds were being pulled because the California High-Speed Rail Authority had “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.”

The Transportation Department said in a separate statement on Tuesday that it was “actively exploring every legal option” to seek the return of the $2.5 billion. That threat, however, was not mentioned in Mr. Batory’s letter.

Late Tuesday, a Trump administration official pointed to Mr. Newsom’s remarks last week as an indication that the project was too costly and would “never be constructed as planned.”

Given that acknowledgment, the official said, the administration had a responsibility to taxpayers to “cancel the financial support for this boondoggle.”

It’s not the first time he’s threatened to punish California for failing to be properly submissive to the Dear Leader, of course. He does it all the time. But this is the first time he’s targeted specific money as retribution for a specific political conflict.

He did this earlier to his home state as a sheer act of dominance:

President Trump is pressing congressional Republicans to oppose funding for a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, using the power of his office to block a key priority for the region and his Democratic rivals, according to several people with knowledge of his actions.

Mr. Trump urged Speaker Paul D. Ryan this week not to support funding for the $30 billion project, two people familiar with the conversation said.

The president’s decision to weigh in forcefully against the so-called Gateway infrastructure project, which has been one of the United States’ top transportation priorities for years, adds a significant obstacle to getting the project underway in the near future.

Mr. Trump’s opposition to the project is in part the result of his belief that it is important to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, according to one person with knowledge of the president’s thinking on the issue.

They didn’t end up doing that. But using federal funds to punish what he perceives as political enemies is obviously something Trump feels is perfectly fine.

If he does this to California, I would suspect that the remnants of the high-speed rail project which are currently planned for Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy’s districts will have to be shelved.

What a shame.

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McCabe’s book reveals that the “Deep State” includes the GOP congressional leadership


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

I wrote about Former Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe’s new book called “Threat” last week when CBS first teased their big interview which aired last Sunday. At the time it seemed as if the big news coming from the book was a rehash of the story that broke last fall about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein suggesting that he wear a wire into the Oval Office and talk among members of the Department of Justice about the process involved in evoking the 25th Amendment to declare the President unable to fulfill his duties. When asked about it by CBS News’ Scott Pelley in the interview, McCabe confirmed that it happened which made the president have a nuclear twitter meltdown and caused the right wing media to start screeching about “Deep State coups” and suggesting that McCabe should immediately be arrested and he and Former FBI Director Comey should be waterboarded to spill everything they know. By CIA director Gina Haspel and Former Vice President Dick Cheney. Because that’s their specialty.

As it turns out that wasn’t in McCabe’s book at all. He answered the question when asked but told Anderson Cooper on CNN Tuesday night that he didn’t put it in the book because that episode hadn’t been revealed when he wrote it and he thought it would be a huge distraction if he did. He was right. An anecdote that wasn’t in his book has received far more attention it should.

The big revelation in the book is that after Trump fired former FBI Director Comey, which they knew was because of the Russia investigation, McCabe opened a counter-intelligence investigation and an obstruction of justice investigation into the president of the United States due to his suspicious behavior during the campaign and in the White House. And — surprise — it turns out he and Rosenstein briefed the Gang of Eight, which includes the leadership of both parties in congress and the Chairs and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. They were Mitch McConnell R-Ky, Chuck Schumer D-Ny, Richard Burr, R-NC, Mark Warner, D-Va, Paul Ryan, R-Wi, Nancy Pelosi, D-Ca, Devin Nunes, R-Ca, and Adam Schiff, D-Ca.

McCabe notes that Nunes had “stepped back” from his role by this time after having been revealed to have conspired with the White House and lied to the media in his silly “midnight ride” and was not expected to be there. But he showed up anyway and neither Rosenstein nor McCabe had the authority to ask him to leave so he heard the whole thing. When asked by Anderson Cooper if he believed that Nunes would rush to tell the White House everything, McCabe told him that he always assumed that someone would tell the White House about the investigations.

McCabe writes:

After reminding the committee of how this investigation began, I told them of additional steps we had taken. No one interrupted. No one pushed back. The mood in the room was sober. Schumer had bee nodding his head and looking at me very directly throughout the bried, On McConnell’s side of the table, I sensed a great deal of resignation.

Rod Rosenstein then took over the meeting and told the assembled officials that he was appointing Robert Mueller as Special Counsel.

What this means is that these members of congress have known from the beginning that the DOJ and the FBI had opened these two investigations because of the president’s suspicious behavior and that they formed the basis for the Special Counsel’s investigation. And if McCabe is right, and one of the little birdies in the meeting whispered in the president’s ear, he knew it too.

According to McCabe, Rosenstein was enlisted by the White House counsel to write the memo laying out the reason for firing Comey and told him that Trump had repeatedly asked him to “include Russia” (which he refused to do.) The specific meaning of that request isn’t spelled out but we know that the original letter firing Comey was cooked up during a long rainy weekend at Bedminster golf club with Senior Adviser Stephen Miller and Ivanka and Jared Kushner. The letter they produced was so inflammatory that then White House Counsel Don McGahn nixed it. We don’t know how much of that original memo (described by those who read it as a “screed”) was focused on Russia but Robert Mueller does. He has a copy of it.

What we do know is that in the letter Trump wrote firing Comey, he clumsily “included Russia” saying:

“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

And then came this, just one month after the Comey firing and the appointment of Robert Mueller:

I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2017

As you can see, that was yet another lie. He had planned to fire Comey.  He even admitted it on TV. And we know that his crack team of political advisers, led by Jared Kushner had assured him that it would be a big political winner.

Later he would repeatedly insist that he wasn’t under investigation at all, despite the fact that it was obvious.

Looking back on that meeting which laid out all the predicates for what turned into the Mueller investigation shines a very different light on how this scandal has unfolded.  And this explosive New York Times piece from Tuesday called Intimidation, Pressure and Humiliation: Inside Trump’s Two-Year War on the Investigations Encircling Him shows that not only did Trump know very well that he was personally being investigated, he has been methodically trying to sabotage his own Justice Department for the better part of the last two years. His most recent intrusion was trying to get his temporary DOJ factotum, Matt Whitaker, to order the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to “unrecuse” from all those investigations into Trumpworld, a concept that never even existed until Donald Trump came along.

He just can’t stop obstructing justice. But then why would he? His new Attorney General, William Barr,  concurs with that Republican icon of corruption Richard Nixon that” if the president does it, it’s not illegal.” He’s told him that he is perfectly free to interfere with investigations, orde them up, protect his friends and punish his enemies. So I wouldn’t expect any of it to stop unless the congress steps up to do its duty.

The country is probably dizzy by now trying to keep up with the cascading news stories about the various investigations and suspicions about Trump’s behavior. It’s overwhelming. But it always comes back to one simple, common-sense observation: no innocent person could possibly act this guilty.

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Heavier, thicker and fouler
by Tom Sullivan

Let’s just say Tuesday was a personal tipping point. The sewage pond contained behind the fences at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue overtopped the sandbags. Jonathan Chait’s thumbnail bill of particulars is an indecent place to start:

Trump of course faces massive political and legal vulnerabilities not only for collusion with Russia during the presidential campaign, but also secretive financial ties to Russia and other authoritarian states, tax fraud, campaign finance violations, abuse of a pseudo-charitable foundation, and embezzlement of inaugural funds. This is a non-exhaustive list of potential crimes that precede Trump taking the oath of office.

The list is among the sort of pre-2017 crimes for which David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley argued in the Wall Street Journal that Donald Trump cannot be investigated. Unlike investigating Bill Clinton’s prepresidential peccadilloes — investigating those was a minor distraction from Oval Office duties — Trump’s massive body of evidence is so corpulent, they argue, that investigating what he did before entering the White House just might interfere with the president’s Executive Time in his golf simulator. Can’t have that.

Word got out in the New York Times just before Chait’s list posted about a plan by Trump family grifters to pad their pockets by cutting a side deal in sensitive nuclear technology with Saudi Arabia, bypassing the Atomic Energy Act and Congressional approval required by law. House Democrats released a report based on multiple whistleblower accounts:

The report is the most detailed portrait to date of how senior White House figures — including Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser — worked with retired military officers to circumvent the normal policymaking process to promote an export plan that experts worried could spread nuclear weapons technology in the volatile Middle East. Administration lawyers warned that the nuclear exports plan — called the Middle East Marshall Plan — could violate laws meant to stop nuclear proliferation and raised concerns about Mr. Flynn’s conflicts of interest.

Mr. Flynn had worked on the issue for the company promoting the nuclear export plan and kept pushing it once inside the White House.

But Flynn’s leaving the White House one year ago did not slow Team Avarice. The House report assures:

On February 12, 2019, the President met with nuclear power developers at the White House about sharing nuclear technology with countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. In addition, next week Mr. Kushner will be embarking on a tour of Middle Eastern capitals—including Riyadh — to discuss the economic portion of the Administration’s Middle East peace plan.

The staff report adds,

Further investigation is needed to determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump Administration are in the national security interest of the United States or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U.S. foreign policy.

How many guesses do we get?

House Oversight and Intelligence Committees are investigating whether Trump officials have been pursuing an illegal plan from which some of them would personally financially benefit, to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. pic.twitter.com/eoDbvUdtZZ— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 20, 2019

Then, after Chait’s list posted, the New York Times dropped another bunker-buster:

As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Installing “a perceived loyalist atop a widening inquiry” is by now a standard Trump tactic, part of “an even more sustained, more secretive assault” over the last two years by the sitting president to undermine efforts by law enforcement and obstruct inquiries into affairs sexual, financial, and international. Say, like trading in nuclear technology. The Times explains the problem for the public in keeping up is:

… Mr. Trump’s attempts to defang the investigations has been voluminously covered in the news media, to such a degree that many Americans have lost track of how unusual his behavior is. But fusing the strands reveals an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession. Mr. Trump has done it with the same tactics he once used in his business empire: demanding fierce loyalty from employees, applying pressure tactics to keep people in line and protecting the brand — himself — at all costs.

Dangling presidential pardons before the indicted is one method the president has kept some of his secrets to date. But which of the president’s “friends” to whom he’s offered to trade pardons for silence can be sure he’ll give them another fleeting thought once Himself is firmly up against the wall?

I watched these stories unfold Tuesday over Twitter on the left side of my monitor while streaming Day 2 of the NC-9 election fraud hearing on the right. It was a binocular horror show of criminal incompetence by the willfully ignorant and morally bankrupt.

At least, there is a chance or two North Carolina will unwind its election mess in the next few days. Out in the provinces, people will go to jail, that’s certain. Yet in the nation’s capitol, the Trump crime family still sits scheming in the White House and making a mockery of the republic rather than serving Executive Time in the hoosegow.

In May 2017, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe briefed “The Gang of Eight” that Trump was possibly compromised by the Russians and that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation. Among them, the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. None objected, McCabe told the Today Show, “not on legal grounds, constitutional grounds or based on the facts.”

Charlie Pierce yesterday lamented the meaning of this revelation, writing:

In 2017, at the time McCabe requested the investigation, these would have included Senator Mitch McConnell, Speaker Paul Ryan, Richard Burr, and White House lawn ornament Devin Nunes from the House. According to McCabe, even Nunes didn’t object to the investigation. This is just a bit astounding, considering the supine performance of congressional Republicans once the president* got sworn in.

They all know. That’s the main thing. They all know and they’ve done nothing. Historians one day will fall out of their anti-gravity chairs.

Teapot what? will have been forgotten.

Right wing torture fantasies turn domestic

by digby

The Daily Beast says they “watch Trumpland TV so you don’t have to, today we learned that far-right outlet TruNews wants nearly the entire government and national media to be imprisoned and, in some cases, waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay. No, really, look at this handy graphic they created”

Last time we checked on TruNews, they were claiming that Tom Brady was under the spell of witchcraft. Now, the full panel is on board to credulously claim that the nation is under attack by the FBI, NSA, CBS, NBC, and especially Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein—whom, in the mind of host Rick Wiles, ought to be dragged to Cuba and personally waterboarded by “Gina Haspel and Dick Cheney.”

It could be Rex Tillerson. It may have been Jeff Sessions. It could have been Nikki Haley, we don’t know! But according to McCabe, two people in the Cabinet were willing to overthrow the President of the United States. That means the President of the United States was holding cabinet meetings and he had snakes sitting around him. Hissing snakes!

The media, government agencies, intelligence agencies, technology firms, all in a massive conspiracy against the constitutionally elected President of the United States.

Wiles concluded his discussion by noting that Rosenstein “ought to be facing the electric chair.”

Maybe Tillerson, Sessions, Haley etc assume these weirdos are just fringe characters and it doesn’t mean anything. After all, it’s not like they’re Hillary Clinton where people are drooling and screaming for blood when they chant “lock her up.” They’re Republicans, after all.

That isn’t going to protect them. Here is the President’s bff Lou Dobbs (whom he reportedly “cherishes”) last night on Fox News:

“Why is the establishment in Washington D.C. not screaming for the arrest of Andrew McCabe and all of his cohorts in the DOJ and the FBI? Why is is that there seems to be almost a satisfaction in the status quo, no matter how rancid and corrupt in the swamp that id D.C.?”

Schlapp said he’s “disgusted by it” too and the one person who can take action is current Attorney General Bill Barr, saying, “I’d be greatly disappointed if he doesn’t.”

Dobbs again asked, “Why the hell isn’t the Republican Party standing up and demanding his arrest?”

“You know why,” Schlapp said.

“I do not know why, or I would not be asking you,” Dobbs responded.

The answer was that the Republicans are all terrified of the Deep State.

You know, all the investigators who’ve been fired by their patriotic Dear Leader.

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Meanwhile in Bizarroworld

by digby

Former Trump official and current Sinclair Broadcasting pundit Boris Epshteyn:

Presidents Day is an important holiday for us to reflect upon those who we have elected to the highest office in our land. We are lucky to currently have a leader in President Trump, whose term so far has been, I would argue, one of the most successful in our nation’s history.

The president has achieved tangible, concrete, quality-of-life improvements for the American people no matter the political cost. His disruption of the status quo has stirred many of his detractors. Despite what some liberals and many in the media may say, the Trump administration has taken strides to ensure that our country is thriving for all Americans.

Since President Trump took office, the female unemployment rate has reached its lowest in approximately 65 years. American worker satisfaction is the highest since 2005. Unemployment among disabled Americans is at an all-time low, and the median income for Hispanic Americans has increased by nearly 4 percent. The president has circumvented partisanship and has tackled, head-on, human issues such as the opioid crisis in our country and criminal justice reform.

Unfortunately, the spirit of bipartisanship has been largely missing, as many on the left and those in the media have put their love of our great country second to their personal hatred of our president. Despite all of that, President Trump is still getting results.

Here’s the bottom line: In just over two years of the Trump administration, we have seen great progress benefiting Americans. If this keeps up, much to the chagrin of many Democrats, the presidents on Mount Rushmore may have to make room for a new addition.

Trump had better be careful or Kim Jong Un will be jealous.

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No innocent person behaves this way

by digby

This is an amazing NYT expose, showing the years-long hind the scenes effort by the beTrump White House to shut down the various investigations against him. If anyone thought that it was just bloviating on twitter and before the cameras to feed his base, this should put that to rest. He was working it obsessively on every level:

As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Mr. Whitaker, who had privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to “jump on a grenade” for the president, knew he could not put Mr. Berman in charge, since Mr. Berman had already recused himself from the investigation. The president soon soured on Mr. Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away.

Trying to install a perceived loyalist atop a widening inquiry is a familiar tactic for Mr. Trump, who has been struggling to beat back the investigations that have consumed his presidency. His efforts have exposed him to accusations of obstruction of justice as Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, finishes his work investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump’s public war on the inquiry has gone on long enough that it is no longer shocking. Mr. Trump rages almost daily to his 58 million Twitter followers that Mr. Mueller is on a “witch hunt” and has adopted the language of Mafia bosses by calling those who cooperate with the special counsel “rats.” His lawyer talks openly about a strategy to smear and discredit the special counsel investigation. The president’s allies in Congress and the conservative media warn of an insidious plot inside the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to subvert a democratically elected president.

An examination by The New York Times reveals the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement. Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama.

This is the first one:

It was Feb. 14, 2017, and Mr. Trump and his advisers were in the Oval Office debating how to explain the resignation of Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, the previous night. Mr. Flynn, who had been a top campaign adviser to Mr. Trump, was under investigation by the F.B.I. for his contacts with Russians and secret foreign lobbying efforts for Turkey.

The Justice Department had already raised questions that Mr. Flynn might be subject to blackmail by the Russians for misleading White House officials about the Russian contacts, and inside the White House there was a palpable fear that the Russia investigation could consume the early months of a new administration.

As the group in the Oval Office talked, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers mentioned in passing what then-Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin had told reporters — that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Flynn to resign.

It was unclear where Mr. Ryan had gotten that information, but Mr. Trump seized on Mr. Ryan’s words. “That sounds better,” the president said, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Trump turned to the White House press secretary at the time, Sean Spicer, who was preparing to brief the media.

“Say that,” Mr. Trump ordered.

But was that true, Mr. Spicer pressed.

“Say that I asked for his resignation,” Mr. Trump repeated.

The president appeared to have little concern about what he told the public about Mr. Flynn’s departure, and quickly warmed to the new narrative. The episode was among the first of multiple ham-handed efforts by the president to carry out a dual strategy: publicly casting the Russia story as an overblown hoax and privately trying to contain the investigation’s reach.

“This Russia thing is all over now because I fired Flynn,” Mr. Trump said over lunch that day, according to a new book by Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and a longtime Trump ally.

Mr. Christie was taken aback. “This Russia thing is far from over,” Mr. Christie wrote that he told Mr. Trump, who responded: “What do you mean? Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.”

Mr. Kushner, who was also at the lunch, chimed in, according to Mr. Christie’s book: “That’s right, firing Flynn ends the whole Russia thing.”

As Mr. Trump was lunching with Mr. Christie, lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office met with Mr. Spicer about what he should say from the White House podium about what was a sensitive national security investigation. But when Mr. Spicer’s briefing began, the lawyers started hearing numerous misstatements — some bigger than others — and ended up compiling them all in a memo.

The lawyers’ main concern was that Mr. Spicer overstated how exhaustively the White House had investigated Mr. Flynn and that he said, wrongly, that administration lawyers had concluded there were no legal issues surrounding Mr. Flynn’s conduct.

Mr. Spicer later told people he stuck to talking points that he was given by the counsel’s office, and that White House lawyers expressed concern only about how he had described the thoroughness of the internal inquiry into Mr. Flynn. The memo written by the lawyers said that Mr. Spicer was presented with a longer list of his misstatements. The White House never publicly corrected the record.

Later that day, Mr. Trump confronted the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, in the Oval Office. The president told him that Mr. Spicer had done a great job explaining how the White House had handled the firing. Then he asked Mr. Comey to end the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Flynn, and that Mr. Flynn was a good guy.

Mr. Comey responded, according to a memo he wrote at the time, that Mr. Flynn was indeed a good guy. But he said nothing about ending the F.B.I. investigation.

By March, Mr. Trump was in a rage that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had recused himself from the Russia inquiry because investigators were looking into the campaign, of which Mr. Sessions had been a part. Mr. Trump was also growing increasingly frustrated with Mr. Comey, who refused to say publicly that the president was not under investigation.

Mr. Trump finally fired Mr. Comey in May. But the president and the White House gave conflicting accounts of their reasoning for the dismissal, which only served to exacerbate the president’s legal exposure.

Spicey was more than just a Saturday Night Live joke — he was an out and out liar.

There’s a lot more in this story, which I’ll write more about later.

This is amazing, though. Yet another Russia lie, from yet another Trump toadie.

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This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party

by digby

Gallup did some interesting polling on the Democratic Party’s ideology:

This should not be scary to anyone who worries about the party going “too far left.” It mirrors the self-identification of Republicans as conservatives, a “brand” which dominated American politics for decades regardless of ideology. It’s long past time for the Democrats to stop running from their own brand and embrace it.

As you can see from the charts about issues there’s still plenty to argue about within this big coalition. And even if there weren’t I have no doubt that Democrats would find something. It’s in their nature.

But whatever differences there are, this is likely to be the deciding factor in 2020:

The Democrats’ grand unifier, however, stands outside the party. Despite differing ideologies and opposing views on some issues, on average last year, 82% of conservative Democrats, 91% of moderate Democrats and 96% of liberal Democrats disapproved of the job President Donald Trump was doing as president.

This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. In fact, your grandmother is a liberal too.

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