Month: February 2019

The henchmen are accomplices

by digby

Did you tell the “Gang of Eight” that you had opened a counterintelligence investigation into President Trump? @savannahguthrie asks Andrew McCabe pic.twitter.com/w4cKwAvvF9— TODAY (@TODAYshow) February 19, 2019

I’ve been calling Nunes and the boys accomplices for a long time. I didn’t realize until now just how accurate that statement was.

Can there be any doubt that Nunes shared this with the president? The same president who said a hundred times that he wasn’t under investigation?

McCabe told Today host Savannah Guthrie that he ordered the opening of a counterintelligence investigation into Trump following Comey’s firing because “we had information that led us to believe that there might be a threat to national security, in this case that the president himself might be a threat to United States national security” — in particular, that Trump might be a Russian agent.

“The president, in our view, had gone to extreme measures to potentially impact — negatively impact, possibly turn off — our investigation of Russian meddling into the election, and Russian coordination with his campaign,” McCabe said. “We thought that might be possible [that Trump was working for Russia] … you have to ask yourself, if you believe that the president might have obstructed justice for the purpose of ending our investigation into Russia, you have to ask yourself why. Why would any president of the United States not want the FBI to get to the bottom of Russian interference in our election?”

Why would his henchmen not want to get to the bottom of it either? Of course, they benefitted from Russian interference too. Since they have made themselves into a rump 40% minority party by backing this cretin, I guess they figure this is their only chance to hold on to power.

.

by digby

Nothing breaks him from his cult. Nothing. They are mesmerized by his grotesque assholishness. What that says about them …

NPR-Marist:

“This is not a break-his-base issue,” Miringoff said. “This is a reinforce-his-base issue, but this is not an expand-beyond-his-base issue.” 

So, to sum up: Not many beyond his base like this; it’s unprecedented; and Americans are very polarized. 

That’s been the story of the Trump presidency so far. Trump has done little to move beyond his base, and that theory of politics – revving up the base and not winning over the middle – is going to be tested in 2020. It’s part of what led to Democrats to winning 40 seats that were previously held by Republicans in the 2018 midterms. 

Some key numbers from the poll: 

–61 percent disapprove, 36 percent approve Trump declaring a national emergency to build a wall along the U.S.- Mexico border. (85 percent of Republicans approve, 84 percent of Democrats disapprove, 63 percent of independents disapprove)

–60 percent think his decision should be challenged in the courts, including 60 percent of independents 

–58 percent do not think there is a national emergency at the border. (84 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Trump supporters think there is. Democrats and independents don’t.) 

–57 percent think Trump is misusing his presidential power. (89 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of independents think he is, while 80 percent of Republicans don’t). 

–54 percent say this decision makes them less likely to vote for Trump in 2020, but for context, the president’s disapproval rating in the January NPR/PBS NewsHour poll was 53 percent.

NC-9 absentees: Signed unsealed & undelivered?
by Tom Sullivan

North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District stretches from Charlotte to Fayetteville along the SC border (via Wikipedia)

N.C. State Elections Director Kim Strach opened Monday’s formal hearing into election fraud allegations in the 2018 NC-9 congressional race by announcing investigators had uncovered a “coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” in Bladen and Robeson counties on the eastern end of the district.

It was the first of what could be three days of testimony into the country’s last unresolved 2018 congressional race. To summarize (from a December post):

At the center of it all, a political operative named McCrae Dowless, 62, hired by Republican Mark Harris’s campaign and other candidates to assist voters with absentee ballot requests. Convicted of insurance fraud in 1992, Dowless is now a person of interest in the state’s investigation into an alleged absentee ballot “harvesting” operation.

On Election night, Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes.

pic.twitter.com/YQ3FnIzc0W— Michael Stolp (@StolpWSOC9) February 18, 2019

At the center of Monday’s hearing was Lisa Britt, one of the crew Dowless paid to both help rural voters request absentee ballots. Britt’s mother was married to Dowless in the early 1990s. Both were living at his home at times during 2018.

Assisting voters in requesting absentee-by-mail ballots is acceptable practice. But Dowless knew through daily public records updates whose absentee ballots had been mailed out. He then sent his team back to the homes to witness and collect them. Anyone other than a close family member collecting completed ballots for return to the Board of Elections is a felony in North Carolina.

Britt testified under oath she had turned over some ballot envelopes to Dowless with no witness signatures. She signed her mother’s name as witness in maybe seven cases because Dowless told her she had already witnessed too many. Many of the witness signatures were not signed not in the presence of the voters. She also admitted to filling in down-ballot races voters had left blank on some ballots they received unsealed. Dowless was employed by Republican Mark Harris; she selected Republican candidates. A later witness admitted she had turned over her blank ballot, signed, but unsealed for the Dowless team to fill in for her.

As we await the start of @ncsbe's NC09 hearing, here's a data viz of the alleged election fraud in action. This video shows the locations and dates of absentee ballots requested but never returned across NC09, breaking out in Robeson & Bladen counties like sore wound. #ncpol pic.twitter.com/NSGJbawLoV— EQV Analytics (@AnalyticsEqv) February 18, 2019

Britt admitted that if she had not realized at first this operation was illegal, she soon did, but continued out of loyalty to Dowless. “Mr. Dowless has been a father figure to me for 30 years,” Britt said. Others witnesses confirmed that many of the ballots collected came from relatives, friends, and neighbors impacted by Hurricane Florence.

Dowless’ ex-wife, Sandra Dowless, testified she was surprised to learn from Strach how much money changed hands since he never seemed to have any money, drawing laughs in the hearing room. Since Britt knew of only a half dozen people on the Dowless collection team, it was unclear Monday where all the money went.

The Dowless team collected “as many as 1,249 ballot request forms overall in the general election,” the Washington Post reports, adding, “It’s unclear exactly how many actual ballots Dowless and his associates turned in.” There was no direct testimony on Monday that any had been destroyed.

Britt testified Dowless asked his team to coordinate signature ink color, stamp alignment, number of ballots mailed at any time to prevent throwing up “red flags” for county Boards of Elections. But the high ratio of requests versus non-returned ballots in the small counties drew attention Dowless had hoped to avoid.

The preview of evidence alone shows state investigators found a lot we haven’t heard yet. pic.twitter.com/MCs9cSVmTy— Michael Stolp (@StolpWSOC9) February 18, 2019

pic.twitter.com/myVu1tNzDZ— Michael Stolp (@StolpWSOC9) February 18, 2019

Britt testified that Dowless called team members to his home in December after the State Board refused to certify election and he coached them to “stick together” and to not admit collecting ballots, as he’d paid them to. Britt admitted she had lied in an interview with WBTV when she denied collecting absentee ballots. A convicted felon herself, Britt was ineligible to vote in 2018.

Strach displayed an image of a slip Dowless had delivered to his team last week coaching them to plead the Fifth Amendment.

Britt says Dowless told her: “They don’t have anything on us.”

And then there’s this text Dowless told Britt to give to her mother and say at this hearing today. #nc09 #ncpol pic.twitter.com/QwQ3yCdl1v— Democracy NC (@democracync) February 18, 2019

Dowless when called refused to testify without a grant of immunity.

Per state law, the Board of Elections may call for a new election if:

(1) Ineligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were allowed to vote in the election, and it is not possible from examination of the official ballots to determine how those ineligible voters voted and to
correct the totals.
(2) Eligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were improperly prevented from voting.
(3) Other irregularities affected a sufficient number of votes to change the outcome of the election.
(4) Irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.

After so much G.O.P. legal and rhetorical caterwauling over the need for sweeping voter law changes to fight the scourge of widespread-yet-undetected voter fraud, the party is minimizing the impacts of the Dowless operation paid for by a Republican candidate. Republicans argue Dowless’ regrettable activities were insufficient to change the outcome of the election (3). Democrats argue the entire election is tainted (4) and new election is required. Under this level of state and national media scrutiny, Republicans may have the tougher case to make.

The Washington Post sums up:

Adding to the partisan currents, the state elections board requires a supermajority of four votes to call for a new election. With three Democrats and two Republicans, the board will not have the votes to take any action if its members vote along partisan lines. That would turn attention to Congress, which also has the power to order a new election.

One seat in the hearing room bore the tag, “U.S. House counsel.” It was occupied.

The death of Congressman Walter B. Jones Jr., Republican from NC-3, ten days ago leaves two of North Carolina’s 13 U.S. House seats vacant. The fact Gov. Roy Cooper has not yet announced a special election to fill the Jones seat suggests he is waiting for the outcome of the NC-9 investigation. Running both elections on the same day would make logistical and economic sense.

The hearings continue today (Tuesday) at 9:30 a.m. EST and may be streamed again on WRAL.

“The rift between Europe and the Trump administration became open, angry and concrete”

by digby

OMG — Pence was visibly shook in Poland when he received absolutely no reaction to what was clearly supposed to be an applause line about how “the time has come for our European partners to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.” pic.twitter.com/biRxARZkcM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 16, 2019

Speaking to a security conference in Munich, Pence tells his audience he brings greetings from President Trump… and not a single person claps. #awkward pic.twitter.com/JkFpsKqfgk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 16, 2019

Vox explains:

The New York Times reported that at the Munich conference, “the rift between Europe and the Trump administration became open, angry and concrete,” in part because of Trump’s “distaste for multilateralism and international cooperation.”

As was the case in Poland, Pence reportedly “met stony silence” during his speech in Munich when he called for US allies to follow Trump’s lead and withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

During her speech, Merkel criticized the Trump administration on a number of fronts, including the president’s recent decision to pull out of a treaty with Russia banning land-based intermediate-range missiles, and his announcement that American troops will be leaving Syria and Afghanistan.

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we certainly had the hope … that we could come to a better cooperation,” Merkel said. “Today, in 2019, that seems like a long time ago … [but] in a few years, it could look very different again.”

Different, for sure. Better? The jury will be out for some time on that.

The NY Times article explains that the allies are done licking Trump’s boots in hopes of appeasing him because it hasn’t worked. He only respects the leaders he perceives as strongmen — like Putin, Xi and Kim Jong Un. So, if they flatter him, he’s truly flattered and believes it’s sincere. If democratic allies flatter him he sees it as a weakness and doubles down on his imbecilic browbeating over bullshit like tariffs and NATO.

Whether these longstanding alliances can be put back together is unknown. Maybe we’ll all end up better off, who knows? But those who think the US doesn’t need any allies and can just wall itself off from the world in 2019 are fooling themselves. We cannot. And confronting the biggest crisis of our time, climate change, is going to require more cooperation between countries than anything in human history. It’s kind of a shame that the richest industrialized nations will have to start from scratch.

In fact, it’s idiotic.

.

Bill Barr has a history of partisan interference

by digby

Josh Marshall points to an article he wrote for Salon back in 2002 about the final report that came out about the Whitewater investigation (which no one paid any attention to.) William Barr played a part and it wasn’t good.  Before the election, Bush Sr apparently got wind of a referral to the Department of Justice about that stupid Arkansas land deal back in the 1980s:

According to the report, on Sept. 17, 1992, Edie Holiday, the secretary to the Cabinet in the Bush White House, contacted then Attorney General William Barr and — after some awkward back and forth — asked Barr if he “would be aware of a pending matter in Justice (she may have said it was a criminal referral) about a presidential candidate or a family member of a presidential candidate.”

At around the same time, according to the report, then-White House counsel C. Boyden Gray also apparently took action. He inquired about the status of the referral with the head of the Resolution Trust Corp. (RTC), the agency from which the referral to the U.S. attorney originated.

Washington is replete with rules prohibiting or discouraging contact that might create the appearance of a conflict of interest. And most cover inappropriate contact between the political side of the executive branch and the law enforcement side of the executive branch, for obvious reasons. During a later phase in the Whitewater investigation, the general counsel at the Treasury gave White House lawyers a heads up about a possible upcoming indictment of Jim McDougal and possibly President Clinton, which was being reported in an internal RTC newsletter called the “early bird report.” That incident was enough to get several White House officials hauled before a federal grand jury and led to the eventual resignations of White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum and Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. The series of incidents noted in Wednesday’s Whitewater report are considerably more serious: political appointees trying to use their influence over the executive law enforcement agencies for political gain.

And it has former Clinton staffers steamed.

“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” says one legal source close to the former president. “How did anybody at the White House even know about it? It suggests to us clearly that they were using the Justice Department and an investigation to influence the election.” How did Edie Holiday find out about the referral? Or C. Boyden Gray? Why did they try to intervene as they did? What other officials were involved? On all of these questions the report is silent.

What is clear is that Barr went on to get in touch with Ira Raphaelson, the Justice Department’s special counsel for financial institution fraud, and asked him to find out whether such a referral existed. When Raphaelson didn’t uncover one at first, Barr asked him to try again. From here, the story takes a turn that is either comic or Kafkaesque.

Though Barr had no apparent reason to believe that the budding case against the McDougals was being handled inappropriately, he instructed his subordinates at the Department of Justice and the FBI to commence a series of contacts with local officials in Little Rock to make sure the case was being handled appropriately. The OIC Report is replete with self-serving statements from these officials, to the effect that they simply wanted to make sure it was handled neither more quickly nor more slowly than any other similar case. Barr, the report explains, told a subordinate that “he did not want action on it artificially sped up or slowed down — it was to be dealt with on its merits and in the normal course.”

In the succeeding pages, statements such as these are coupled with actions that clearly belie them. Everything in this case should be handled like every other case, Washington seemed to be telling the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. But after reading the OIC’s recounting, it is virtually impossible to conclude that Barr and his colleagues at Justice were concerned with anything except the possibility that the potential case might not be moving as quickly as it could.

On Oct. 7, 1992, Banks informed his superiors in Washington that based on his review of the referral he was not inclined to open an investigation or move toward issuing indictments. Justice and FBI officials then met and responded to Banks’ message by ordering him to commence an investigation and report back to them on Oct. 16.

Banks had little doubt about the origins of the sudden urgency to move ahead with the case. “All of a sudden, we had this FBI pressure that something had to be done by October 16th,” he later told the OIC. But Banks and other law enforcement officials in Little Rock held their ground.

Officials in the Bush Justice Department apparently realized that it wouldn’t do to order local officials to fast-track the case, but they nudged them as much as they could. It reflects well on Banks that he didn’t let his superiors convince him that they knew better than he did. He believed he was being angled into issuing subpoenas in the case before the November election, and later testified that he would have resigned before doing so.

There are many passages in the OIC report that beg the question of whether more questions would have been asked if the independent counsel were interested in scrutinizing the behavior of former Bush administration officials rather than people tied to the Clinton administration. Why did the independent counsel choose to investigate possible foot-dragging on the part of U.S. Attorney Banks (who is completely vindicated in the report), when Banks had no reason to help Bill Clinton, and ignore the possibility that inappropriate pressure tactics were employed by Attorney General Barr, when Barr had a vested interest in seeing Clinton lose in November?

After Banks refused to pursue the Whitewater investigation, and after Bill Clinton’s election, departing Bush Justice Department officials revealingly lost their sense of urgency about the case. Whitewater ultimately came into full bloom when Clinton requested a special prosecutor to look into it in 1994, following pressure from the media and critics.

Another tantalizing tidbit in the report is the central role that FBI director Robert Mueller, then assistant attorney general for the criminal division, played in Barr’s fishing expedition. From the facts contained in the report, it’s not clear that Mueller was doing anything more than overseeing the execution of decisions made by others or overseeing meetings of Justice Department and FBI officials in Washington. But he was clearly in the center of the drama and in the position to see almost everything that was going on.

All we can hope for is that Mueller still has enough juice with Barr to keep him from reverting to his old partisan ways.  I think the odds are no better than 50-50.

.

QOTW: George Conway


by digby

We should highly question the mental stability of a president of the United States who would lie about whether the United States had been on the verge of starting “World War III” with another state possessing nuclear weapons. https://t.co/XY4zzTEyHR

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) February 16, 2019

Indeed. But people like his wife call such questioning a “coup.”

.

There was plenty of reasonable suspicion

by digby

Four different judges have at least started the sentencing process against Trump’s aides in the Mueller investigation. In every case, their suspect loyalty to Trump came up. With both Flynn and Manafort, the judges’ language about betraying country was far stronger.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 18, 2019

Significantly, the two judges who have read significant non-public materials on the underlying conduct that Trump’s aides were lying to hide both suggested the aides had betrayed the country.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 18, 2019

 Emptywheel’s post lays out the four legal proceedings before judges that we’ve seen evidence that this is not some partisan witch hunt and that the evidence, much of which we have not yet seen, shows something very nefarious. She concludes:

Four times so far in this investigation, Trump’s aides have started the sentencing process for their crimes designed to obstruction Robert Mueller’s investigation. All four times, before four different judges, their misplaced loyalty to Trump above country has come up. And with both Flynn and Manafort — where the judges have seen significant amounts of non-public information about the crimes they lied to cover-up — two very reasonable judges have raised explicit questions about whether Trump’s aides had betrayed their country.

Trump wants this to be a case of contested claims of betrayal. But the judges who have reviewed the record have used striking language about who betrayed their country.

Considering all the hand-wringing over the McCabe interview this morning, I thought I’d re-up my Salon piece from Friday that makes some of the same points:

My Salon column this mprning:


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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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

.

McCabe on 60 Minutes 

by tristero

Be sure to watch the whole thing. I couldn’t help but think that here was a man who (1) spent his entire life believing that Republicans were the good guys, (2) because he believed he himself was a good guy, he could only be a Republican, and (3) now realized that, because of Trump, nothing he had ever believed about what was “good” was true.

McCabe sounds shaken to his core, completely confused about how he could have been so wrong about so many fundamental verities. He also sounds depressed at the state his country finds itself in, and terrified. He’s not alone.

But McCabe’s interview is unnecessary. There is already more than abundant evidence for impeachment against Trump and his cronies. The only reason he hasn’t been forced from office is due to other Republicans who are enabling his corruption, obstruction, vindictiveness and destruction of this country.

As McCabe learned the hard way, it is the Republican party itself that is the problem. Trump is merely a symptom.

“The gulf between the discussion on twitter and campaign events is a mile wide”

by digby

Here are some well-informed observations about actual, real live Democratic voters in February 2019. It’s from Dave Weigel who is following the candidates all over the place:

For the past six weeks, The Trailer has been on the scene for the first campaign appearances by every newly declared Democratic presidential candidate. They ranged from Pete Buttigieg’s news conference in Washington, to Julián Castro’s tour of Puerto Rico recovery sites, to the aforementioned Kamala Harris trip to a boutique on Lady Street.

If any theme has emerged, it’s that the Democratic electorate showing up to meet its candidates is far less ideological and skeptical than the one that lives on social media. Some days, the gulf between the discussion on Twitter and the discussion at campaign events is a mile wide.

For example: The first question asked of any Democratic presidential candidate this year was the one Elizabeth Warren got at her maiden voyage to Council Bluffs, Iowa: “What is it that you think the Democratic Party needs in this journey toward 2020, and what you are bringing to it?”

The most recent question that The Trailer was on the ground for, in Columbia, was about Democrats’ most ambitious spending plans. “I believe you said you support Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal,” asked Ron Anderson, 50, at the end of Harris’s town hall. “Simultaneously, we have a $22 trillion national debt and a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit. How do you square that circle?”

Warren has received just two questions from voters about the controversy around her past claim of Native American heritage. Gillibrand has received just one about her role in encouraging Al Franken to resign from the Senate. Harris has received no questions about her criminal justice record; Booker has received none about his vote against (nonbinding) legislative language to crack down on the pharmaceutical industry. No candidate has gotten a question about the details of the now two-year-old Russia collusion probe, though some have gotten questions about whether Trump may be too scandalized to remain in office.

What can change after the first seven weeks of a primary? Everything. No one has criticized a rival Democrat by name, relatively few have mentioned the president, and there have been more skeptical questions about whether they can really pay for a big “progressive” agenda than whether they pass the litmus test of progressive groups. All of this really should be factored in when there’s speculation about how issues are playing on the trail; so far, the candidates are not being whipsawed by events like the media is.

I find that reassuring. People have open minds, are asking questions and don’t seem to fighting the last war. While we are all sniping on twitter and Facebook, this campaign will unfold in its own time.

.

Gypsies, tramps and thieves
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump’s presidential declaration of a national emergency is as fake as Trump University and a host of other Trump-branded products. Trump’s “dictator move,” wrote Will Bunch, is something we all expected, yet arrived with “a lot more banality than evil.” Bunch examines the ways in which Congress through years of fecklessness has, even in trying to retard the expansion of the imperial presidency, simply enabled it through Republican and Democratic presidencies alike. And here we are.

The real national emergency Republicans see is not the southern border, but 2020. On the line are a presidential election, control of state legislatures that draw maps for state and federal districts (REDMAP 2.0?), plus a chance for Republicans to roll back the blue wave that washed over them in 2018.

Their propaganda campaign against high-profile non-white, non-male, non-Christian freshman Democrats has begun.

“In the 116th Congress, if you’re a Democrat, you’re either a socialist, a baby killer or an anti-Semite,” writes Sheryl Gay Stolberg for the New York Times. It may not be as catchy as gypsies, tramps and thieves, but Republican strategists are working up a familiar tune their base can hum:

“Socialism is the greatest vulnerability by far that the House Democrats have,” Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in an interview, adding that he had also instructed his team to spotlight “all the extreme wild ideas” that Democrats espouse, “on a daily basis, on an hourly basis if it’s available.”

House Republicans have identified 55 Democrats they regard as vulnerable, including many freshmen. Some flipped Republican seats last year, some represent districts carried by Mr. Trump in 2016, and some are in districts held by Republicans until recently. Bruised by their losses last year, Republicans are determined to start earlier and be more aggressive on the offense in 2020, and are hoping to exploit the Democratic presidential candidates’ courtship of the left.

Attempting “to strangle the new Democratic majority in its infancy,” the GOP has already launched attacks ads. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) will feature prominently, as well as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), both Muslim women. Move over, Nancy Pelosi, self-described democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez is the new face of the liberal menace. Republican strategist and former Trump White House official Andy Surabian believes, “Democrats have handed Republicans this messaging on a silver platter.”

“Washington Republicans are set back now, and all they’re playing on is exaggerations and fear,” Cheri Bustos of Illinois, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tells the Times. Democrats, she insists, will continue to emphasize reducing health care and drug costs, improving infrastructure, and “and rooting out corruption in Washington.” Democrats cannot let Republican negative branding take hold, leaving them climbing out of a hole in 2020.

For once, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) offered some useful counter-messaging, saying, “We are not going to abandon socialist policies like Social Security — or is that ‘socialist security,’ is that what they call it?”

Republicans running for anything from president to school board who cries socialism should be asked if they advocate killing “socialist security.” See how that flies.

Red-baiting tactics by Republicans have worked in the past, both in sustaining fear in their already fear-saturated base and in making a flinchier generation of Democrats run campaigns on defense. But Republicans are preaching to the conditioned and not offering the remotest possibility for better lives to voters who might be persuadable. As Trump’s cotton candy promises of economic renewal turn to dust in his voters’ mouths, offering them more bitterness will energize only the most far-gone among them.

The Green New Deal Republicans ridicule may be a crude vision as yet, but it is a vision. Offered by a new generation of Democrats not easily cowed, it is a vision of a future better than the past. Republicans as a party lack any. Nor principles left they have not already sacrificed in a desperate effort to retain power. They have sold their birthright for Trump’s white nationalist nihilism and are left to campaign on hidebound tropes left over from the last century.

Republicans who bragged Ronald Reagan won the Cold War should get their heads out of their anti-communism if they expect to lead America in the 21st century.

Extra: NC-9 Election fraud case

Reminder that today's evidentiary hearing in #NC09 will be live streamed on https://t.co/3UiDxx0x9v. It begins at 10 a.m. #ncpol #ncga— NCSBE (@NCSBE) February 18, 2019

Links to exhibits are here.