Friday morning began with news of 49 dead at New Zealand mosques after a white supremacist’s murderous, made-for-Internet, shooting rampage. Friday night, Rachel Maddow reported that Donald Trump’s Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Scott Lloyd, kept a spreadsheet tracking the menstrual cycles and pregnancies of unaccompanied minor girls in ORR’s custody. Like a villain in a dystopian novel, Lloyd reportedly used the tracking system to block the girls from 12 to 17 from seeking seeking abortions.
One byproduct of the week’s news will be deepening outrage fatigue.
Hours later, a shockingly similar phrase came from the president. Trump, after vetoing a bill that would’ve blocked his national emergency declaration to access border wall funding, briefly condemned the shooting before pivoting back to border talk. There are “crimes of all kinds coming through our southern border,” Trump said, adding that “people hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is.”
Inspired by the likes of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, the list of Trump’s white nationalist riffs is lengthy. Chauncey DeVega lists just a few that mass murderers from the U.S. to Canada to New Zealand found inspirational.
Central American migrants — women, children, men — are now a target for white nationalist violence, if they weren’t already, along with American Muslims and Jews.
“This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility,” the alleged New Zealand shooter’s manifesto states, “is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”
Trump’s MAGA cult doesn’t want non-whites here either, but insists if underage females arrive pregnant, they must be forced to carry their non-European offspring to term.
Two little bear cubs are turning heads on Facebook because they are among the smallest and youngest cubs ever received in their first year.
Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care posted pictures of the cubs on their Facebook page. The cubs weigh in at just over 4 pounds. (Credit: Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care)
The cubs are originally from Yreka and were picked up at the California Fish and Wildlife’s Investigations Lab in Rancho Cordova.
The two cubs named “Blaze” and “Yreka” both weigh in at around four pounds.
Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care officials say it’s the earliest in the season they have ever received first-year cubs.
The terrorist had published a manifesto and the manifesto includes the claim from the terrorist shooter that he’s not a conservative, that he’s not a Christian, that he identifies as an eco-fascist, and he adds that he disagrees with Trump on politics.
…
The idea that there is far more crazed right-wing terrorism in America than there is any other kind is nothing more than a media narrative manufactured out of whole cloth, and it’s just waiting for events like this to take place, and this is what happens, folks. I don’t know, you probably get up and you see this news story and you just — in addition to all of the emotion you have over the sheer shock, terror, and horror of it all, then you realize you’re going to face a whole day of the politicization of it. You realize you’re going to face a whole day of Donald Trump being blamed for it, or you being blamed for it, or things you believe in being blamed for it.
…
Another thing that happens here when these events happen, you have all kinds of speculation that erupts. And there is an ongoing theory — Mr. Snerdley, correct me if I’m wrong about this. There’s an ongoing theory that the shooter himself may in fact be a leftist who writes the manifesto and then goes out and performs the deed purposely to smear his political enemies, knowing he’s going to get shot in the process. You know you just can’t — you can’t immediately discount this. The left is this insane, they are this crazy. And then if that’s exactly what the guy is trying to do then he’s hit a home run, because right there on Fox News: “Shooter is an admitted white nationalist who hates immigrants.”
It’s always something:
Rush Limbaugh suggests bombs mailed to Democrats are a false flag: “Republicans just don’t do this kind of thing”
Limbaugh: “There’s a smell test that this stuff has to pass, and, so far, a lot of people’s noses are in the air, not quite certain of what to make of this”
Limbaugh: “Practically Every One Of These Young Kids Shooting Up Schools Is Inspired By Something To Do With Leftism”
Rush Limbaugh complains media outlets don’t want to tie Las Vegas gunman to ISIS
Limbaugh: To “the American left, there’s no such thing as militant Islamic terrorism”
Nothing is real.
Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see It’s getting hard to be someone But it all works out It doesn’t matter much to me
Given a chance to denounce white supremacist violence hours after 49 people were killed in a mosque by a gunman who praised him by name, Trump instead denies that it’s even a significant threat. pic.twitter.com/maTx559TKD— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 15, 2019
Asked if he thinks white nationalism is a rising threat, Trump says, "I don't really. I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems."
Trump goes on to say he thinks it's too early to draw conclusions about what motivated New Zealand mosque shooter. pic.twitter.com/maTx55ruCb— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 15, 2019
You have to love the fact that he claims we don’t know if this was white nationalist terrorism. There’s a manifesto and it mentioned him in it. If he couldn’t even find it in himself to repudiate’s this terrorist’s evocation of himself I think it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t want to.
Keep in mind that like the Christchurch terrorist, Trump complains about “invaders” coming to his country.
He did it today,
Just before he was asked that question.
TRUMP echoes white supremacist rhetoric: "Congress' vote to deny the crisis on the southern border is a vote against reality…People hate the word 'invasion,' but that's what it is. It's an invasion of drugs, criminals, & people…in some cases, they are killers." pic.twitter.com/nupFMpmHQZ— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 15, 2019
This NYT op-ed about online extremism in the wake of the Christchurch massacre is on point:
Before entering a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, the site of one of the deadliest mass murders in the country’s history, the accused gunman paused to endorse a YouTube star in a video that appeared to capture the shooting.
“Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” he said.
To an untrained eye, this would have seemed like a bizarre detour.
But the people watching the video stream recognized it as something entirely different: a meme.
Like many of the things the suspect appears to have done in preparation for the shooting on Friday — like posting a 74-page manifesto that named specific internet figures who had influenced his views, or writing that the video game Fortnite “trained me to be a killer” — the PewDiePie endorsement served two purposes. For his online followers, it was a kind of satirical Easter egg. (“Subscribe to PewDiePie,” which began as a grass-roots online attempt to keep the popular YouTube entertainer from being dethroned as the site’s most-followed account, has morphed into a kind of all-purpose cultural bat signal for the young and internet-absorbed.)
For everyone else, it was a booby trap, a joke designed to ensnare unsuspecting people and members of the media into taking it too literally. The goal, if there was one, may have been to pull a popular internet figure into a fractious blame game and inflame political tensions everywhere. (In a tweet early Friday morning, PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, said, “I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.”)
The details that have emerged about the Christchurch shooting — at least 49 were killed at two mosques — are horrifying. But a surprising thing about it is how unmistakably online the violence was, and how aware the suspected gunman appears to have been about how his act would be viewed and interpreted by distinct internet subcultures.
In some ways, it felt like a first — an internet-native mass shooting, conceived and produced entirely within the irony-soaked discourse of modern extremism.
The suspected gunman teased his act on Twitter, announced it on the online messsage board 8chan, and broadcast it live on Facebook. The footage was then replayed endlessly on YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, as the platforms scrambled to take down the clips nearly as fast as new copies popped up to replace them. In a statement on Twitter, Facebook said it had “quickly removed both the shooter’s Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video,” and was taking down instances of praise or support for the shooting. YouTube said it was “working vigilantly to remove any violent footage” of the attack. Reddit said in a statement that it was taking down “content containing links to the video stream or manifesto.”
Even the language the suspect used to describe his attack before the fact framed it as an act of internet activism. In his post on 8chan, he referred to the shooting as a “real life effort post.” He titled an image “screw your optics,” a reference to a line posted by the man accused in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that later became a kind of catchphrase among neo-Nazis. And his manifesto — a wordy mixture of white nationalist boilerplate, fascist declarations and references to obscure internet jokes — seems to have been written from the bottom of an algorithmic rabbit hole.
It would be unfair to blame the internet for this. Motives are complex, lives are complicated, and we don’t yet know all the details about the shooting. The authorities in New Zealand have charged a man but have not identified him. Anti-Muslim violence is not an online phenomenon, and white nationalist hatred long predates 4Chan and Reddit.
But we do know that the design of internet platforms can create and reinforce extremist beliefs. Their recommendation algorithms often steer users toward edgier content, a loop that results in more time spent on the app, and more advertising revenue for the company. Their hate speech policies are weakly enforced. And their practices for removing graphic videos — like the ones that circulated on social media for hours after the Christchurch shooting, despite the companies’ attempts to remove it — are inconsistent at best.
We also know that many recent acts of offline violence bear the internet’s imprint. Robert Bowers, the man charged with killing 11 people and wounding six others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, was a frequent user of Gab, a social media platform beloved by extremists. Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with sending explosives to prominent critics of President Trump last year, was immersed in a cesspool of right-wing Facebook and Twitter memes.
People used to conceive of “online extremism” as distinct from the extremism that took form in the physical world. If anything, the racism and bigotry on internet message boards felt a little less dangerous than the prospect of Ku Klux Klan marches or skinhead rallies.
He goes on to call internet extremism “extremism on steroids” and then explains that the real problem is translating it to real life. Here’s someone who is actively doing that:
“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. — Donald Trump, yesterday
They call themselves The Night Wolves, “a new kind of motorcycle club,” or, sometimes, “Putin’s Angels.” And just as much as the Orthodox Church or the military, the Wolves have become a symbol of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the idea that they might be used as his extra-legal enforcers in times of trouble is usually implicit—embedded in their flag-waving Putinized patriotism—never really spelled out.
[…]
Trump, you will recall, learned his special brand of politics from the promoters and crowds at pro wrestling events, where violence in the ring is staged, but that’s not always true in the stands. So he’s not likely to give up on the tough-guy iconography offered by bikers, or the way it can be used to incite others. And Russia remains a great example for him.
Here, the Night Wolves are familiar figures, and have been since the 1990s. Their tall, burly, bearded leader Alexander Zaldastanov, nicknamed Khirurg (surgeon), often hugs Putin on camera, usually being careful not to make him look too short. (On bikes they look the same height.)
The Wolves originally copied their tattoos, leather pants and vests covered in pins from world famous American biker movements like Hell’s Angels, who have been rolling around for most of a century. But if the oldest U.S. biker empires were full of revolutionary outlaws, Putin tamed the men in leather, who act according to the programs approved by the Kremlin’s administration and say things appropriate for the state-controlled television channels.
One day you can see them posing with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Orthodox priests, next day they zoom with flapping Russian flags through European countries or open a base in an abandoned military town in Slovakia, a NATO country.
The pro-Putin bikers have been spreading their wings all over the European Union and also finding friends in the mostly Trumpist Russian community of Miami Florida millionaires. The team of Transparency International researched the connection between a group called the “Alfa Anticriminal” organization made up of Russian special service officers, the group’s founder Svyatoslav Mangushev, and a biker club he founded in Miami, called after Russian special forces, Spetsnaz LE [for Law Enforcement] Spetsnaz.
On Saturday the Wolves are planning to bring a 1,423 meter-long flag to Crimea, to celebrate “Russian Spring” —the beginning of the pro-Kremlin unrest in Ukraine—and mark five years since Russia annexed the peninsula with the help of “little green men,” forces of masked soldiers in unmarked green army uniforms.
In Ukraine the Night Wolves play a genuinely sinister role, in fact. They are under U.S. sanctions for recruiting rebels to fight against Ukraine in Donbas. In 2015, Zoldastanov confirmed that his movement had received $856,242 from the state, “openly and transparently.” A report by Bild, a German newspaper, said that the Night Wolves receive their finance from Russian ministry of Defense.
On Friday, the bikers’ leader Zaldastanov spoke on Russia-24 TV about a Russian soldier allegedly killed by a Ukrainian sniper. With a tragic expression on his face, the biker described the accident but did not mention the death toll of 13,000 killed in the Ukrainian war. The biker did not speak on TV about nearly two million people who the war has turned into refugees, or 70 prisoners of war held in Russian prisons. These topics are not on the agenda of Putin’s Angels.
According to Levada Center opinion polls 68 percent of Russians say the United States is their country’s main enemy. Yet the Night Wolves enjoy American-made bikes; even their ideological leader Vladimir Putin rode with them on a Harley Davidson.
And the Night Wolves love Trump, too.
That’s a video of Zalstantanov the Surgeon’s big birthday bash. A costumed Trump character come in at about 1:30 and gives a little speech in which he says to The Surgeon, “you are the president and I am the president, I like that you support Vladimir Vladimirovich. We are both against hostility and hate.”
The fact that we are even having any conversation at all about how to interpret Whitaker’s conversations w/POTUS regarding an investigation of the president means to me that the president clearly wanted to influence the AG. @CNN@OutFrontCNN ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/PlkvDYmJKA
I’m so old I remember when this was a huge scandal:
Attorney General Loretta Lynch described her Monday meeting with Bill Clinton aboard a private plane as “primarily social,” but some Democrats are struggling to stomach the optics of the attorney general’s meeting with the former president while his wife is under federal investigation …
Once news of their meeting on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport broke, Democrats made clear that while the meeting was likely as innocent as Lynch described, it did not give the Justice Department the appearance of independence.
“I do agree with you that it doesn’t send the right signal,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said Thursday in response to a question about the meeting from CNN “New Day” host Alisyn Camerota. “She has generally shown excellent judgment and strong leadership of the department, and I’m convinced that she’s an independent attorney general. But I do think that this meeting sends the wrong signal and I don’t think it sends the right signal. I think she should have steered clear, even of a brief, casual social meeting with the former president.”
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was not convinced by the attorney general’s assurances, attacking the judgment of both Lynch and Bill Clinton.
“It is an amazing thing,” Trump said on the Mike Gallagher Show. “And it was really a sneak. It was really something they didn’t want publicized as far as I understand.”
“I think it’s so terrible. I think it’s so horrible. I think it’s the biggest story, one of the big stories of this week, of this month, of this year.”
“Even in terms of judgment, how bad a judgment is it for him or for her to do this? I mean, who would do this?” Trump said.
That’s funny.
Trump probably actually thinks that what Clinton and Lynch did was terrible but the president strong-arming his Attorneys General to obstruct justice and be his “Roy Cohn” is completely fine. He doesn’t really have the capacity to understand how the two situations are related or that his behavior is a hundred times worse.
President Trump tried to marshal his most potent weapon — himself — to stave off what eventually became an embarrassing rejection from his own party over his declared national emergency on the border.
In numerous calls with Republican senators in recent days, the president spoke of the battle almost exclusively in personal terms — telling them they would be voting against him while brushing aside constitutional concerns over his attempt to reroute billions of federal dollars for a border wall. He argued that a vote against the emergency would be seen by GOP supporters as being against border security and the wall and would hurt their own political fortunes, according to a person with direct knowledge of some of the calls.
The president, along with his aides, continued to hammer that message leading up to Thursday’s Senate vote on the issue. Trump tweeted the day before that Republican senators were “overthinking” it, stressing that it was only about supporting border security. And White House aides made it clear to undecided Republicans that Trump was noticing those who chose to oppose him — particularly if they were up for reelection in 2020.
But it wasn’t enough, as a dozen Republicans joined Democrats in dealing Trump a humiliating blow by voting Thursday to nullify the national emergency, setting up what is likely to be the first veto of his presidency.
Trump’s personal pleas and pressure were among a number of missed opportunities and missteps by the White House that contributed to a defeat notably worse than the administration had hoped for in trying to limit defections, according to officials and lawmakers familiar with the efforts, many of whom requested anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
The administration, for example, failed to give opposing GOP senators legal opinions, project details and other information that they had requested about the national emergency, according to lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides. Vice President Pence was also unable or unwilling to make commitments on behalf of the president even while serving as Trump’s main emissary to negotiate with Republicans, people familiar with the debate said.
[…]
During a private GOP lunch in late February that Pence attended, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) asked to see any memorandum produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that would lay out the administration’s rationale for why the emergency declaration was lawful, according to an official with knowledge of the closed-door discussion.
Cruz had raised a hypothetical question involving a Democratic senator from Massachusetts that struck at the heart of some of their concerns: What if a President Elizabeth Warren declared a national emergency to seize oil wells in Texas?
A Justice Department official in attendance said the White House had drafted a legal memo the OLC had approved. When Cruz asked to see that document, Pence said he would relay the request to Trump.
The White House never provided that memo, according to an official familiar with the discussions.
A similar scenario unfolded a week later, when Republican senators pressed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for a list of military construction projects that could lose funding this year as a result of Trump’s emergency declaration. Nielsen told them the issue was largely the purview of the Pentagon — while Defense Department officials at the same time were deferring to Nielsen’s agency for information they needed to make a list of targeted projects.
Senators never got that list of projects either, and some Republicans doubted whether one exists.
Nonetheless, Trump called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) almost daily to press him on who was opposing his declaration — all while White House officials worked to keep the number of Republican defectors in the single digits, according to two administration officials.
[…]
Trump kept saying in private to White House officials and senators that he would be willing to entertain any proposal that would unite most Republicans and keep the vote count on the disapproval resolution at just 50 in the Senate, which would have defeated the measure.
To that end, the administration and a handful of influential GOP senators began quietly discussing whether they could reach a compromise addressing the flaws of a 1976 law, the National Emergencies Act, relied on by Trump to invoke his national emergency.
But in private, Pence was vague about what the White House would accept in terms of revisions to the law, people familiar with the discussions said. The sole commitment he made was that he would take the information back to Trump.
“None of the proposals got anywhere close,” a senior administration official said. “We were all wasting our time.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), one of the senators who had negotiated with Pence for days, acknowledged the vice president had a “difficult job.” Alexander voted to reject the declaration.
“The president feels very strongly about his authority, and a number of us feel very strongly about the Constitution,” he said. “So I’m not sure anyone could’ve done a better job than the vice president did.”
Authoritarian? Nah. Of course not.
Capitol Hill aides were concerned Trump would lash out at senators who voted no, and McConnell and others in leadership have encouraged the president to focus instead on issues that unite the party moving forward, two people familiar with the talks said.
“I think [the president] respects people with principle,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who told Trump during a private Oval Office meeting last week on China policy that he would be voting to reject his declaration.
The administration’s efforts with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) turned out to be the most fruitful.
Shortly after The Washington Post published a defiant opinion piece by Tillis, announcing his opposition to Trump’s emergency order, the senator contacted the White House to assess its willingness to change the emergencies act, which an increasing number of GOP senators have complained about.
As he engaged in numerous conversations with Justice Department lawyers and the White House Counsel’s Office, Tillis repeatedly asked the administration to commit to something down the line — stressing that he wanted a reason to vote in favor of the declaration, officials said. Finally, Tillis told the White House two days ago that he would support Trump, according to a senior administration official.
“The White House has been very gracious — and, I should say, very patient, given my initial position — in working with us and, as late as today, have a president make a statement that he’s willing to work with us,” Tillis said on the Senate floor before he reversed his stance.
Other last-ditch efforts were more dramatic.
Three Republicans — Cruz and Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.) — showed up with little notice at the White House late Wednesday and interrupted a private dinner with Trump and first lady Melania Trump, trying to sell the president on a final pitch that would give senators an off-ramp from Thursday’s vote. The senators had sought to come all day but were scuttled by White House aides; eventually, they just showed up.
Cruz began making the case to Trump that the president could reprogram federal dollars toward the wall to expend even more funds without having to declare a national emergency, people familiar with the episode said. The meeting lasted more than an hour, and White House aides including legislative affairs director Shahira Knight and lawyer Pat Philbin were summoned, with Philbin telling the senators the option would not legally work.
Growing frustrated, Trump told Cruz he was not rescinding the national emergency and that the senator could vote however he wanted to vote. Trump berated the group for showing up at the White House late at night and told them they were wasting his time.
“Hell, if I’d been him,” Graham remarked Thursday morning, “I’d have told us to go to hell.”
Naturally Cruz and Graham voted with the president. They love to be dominated.
Thursday provided Americans with an exceptionally rare political moment. The House of Representatives voted unanimously on an issue so fraught with partisanship that opposing sides are generally unable to remain civil, much less agree on anything. But on a non-binding resolution designed as a message to Attorney General William Barr, the House voted 420-0 (four Republicans voted present) to make special counsel Robert Mueller’s much-anticipated report public.
It was a symbolic measure that was immediately blocked in the Senate by Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who says he believes Hillary Clinton hasn’t been treated with the same investigative zeal as Donald Trump. (The fact that she has not held public office of any kind since 2012 has apparently escaped his notice.) Graham needed to soothe Trump’s bruised feelings after 12 Republican senators managed to resist his mighty negotiating skills and voted with all 47 Democrats on a measure to roll back Trump’s border wall “national emergency.”
Ragging on Clinton and refusing to let senators go on record in support of releasing the Mueller report was a consolation only the president’s favorite senator could give him. It didn’t seem to help, considering the president’s hysterical reaction on Friday morning, when he actually suggested there should be no Mueller report at all:
No doubt Trump’s House henchmen knew that Graham would step up to defend the president, and therefore felt free to pretend they care about transparency. Still, it was probably a good thing to get all those Republicans on the record. It may well be something they come to regret.
Waiting for Mueller is turning into a rolling national anxiety attack. For the last few months there have been a number of reports that the investigation is coming to a close and that Mueller is getting ready to close up shop. So far, it hasn’t happened. We have also learned that various members of the team have either been reassigned or are planning to move on to other jobs. On Thursday the special counsel’s office confirmed that Andrew Weissmann, the prosecutor who handled the Manafort case, is leaving, which set off even more speculation that Mueller is getting ready to turn off the lights.
It that’s true, we don’t know yet whether more indictments may be coming, or how much Mueller has handed off to other prosecutors for follow-up. We do know that Roger Stone’s trial has been set for November, so if Mueller is moving on, someone else will be handling it. And the U.S. attorneys in the Southern District of New York seem to be pursuing a number of investigations that are at least tangentially related to the Mueller probe.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that SDNY prosecutors have requested emails featuring some pretty damning “pardon” talk between former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and another lawyer who created a “back channel” to Trump’s current personal counsel, Rudy Giuliani. That, suggesting that they may be interested in whether or not Trump and his associates sought to obstruct justice in that case. So there’s a lot of evidence that criminal investigations are ongoing, even beyond the Mueller probe.
Adding all this up, it does appear that we are reaching some sort of crescendo. If Mueller is done, the assumption is that he will write up the results of the investigation and send it to the attorney general, who will then decide if he wants to send it to Congress. Legally, Barr has total discretion at that point: He could send the report as written, summarize it in some form or just lock it up in a file and never show it to anyone. Considering the Justice Department’s policy holding that a president cannot be indicted, and since the Justice Department typically does not air out the evidence against anyone who has not been indicted, Barr could easily rationalize such a decision.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said on MSNBC that he was prepared to do whatever is necessary to see the report and also get access to the underlying evidence, including calling Mueller to testify and going to court. But he has an ace up his sleeve that he isn’t talking about.
A couple of weeks ago former SDNY prosecutor Nelson W. Cunningham, who served as general counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Joe Biden was chair (and was also a White House lawyer under Bill Clinton), wrote a piece for the Daily Beast in which he clarified that the “Mueller report” is actually two reports.
Recall that some time back we learned that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president of the United States was a Russian agent — knowingly or otherwise — and that that investigation was then folded into Mueller’s mandate. As I noted at the time, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe made quite a point of that during his book tour, even describing how he briefed the Gang of Eight congressional leaders about that decision. If you wondered why McCabe thought that was so important, this may be the reason: Counterintelligence investigations must be reported directly to Congress.
Cunningham wrote:
Significantly, unlike a final criminal report, a Mueller counterintelligence report cannot be bottled up. By statute it must be shared with Congress. The House and Senate intelligence committees are legally entitled to be given reports, in writing, of significant intelligence and counterintelligence activities or failures. Mueller’s findings will certainly qualify.
Done well (and Mueller and his team seem to do everything well), it will provide a much richer, broader narrative description of Russia’s effort to interfere in 2016, the nature of any links or cooperation between the Russians and the Trump campaign, and whether Trump or his associates were witting or unwitting assets for the Russians (including by obstructing the investigation) — as well perhaps as conclusions for action.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, backed this up on MSNBC this week:
The Mueller case at heart is an intelligence case. So what does that mean for the report, the content and the access Congress will have to it? It means that the House and Senate intelligence committees, because at it’s a CI case, are going to be able to demand a briefing on results and significant developments … .
I’m telling you, Adam Schiff may have more power than anyone else to get the most out of that Mueller inquiry and get the most transparency. So I think, intriguingly, the most sensitive part of the case may be the way Congress gets the most insight into it.
When Schiff says he will bring Mueller to testify, I’m guessing that this what he’s talking about. It might take place behind closed doors because the counterintelligence report is likely to contain classified information the public cannot see. But if Mueller is clever and Schiff is agile, they should be able to create a narrative that can be shared with the public about what happened (and is still happening) that is not subject to Department of Justice restrictions. This evidence will almost certainly inform the House leadership’s decision on impeachment. Who knows, it might even be enough to move a few Republicans to do their duty.
White grievance, insecurity, and an overactive sense of history
by Tom Sullivan
Twitter was buzzing Thursday night about shootings at a mosque(s) in Christchurch, New Zealand. But the headline this morning at the Washington Post took my breath away. With the caveat that early reporting tends to be incomplete and often incorrect, here is a piece of what news the Guardian has available as I write this:
Forty-nine people have been killed in shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. They included 41 people killed at the Deans Avenue mosque and seven at Linwood mosque. Another victim died later in Christchurch hospital.
Christchurch hospital is treating 48 people, including young children, for gunshot wounds. In a statement he said injuries range from critical to minor.
A man in his late 20s has been charged with murder and will appear in Christchurch court tomorrow. The police have not named him.
A 28-year-old Australian who livestreamed himself attacking a mosque identified himself online before the rampage as Brenton Tarrant. Tarrant posted multiple photos of what appear to be machine gun magazines and a link to what is being described as a manifesto for his actions. New Zealand Police urged people not to share “extremely distressing footage” related to the incident.
Tarrant outlines his motivations: including to “create an atmosphere of fear” and to “incite violence” against Muslims while offering up autobiographical details. He also cited actions of other rightwing extremists including the Finsbury Park mosque attacker Darren Osborne and Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Brevik.
Three others were arrested, and one was later released. Police found additional weapons, plus explosive devices. Those have been disarmed. Officials in Paris, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis have increased security at mosques in response.
Tarrant signaled in a Thursday post on the far-right online forum 8Chan he planned to live-stream an attack on “the invaders.” He chose firearms for the attack hoping for extra media coverage and thereby to affect “the politics of United States and thereby the political situation of the world.” Prior to the attack, Tarrant issued a 74-page manifesto about “white genocide” espousing “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-leftist views” in which he declared his belief in “ethnic autonomy for all peoples with a focus on the preservation of nature, and the natural order.”
The Sydney Morning Herald reports the Tarrant manifesto contains an assortment of references to past mass shootings and historic conflicts between Muslims and Europeans:
He also included the names of several Serbian military figures, such as Milos Obilic, an apocryphal knight featuring prominently in accounts of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo against the invading Ottoman Empire, the Islamic superpower of its day, who was alleged to have assassinated the Ottoman Sultan.
Other names inscribed on Tarrant’s weaponry included Bajo Pivljanin and Novak Vujosevic, each of whom led uprisings against the Ottomans during later periods and were considered heroes within their communities, as well as Montenegrin general Marko Miljanov.
Also inscribed on his guns and ammunition were references to the 1683 Battle of Vienna, in which Christian forces defeated the Ottomans, and 1571, an apparent reference to the Battle of Lepanto in which the Empire suffered another defeat.
A far-right Australian senator, Fraser Anning, issued a statement blaming the victims of the mass shooting, “The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rebutted such sentiments in a press conference:
“We were not a target because we are a safe harbor for those who hate. We were not chosen for this act of violence because we condone racism, because we are an enclave for extremism. We were chosen for the very fact that we are none of these things. Because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion, a home for those who share our values, refuge for those who need it. And those values, I can assure you, will not and cannot be shaken by this attack.”
Someone tweeting for the sitting president of the United States did not offer thoughts and prayers, but “warmest sympathy and best wishes” to the people of New Zealand.
It struck me during the Bosnian genocide that the flip side to some people having no sense of history was having an overactive one. They were re-fighting battles that had taken place 600 years earlier. In the American South, plenty of people still grind their teeth over a four-year conflict initiated over 150 years ago because the southern aristocracy insisted on keeping people as pets. They conned non-aristocrats into dying for their cause. The inferiority complex resulting from that loss lingers a century and a half later.
Tarrant condemns Australia as little more than a “European colony,” by definition a land “invaded” by his kind. But it is not the fate of European civilization or states’ rights driving the spread of right-wing ethno-nationalism. It is racism and fear. The torch-carrying, swastika-wearing morons chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Virginia did so because they are startled by shadows. They fear and hate the dark like they fear and hate the dark-skinned and non-homogenous Others, the non-white, non-Christian, non-straight, non-males that threaten their entitled places at the apex of western culture.
The attackers’ civilized, European response to living among people not like them is barbarism.
It takes just seven ordinary, imperfect shuffles to mix a deck of cards thoroughly, researchers have found. Fewer are not enough and more do not significantly improve the mixing.
The mathematical proof, discovered after studies of results from elaborate computer calculations and careful observation of card games, confirms the intuition of many gamblers, bridge enthusiasts and casual players that most shuffling is inadequate.
The finding has implications for everyone who plays cards and everyone, from casino operators to magicians, who has a stake in knowing whether a shuffle is random…
In Las Vegas, cards are shuffled from four to seven times…
At Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, blackjack dealers shuffle eight decks twice at the beginning of each game, said Howard Dreitzer, who is senior vice president of casino operations. ”We’ve tested these shuffles and feel that they are random,” he said, adding that ”no one has ever complained.’’
That’s right. Screw the science because in Trumpland, it just feels right to shuffle twice and the rubes will never complain.
I have to admit I laughed out loud when I read that, but it was a very grim laugh.
