Month: March 2019

Another clue pointing to an end to the Mueller probe

by digby

With the big news today that top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman is leaving the Special Counsel’s office, everyone is assuming this means that Mueller is closing up shop. Marcy Wheeler points out that prosecutors have been leaving for quite some time. She has a timeline (of course.)

This is her analysis of what’s going on with all that:

After each prosecutor has finished their work on the Mueller team, he or she has moved on. Weissmann’s departure is more final,since he’s leaving DOJ. But his departure continues a pattern that was set last summer. Finish your work, and move on.

Nevertheless, his departure is being taken as a surefire sign the Mueller investigation is closing up.

Let me be clear: I do agree Mueller is just about done with the investigation. He’s waiting on Mystery Appellant, possibly on Andrew Miller’s testimony; he may have been waiting on formal publication of Jerome Corsi’s book yesterday. Multiple other details suggest that Mueller expects to be able to share thingsin a month that he’s unable to share today.

None of that tells us what will happen in the next few weeks. There is abundant evidence that Trump entered into a quid pro quo conspiracy with Russia, trading dirt and dollars for sanctions relief and other policy considerations. But it’s unclear whether Mueller has certainty that he’d have an 85% chance of winning convictions, which is around what he’d need to convince DOJ to charge it. There is also abundant evidence that Trump and others obstructed the investigation, but charging Trump in that presents constitutional questions.

If Mueller does charge either of those things, I’d still expect him to resign and either retire or move back to WilmerHale and let other prosecutors prosecute it. That’s what Leon Jaworski did in Watergate.

The far more interesting detail from Carrie Johnson’s Weissmann report is that just some of Mueller’s team are returning to WilmerHale.

WilmerHale, the law firm that Mueller and several other prosecutors left to help create the special counsel team, is preparing for the return of some of its onetime law partners, three lawyers have told NPR in recent weeks.

I’m far more interested in the plans of James Quarles (who has been liaising with the White House and so presumably has a key part of the obstruction investigation) or Jeannie Rhee (who seems to have been overseeing the conspiracy investigation) than Mueller or his Chief of Staff, Aaron Zebley. Their plans might tell us more about what to expect in the next month (though Rhee appeared in Roger Stone’s status hearing today, and may be sticking around for his prosecution, which just got scheduled for November 5).

In any case, though, we don’t have long to wait, so it’s not clear that misreading the departure of Weissmann — which is better understood as part of the normal pattern of Mueller’s prosecutors leaving when they’re done — tells us anything useful.

I think it makes sense that these prosecutors who were tasked with specific pieces of the inquiry are being released back into the wild after what has likely been a grueling couple of years once their tasks are complete. And I have always heard that Mueller as a prosecutor did not believe in long meandering investigations and liked to get them buttoned up as quickly as possible.  I never heard he wasn’t thorough so one assumes he wouldn’t do it prematurely.

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Will the GOP Senators stick with door number 1 or will they switch to door number 2?

by digby

This fun post by Ryan Casey about the GOP Senators and the famous Monty Hall problem shows how there might actually be a shift in Trump support:

Some background: The Monty Hall riddle was inspired by a popular game show in the 1960s and 70s called Let’s Make A Deal. On the show, the handsome and charming host, Monty Hall, asked each contestant to choose one of three doors. Behind one door was a car; behind the other two was something silly nobody wanted, like a goat. Naturally, it was the goal of every contestant to win the car. Contestants were free to choose any of the three doors, but before the door was opened, Monty would do his thing.

Unlike the contestants, Monty knew which door was the winner. So, he would open one of the other doors, and reveal a goat. He would never open the door with the car behind it; that would ruin the game. And regardless of which door contained the car, Monty would never begin by opening the door the contestant had picked initially.

After opening one of the doors and revealing a goat, Monty would give the contestants a choice: stick with their first guess, or switch to the remaining mystery door. Viewers probably took a certain twisted pleasure as contestants agonized over whether they should take Monty’s offer and switch their pick, or stick with their gut — their first choice. Ahh! What to do?!

The Monty Hall problem became more than just the basis for a cheesy game show when, in September 1990, it suddenly sparked a fierce debate among leading experts in mathematics and probability theory. In truth, the name of the “Monty Hall problem” had actually been conceived in 1975 by statistician Steve Selvin, who used the moniker in a letter published in the scientific journal The American Statistician, titled “A Problem in Probability.”

But the problem remained relatively unknown until controversy erupted 15 years later, when advice columnist Marilyn vos Savant answered a reader’s question about whether it was better to always take Monty’s offer and switch doors, or to stick with the first pick. The “Ask Marilyn” column was featured in Parade magazine, and together with syndicated newspapers, it reached a combined circulation of almost 35 million people. Marilyn’s qualification for writing it was that she had long held the Guinness World Record for the highest IQ ever recorded (228).
[…]

Marilyn’s answer was met with anger and scorn. Approximately 10,000 readers — nearly 1,000 of them with PhDs — wrote letters to the columnist. Many were esteemed mathematicians who felt the need to “mansplain” the error of Marilyn’s ways. One math professor from George Mason University condescended, “You blew it . . . As a professional mathematician, I’m very concerned with the general public’s lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error and, in the future, being more careful.” Even Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 20th century, grew visibly upset with colleagues and refused to accept Marilyn’s explanation until he was shown a computer simulation that demonstrated the result.

Marilyn was right, of course; contestants who switch doors double their probability of winning the car compared to contestants who stick with their initial choice. But how can something seemingly so obvious (a 50/50 probability regardless of which door is ultimately chosen) be the wrong answer, and trip up so many experts — including the greatest mathematician of his era? The answer lies in their failure to recognize a critical insight: When Monty opens one of the doors and reveals a goat, he is not choosing that door at random. For this reason, Monty’s choice provides key information to the contestant.

If you’re still struggling to understand why it is always better to switch, this short explainer video is helpful. But here is the simplest explanation: When the contestant first chooses — at random — one of three doors (let’s call this the “chosen” door), each door has a ⅓ probability of containing the car. So the chosen door initially holds ⅓ probability, and the combined probability of the other two doors is ⅓ + ⅓ = ⅔. But, because Monty knows which door contains the car (and will never open that door), and because he won’t open the chosen door, the door he does open subtly reveals a key nugget of new information the contestant can — and should — use. The moment Monty opens that door and reveals the goat, all of the ⅔ probability from those two doors gets compressed into that single, untouched door. Thus, contestants are left with the ⅓ probability that their chosen door is the winner, compared to the ⅔ probability that the untouched door contains the car. Which is to say, they literally double their chances of winning by switching doors. Computer simulations, as Erdős came to realize, bear this out.

Casey points out that there are some small, emerging fissures in the Trump wall of support and he suspects that as more information about Trump’s criminality seeps out there will be more information and hence, a different calculation:

The Monty Hall problem is a brainteaser that illustrates how the odds of “guessing” correctly between two options improve significantly when the contestant learns new information partway through the game. Sometimes, the new information changes the odds in a way that is surprising or even counter-intuitive. Like contestants on Let’s Make A Deal, GOP senators can’t know with certainty which choice — protect Trump at all costs, or throw him overboard if things get bad enough — will turn out to be the correct political judgment. But the addition of devastating evidence of Trump’s criminality and abuse of power just might change the odds in a way even veteran political observers don’t anticipate.

Those who discount the possibility of Trump’s expulsion from office compare the current era to Watergate. If Richard Nixon had enjoyed Fox News and today’s hyper-polarized electorate, they argue, he would have survived. That’s probably true, but it misses a key point: Trump’s criminal conduct is far worse than Nixon’s, in both scope and impact. The American people will be the ultimate judges of that, but when the time comes, Republican senators would do well to consider how revelations of Trump’s crimes affect the odds they’ll guess right.

I would guess that the only new information they will pay attention to is Trump sinking precipitously from his anemic 40% average in the public opinion polls. If the base slips some will almost certainly take the off ramp. But it’s also possible, as Casey suggests, that some will take a longer view as more information about Trump’s criminality is exposed, with an inevitable probability that there is more to come. Enough of them might just realize that the smart move is to switch. So, stay tuned.

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s a fun read.

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The President of the United States is inciting political violence. Again.

by digby

Trump talking to the True believers at Breitbart:

“I can tell you 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.”

He’s basically saying that cops, military and biker gangs will use violence against his political opponents if they become too unhappy with what they are saying.

There’s just no other way to read that.

This is the implicit threat he’s making about the election. If he loses, he will say it was stolen and he will unleash his supporters to commit violence in his name.  The question is whether or not anyone but the fringe will take him up on it.  Cops and the military? Well, if that happened we would be in a new world.

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Trump says he wasn’t for Brexit. That is a lie.

by digby

John Amato caught Trump’s photo op with the Irish PM this morning and it included a Trumpian whopper. Of course:

During their presser, Trump said he only predicted Brexit would pass, “and I was right,” and brought up his wacky Turnberry presser from 2016. Trump lied, of course.

Trump then blamed Teresa May for not listening to the worst negotiator on the planet. All of her deals with the EU have failed in Parliament.

“I’m surprised at how badly it has all gone from the standpoint of a negotiation. But I gave the prime minister my ideas how to negotiate it and I think you would have been successful. She didn’t listen to that and that’s fine. She gotta do what she’s gotta do,” Trump said.

Then Trump continued his support of the Brexit vote saying, “I don’t think another vote would be possible because it would be very unfair to the people who voted in that one.”
[…]
Leo Varadkar said, “We’ve a different opinion at present – I regret that Brexit’s happening. And the UK, it was a really important part of EU, but they’re going now and that’s their decision.

He continued, “The most important things for us in Ireland is their decision to leave shouldn’t cause any problems in Northern Ireland who actually voted to stay. And that we shouldn’t have a hard border or anything to disrupt the peace process, and we also want to make sure we have frictionless trade.”

Trump lied when he said he wasn’t a supporter of Brexit in Turnberry back in 2016, because the vote supported his own xenophobic immigration policy. Here’s what he actually said via CNN.

“People want to take their country back and they want to have independence in a sense, and you see it in Europe, all over Europe,” Trump said. “They want to take their borders back, they want to take their monetary back. … I think you’re going to have this more and more.”

And then he said Brexit would be a good thing even if the pound goes down.

“If the pound goes down, they’ll do more business,” he said at his Turnberry golf resort. “I think places like Scotland and England, I think you’re going to see a lot of activity. I think it could well turn out to be a positive. What is known is that they’ve taken back their independence. I thought this would be a good thing. Some don’t like (it) and some do like it.”

“They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people,” Trump added. “I hope America is watching, it will soon be time to believe in America again.”

If that isn’t full-throttled support of the Brexit vote, then my uncle is my mother.

After the Irish PM spoke out against Brexit, Trump then attacked the EU, threatening severe stuff economically against them.

Trump said, “We’re talking about trade with the European Union. They’ve been very, very tough over the years,” Trump said. “If they don’t talk to us, we’re going to do something that’s going to be pretty severe economically. We’re going to tariff a lot of their products.”

Recall that Trump hadn’t heard of Brexit just a month before the vote, but he thought it was good idea when he heard about it:

“And Brexit? Your position?” I ask.

“Huh?”

“Brexit.”

“Hmm.”

“The Brits leaving the EU,” I prompt, realizing that his lack of familiarity with one of the most pressing issues in Europe is for him no concern nor liability at all.

“Oh yeah, I think they should leave.”

Fox News, May 2016 before the vote:

“I think the migration has been a horrible thing for Europ. A lot of that was pushed by the EU. I would say that they’re better off without it, personally, but I’m not making that as a recommendation. Just my feeling. I know Great Britain very wellI know, you know, the country very well. I have a lot of investments there. I would say that they’re better off without it. But I want them to make their own decision.”

If you want to read something that should have scared every American into voting for Clinton, that campaign press conference in Scotland promoting his Turnberry property is worth re-reading. The man is, and was, an imbecile on foreign policy. But we knew that.

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A loyal Senator gives his Dear Leader a big wet kiss

by digby

Lindsay Graham today:

There’s two questions I think the public deserves an answer to. Did they short-circuit the Clinton e-mail investigation because they wanted her to win? They knew if they charged her she might lose. Did they start the Russian investigation against Trump as an insurance policy in case he did win?

Those are the two questions that I’ll try to get you answers to…

GRAHAM: We need a special counsel to look at the potential crimes by the Department of Justice — the FBI — regarding the Clinton e-mail investigation and the Russian investigation against Trump early on.

The point is the Congress, me, not going to the House, we’re going to call them all before the committee. Did they try to invoke the 25th Amendment to take the president down? Did they get a warrant against an American citizen (Carter Page) using information they know was flawed? Did they tank the Clinton e-mail investigation because they were afraid if they indicted her she would lose an election they wanted her to win? You’re going to get answers to that, the best I can give them to you.

I think we know that the average Republican is living in Bizarroworld. Graham is just offering up an alternative narrative in which the biggest scandal in the country remains Hillary Clinton and her emails. And the Trump cult is thrilled, none more than Trump who is convinced he can change reality by repeating lies over and over again.

And it seems he’s right.

Friends in low places

by digby

This is absurd:

Last week, news reports surfaced that attorney Bob Costello, a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, reached out to the president’s ex-fixer Michael Cohen last year with a potentially scandalous suggestion: Trump might consider pardoning Cohen amid growing legal problems owing to his business deals and skirting of campaign finance law.

Giuliani’s camp denied the stories, suggesting that the pardon had been floated by Cohen’s campaign. From there, the entire matter degenerated into a he-said-he-said affair.

On Wednesday, however, CNN reported that Costello wrote an April 2018 email to Cohen telling him that he could “sleep well tonight” because he had “friends in high places.”

It seemed, at first blush, possibly like evidence that a pardon—or, at a minimum, a telling wink and nod—had been dangled and that it was Team Trump doing the dangling.

Not so, says Costello.

In an email to The Daily Beast, Costello said that he was not hinting at a Trump pardon when he talked about sleeping well at night. Instead, he was referencing a song by music star Garth Brooks in an attempt to comfort a “suicidal” Cohen. And, he added, there were documents that could confirm as much.

“To repeat myself, Michael Cohen and his counsel’s interpretation of events is utter nonsense,” Costello said. “This statement: ‘Sleep Well tonight, you have friends in high places’ was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a Garth Brooks song, to a client whose state of mind was highly disturbed and had suggested to us that he was suicidal. We were simply trying to be decent human beings. There is no hidden message.”

That is ridiculous.
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Walking and chewing gum
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Nicole Fara Silver via Creative Commons.

One reason House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is tepid about impeachment is she’s trying to keep her caucus focused on the issues that helped them flip the House in November, argues Martin Longman. If they turn all their focus to the president, they’re not talking about health care, jobs, and better government. Besides, he adds, “Pelosi understands that if she acts like she wants something, that alone will make her less likely to get it.”

In that regard, the sitting president is helping her by floating a budget voters will hate.

“We’ve lost the messaging battle on the issue”

Trump ran on protecting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (or are Republicans now calling it Socialist Security?) — without cuts. “Have to do it,” Donald Trump promised in 2015.

Priorities USA found in post-election polling that using cuts to Social Security and Medicare to pay for Trump’s tax cuts topped the list of concerns of new Democratic voters and voters who voted Democrat in 2018 after supporting Trump in 2016.

An leaked internal GOP poll concurs, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green reports:

That study, conducted in September for the Republican National Committee, found that Americans worried the tax law would prompt cuts in Social Security and Medicare, leading “most voters [to] believe that the GOP wants to cut back on these programs in order to provide tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.”

The Republican pollsters wrote to the RNC in a memo, “We’ve lost the messaging battle on the issue.” That was before November’s blue tsunami.

Trump just made it worse.

His proposal to cut $845 billion from Medicare over 10 years, $241 billion from Medicaid, and $25 billion from Social Security is Paul Ryan’s “dream come true,” write Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent:

Trump is seeking an additional $8.6 billion for his border wall — after making the election all about the border (he even sent in the military as a campaign prop) and after losing a government shutdown battle over this same topic, one in which majorities firmly sided with Democrats.

Trump is seeking to block-grant Medicaid, impose work requirements and zero out the Medicaid expansion — after an election in which Democrats routed Republicans in districts across the country by campaigning on a vow to protect Obamacare, which of course includes an open-ended expansion of Medicaid in states that have opted in.

And the Trump budget would make the tax cuts he signed permanent — after Republicans suffered a dramatic repudiation at the polls, despite their effort to sell those tax cuts as their primary accomplishment of the Trump era. Those tax cuts, of course, have led to an explosion of the deficit, repudiating GOP economic theory. Yet this budget only doubles down on that theory and the broader set of priorities embedded in it, deeply cutting spending to help fund tax cuts and his border wall, even as his budget would produce trillion-dollar deficits in coming years.

You might call him a slow learner.

Democrats for all

Meanwhile, the special counsel saga and impeachment rumors eclipse a string of Democratic proposals to enhance people’s lives.

2/3s of all bankruptcies today in the U.S. today are due to medical costs. GoFundMe has become a popular insurance plan. This is simply not acceptable. It's time for a quality, universal health care system in the U.S. It's time for #MedicareforAll. pic.twitter.com/tLKmE5yImU— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) March 13, 2019

Where once Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) carried the Medicare-for-all banner, he is now playing catch-up. Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Wash.) Medicare-for-all bill has the support of 100 House Democrats and goes further than Sanders’ original proposal:

Jayapal’s bill would provide everyone in the United States — including undocumented immigrants — with a full set of health benefits including dental care, long-term care and vision care, all services the Medicare program doesn’t currently cover. Patients wouldn’t be charged co-pays for doctor visits, nor would they have to meet a deductible before coverage kicked in.

Sanders is expected to present an update of his plan that brings it more in line with Jayapal’s. Both agreed last week to add long-term supports and services (LTSS) for disabled Americans. Those features are already included in the “Medicare Extra for All” plan proposed in January by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.)

Jayapal’s bill overhauls the U.S. system so drastically, it is not likely to survive in its current form. More moderate Democrats advocate adding something like a public option to the Affordable Care Act. Nonetheless, strengthening consolidation behind fixing the broken, patchwork of private and public insurance is a sea change. But it’s fighting for column inches with the scandal-a-day Trump circus and impeachment chatter. Good thing Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Happy π (Pi) Day:

Javanka none too bright

by digby

Here’s a sneak peek for Axios readers at “Kushner, Inc.,” by investigative reporter Vicky Ward, out next Tuesday from St. Martin’s Press:

[I]n early May [2017], an aide to Gary Cohn, who had an office on the second floor of the West Wing, noticed a document on his printer. It appeared to be a letter from Trump, firing Comey. It also appeared to have been sent to the wrong printer. …

Trump was livid about the attention the FBI investigation was attracting, but to fire the head of the FBI while it was investigating him was an extraordinarily risky move. … 

Cohn told his aide to take the letter straight to [then-White House counsel] Donald McGahn, who also had an office on the second floor of the White House (and whose printer it had clearly been meant for). Upon receiving it and realizing it had been printed in the wrong place, McGahn said, “Oh, f!@#!

More:

The New York Times’ Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman get the jump on “Kushner Inc.,” a book by investigative journalist Vicky Ward that’s out a week from today: 

She portrays Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner as two children forged by their domineering fathers — one overinvolved with his son, one disengaged from his daughter — who have climbed to positions of power by disregarding protocol and skirting the rules when they can. And Ms. Ward tries to unravel the narrative that the two serve as stabilizing voices inside an otherwise chaotic White House, depicting them instead as Mr. Trump’s chief enablers. … 

Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner wanted to control who could travel on trips funded by the State Department, Ms. Ward wrote, citing a source at the department. Ms. Trump also often requested to travel on Air Force planes when it was not appropriate. When Rex W. Tillerson, the former secretary of state, would deny the requests, the couple would invite along a cabinet secretary, often Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, to get access to a plane.

If Trump really loved his daughter he wouldn’t have ever put her in this position. Of course, if he really loved his kids he wouldn’t have brought them into his private criminal enterprise either. And he would never have run for president and exposed his family to this level of scrutiny. His ego knows no bounds.

His daughter, her husband and his sons are looking at serious criminal liability now. And they aren’t any smarter than Daddy.

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What made Whitaker stop covering?

by digby

Matt Whitaker unexpectedly left the Justice Department a couple of weeks ago. Nobody knows why. He’d been promised a nice sinecure for his services.

Today, this happened:

Nadler said that Whitaker was “directly involved in conversations about whether to fire one or more U.S. attorneys.”

The committee chairman also said that Whittaker “was involved in conversation about the scope of the recusal” of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, from the Michael Cohen investigation, as well as whether the prosecutors there went “too far in pursuing the campaign finance case” that implicated the President.

Nadler also claimed that Whitaker “did not deny” that Trump called Whitaker to discuss Cohen’s case and personnel decisions surrounding it, as had been reported by the New York Times. At a public hearing last month, Whitaker denied a report by CNN that Trump “lashed out” at him about the Cohen investigation in New York.

Nadler, on Wednesday, did not elaborate on what exactly Whitaker said behind closed doors about the phone call.

“He would not say no,” is all Nadler would say.

Nadler claims Whitaker was involved in conversations about whether to fire one or more U.S. attorneys pic.twitter.com/M7T64mAhTo— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) March 13, 2019

Whitaker seems to have decided to be a little less obstructive for some reason.Perhaps, like others before him, he’s seeing the downside to being a Trump toadie. Having this president say something nice about you at a photo op isn’t really helpful when the law is breathing down your neck.

And they should all see Michael Cohen as a cautionary tale. He worked for Trump for a decade, very closely. He was involved with the family. Look where he is now.

Everywhere he goes, Trump leaves a path of destruction in his wake.

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Trump: Up is down, black is white, no collusion

by digby

During White House event, Trump — echoing Manafort's lawyer's lie — falsely claims Judge Amy Berman Jackson exonerated him of collusion.

"That was proven today — no collusion. There was no collusion… it was all a big hoax… Today, again, 'no collusion.'" pic.twitter.com/rGUwil2DyN— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 13, 2019

For the record, here’s what the judges have said:

“The ‘no collusion’ refrain that runs through the entire defense memorandum is unrelated to matters at hand,” [Judge Amy Berman]Jackson said. “The ‘no collusion’ mantra is simply a non-sequitur.”

“The ‘no collusion’ mantra is also not accurate because the investigation is still ongoing,” she added.

Jackson’s comments were similar to what Judge T.S. Ellis III said about collusion earlier this month, when he sentenced Manafort to 47 months in prison for tax and bank fraud charges that were also brought by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Ellis pointed out that Manafort was “not before the court for anything having to do with colluding with the Russian government.” His comments didn’t rule out that collusion happened, nor did it rule out that the Trump campaign may have been been involved in it.

And yet, he comes out and blatantly lies, saying that the judges found him innocent of collusion.

And his boot-licking henchmen in the US Congress back him all the way. And 90 percent of Republican voters still support him.

I still don’t know quite what to do with that.