Month: March 2019

Trump was deeply involved in the inauguration planning

by digby

No wonder it was such a trainwreck:

It was Christmas Day 2016, and President-elect Donald Trump had the Rockettes on his mind.

A few days earlier, James Dolan, chief executive officer of Madison Square Garden, had announced that the famous New York dance troupe would perform as part of Trump’s inaugural festivities. But some of the dancers were balking over Trump and his politics, a recurrent problem for those trying to lure top talent to play the inaugural. In a phone call with Tom Barrack, his longtime friend and chairman of his inaugural committee, Trump asked if the dance troupe was still locked down, according to two people familiar with the conversation. The Rockettes ultimately performed.

The Rockettes dance at one of the inaugural balls for President Trump on Jan. 20, 2017.

It was one of several instances in which Trump weighed in on his inauguration, put on by a committee of his allies that reported raising a record-breaking $107 million. Trump’s interest would be unremarkable except that White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders has lately been emphatic that Trump had no involvement at all in his inaugural committee, which is now beset by federal and state investigations into its fundraising, spending, and relationships with donors.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with the president or the first lady,” Sanders said in December in response to questions about the investigations. “The biggest thing the president did, his engagement in the inauguration, was to come here and raise his hand and take the oath of office. The president was focused on the transition during that time and not on any of the planning for the inauguration.”

But Trump registered his opinion on inaugural plans big and small, from allocation of broadcasting rights to procurement of tablecloths, according to three people familiar with the planning and the transition effort who requested anonymity to describe the decision-making process. When questions arose in planning meetings, Barrack would frequently call Trump so he could weigh in, the people said.

Barrack told staff that Trump wanted to know everything about the inauguration’s finances, an admonition to keep budgets in check, two of the people said. Trump’s interest in keeping tabs on spending was familiar to anyone who’d worked on the campaign, according to the two sources.

The investigations by federal prosecutors in New York and attorneys general in New Jersey and the District of Columbia into the inauguration have been a hard turn for Barrack, the founder and chairman of Colony Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. The scrutiny is still expanding. On March 4, Democrat Jerry Nadler, who leads the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Barrack as part of a wide-ranging probe into Trump. A request that accompanied the letter asked for documents related to the inaugural committee’s work. It also sought documents from the campaign and transition about communications “regarding Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia.”

Trump’s involvement in inaugural planning started early. He wanted to give exclusive broadcasting rights to Fox News, with on-air talent that was broadly supportive of his candidacy, according to three people familiar with his thinking. But in a late November phone call with Trump, Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, argued it would be a mistake to broadcast only to his most loyal supporters, these sources said.

Afterward, Trump told Barrack they’d do deals with both Fox and CNN, two of the people said, but the idea was never executed.

Barrack planned much of the inauguration at Colony’s New York offices, and he was also a key player in the transition effort taking place just across the street at Trump Tower. His dual role allowed him to keep Trump apprised of the inaugural committee’s efforts, according to people familiar with their conversations.

Barrack’s deputy in the inaugural effort was Rick Gates, who previously reported to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman now awaiting sentencing for several crimes. In late November, Trump told Barrack to fire Gates, according to four people familiar with the request. Both Trump and Don McGahn, his campaign lawyer, had concerns about how more than $700,000 for a direct mail contract had been allocated several months earlier, while Manafort and Gates were overseeing plans for the Republican convention, and Trump was still seething about it, two of the people said.

But Gates was never fired, and remained through the inauguration. He later pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI, admitting he committed crimes with Manafort when they worked as political consultants in Ukraine.

“There was no order to fire Gates and this issue involving Gates was not related to the inauguration,” said Tom Green, Gates’s lawyer at Sidley Austin LLP, in an email. “This whole story is very old.”

As the inaugural events drew near, several committee executives gathered in Trump Tower to make a presentation to Trump and the future first lady, Melania, according to three people familiar with the meeting. It was a full download of the plans for the week, the people said.

Occasionally, it could be hard to tell whether some decisions were made at Trump’s behest, or if they were made to preempt potential complaints. In the final days before the inauguration, a contractor called Don’s Johns began lining up portable toilets near event sites. Gates instructed staff to cover the company logo with tape, which prompted the chief operating officer of Don’s Johns to promise to rip it off, an episode that quickly became tabloid fodder.

During the week of the inauguration, Barrack hosted his own “chairman’s dinner,” a high-powered affair with an entertainment roster including Southern rock group Alabama and a Las Vegas dance troupe. The president-elect hadn’t planned to come to Washington for the dinner but flew down for a surprise appearance.

Trump loved Barrack’s dinner, where he was swarmed by foreign diplomats and Republican donors, according to two people who were there. But he found one thing lacking: a robust media presence. Trump wanted “tons” of journalists at his own candlelight dinner the night before he was sworn in, according to people familiar with the order.

In early 2017, Trump reviewed the table arrangements for his own dinner and was galled by what he saw, according to people familiar with his response. Photos showed retro white-leather tables punctuated with metal studs. Trump couldn’t imagine a black-tie dinner without tablecloths, the people said.

Barrack’s staff had already settled on the leather-sheathed tables, but he nonetheless relayed the president’s request.

Trump got his tablecloths.

He made a tidy profit skimming off the top as well … you know he did. He never leaves a penny on the sidewalk.

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This sure looks like witness tampering to me

by digby

… but what do I know?

This strikes me as a big deal. Some unnamed attorneys with ties to Giuliani approached Cohen with a backdoor deal to stay on the Trump team:

In the weeks following the federal raids on former Michael Cohen’s law office and residences last April, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and confidant was contacted by two New York attorneys who claimed to be in close contact with Rudy Giuliani, the current personal attorney to Trump, according to sources with direct knowledge of the discussions.

The outreach came just as Cohen, who spent more than a decade advocating for Trump, was wrangling with the most consequential decision of his life; whether to remain in a joint defense agreement with the president and others, or to flip on the man to whom he had pledged immutable loyalty. The sources described the lawyers’ contact with Cohen as an effort to keep him in the tent.

Cohen generated a bounty of bold-faced headlines during his public testimony before Congress last week. He called the occupant of the Oval Office a racist, a con-man and a cheat and accused the president of TEXTcommitting at least one crime while in office.

MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Michael Cohen says family and country, not President Trump, is his ‘first loyalty’
Yet for all the attention paid to what Cohen was willing to say about the president, his reluctance to answer a question about the last communications he had with Trump or someone acting on his behalf made news on its own. Cohen clammed up and claimed that federal prosecutors were actively probing that very issue.

“Unfortunately, this topic is something that’s being investigated right now by the Southern District of New York, and I’ve been asked by them not to discuss and not to talk about these issues,” Cohen said.

The sources familiar with the contacts said the two lawyers first reached out to Cohen late in April of last year and that the discussions continued for about two months. The attorneys, who have no known formal ties to the White House, urged Cohen not to leave the joint defense agreement, the sources told ABC News, and also offered a Plan B. In the event Cohen opted to exit the agreement, they could join his legal team and act as a conduit between Cohen and the president’s lawyers.

At one point in the discussions, one of the attorneys sent Cohen a phone screenshot to prove they were in touch with Giuliani, the sources said.

During the time of the conversations, Cohen and attorneys for the president and the Trump Organization were engaged in a cooperative, court-supervised effort to examine millions of files seized from the Cohen raids looking for items potentially covered by attorney-client privilege.

With that process ongoing, the New York attorneys talked up to Cohen the value of working with them because of their good relationship with Giuliani.
[…]
Cohen eventually left the joint defense agreement and hired Guy Petrillo, a white-collar defense lawyer in New York, to represent him as he sought to cooperate with Mueller’s probe and other federal and state investigations. The news of Petrillo’s hiring was first reported last June, but it had been rumored for weeks before that.

According to the sources, the attorneys cautioned Cohen that hiring Petrillo, the former head of the criminal division of the Southern District of New York, could effectively end all contact between Cohen and Trump’s legal team. They noted that Petrillo had previously worked with prominent Trump critics, including former FBI Director James Comey and Preet Bharara, the former US Attorney in Manhattan, who had been fired by the president.

As it became clear that Cohen would commit to Petrillo, the attorneys asked Cohen to consider bringing them on board as well, because their purported relationship with Giuliani could serve to keep lines of communication open with President Trump’s legal team. Petrillo apparently opposed the idea of working in tandem, and Cohen ultimately rejected it, the sources said. The two attorneys never formally joined Cohen’s legal team but sent Cohen a bill for legal services, which he did not pay, the sources said.

The charges include fees for at least a half a dozen phone calls between the attorneys and Giuliani, according to two sources who have seen the invoice. One of the final entries is for a late June in-person meeting in New York between at least one of the attorneys and Giuliani. ABC News has not independently reviewed the bill.

The Southern District of New York prosecutors are now in possession of the legal bill along with logs of numerous calls and copies of emails between the attorneys and Cohen, the sources said. During a meeting with Cohen earlier this year, federal prosecutors in New York expressed interest in learning who paid the bill. Cohen said he did not know who, if anyone, did.

I think we probably know the answer to that don’t we?

In my Salon column this morning I mentioned in passing the weird legal arrangement Cohen had with his lawyers and the legal expenses for the document review by the special master being paid by the president. That whole thing went sideways during this period and this explains some of it. They wanted to keep him on the team but I imagine he was rightfully suspicious that whatever they were promising to do for him wasn’t exactly written in stone. He’d worked for Trump for ten years and knew he couldn’t trust him as far as he could throw him. He’s not the brightest bulb but nobody is that stupid.

It’s a cliche that we don’t know everything that’s happened in this case but it happens to be true. There’s always something …

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Trump kitsch is the very best kitsch in the history of the world

by digby

My new painting – “National Emergency”
“They hold the flags they cherish…
And trample America’s interests…
And endanger millions of people…
It is a national emergency.” – Jon McNaughton
For a list of figures standing on the flag: https://t.co/seFYh2IXWV pic.twitter.com/YKRK6oRQuy

— Jon McNaughton (@McNaughtonArt) March 6, 2019

Here’s a video to go along with it:

Of course Trump knew what the 35,000 checks were for

by digby

Gary Legum caught this interesting exchange on CNN this morning:

Who among us does not notice all the $35,000 checks we are signing? During an interview on CNN’s New Day on Wednesday morning, Alisyn Camerota was gobsmacked by the idea that Donald Trump wouldn’t.

“That is absurd!” Camerota gasped to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.

Camerota and co-host John Berman were interviewing Haberman about her latest story for the Times, documenting when the president signed a series of such checks to reimburse his personal fixer, Michael Cohen, for paying off Stormy Daniels.

Haberman and co-writer Peter Baker got hold of copies of six of the checks signed by the president, along with one signed by his son, Donald Trump Jr., and another signed by Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. Cohen has alleged that all the checks were reimbursements to him for fronting the money to Daniels to ensure she would stay silent before the 2016 election about an affair she had with Trump.

Haberman stated that her sources contend Trump may not have known exactly what he was paying Cohen for, and may have thought the checks were for general legal services. This led to Camerota’s outburst.

“That Donald Trump every month would sign by hand a check for $35,000 and not know. This is a man who didn’t even pay his vendors when they completed work for him. This is somebody who doesn’t part with $35,000,” she said, referencing Trump’s legendary cheapness that led him to stiff contractors, lawyers and others who did work for him during his long business career.

Haberman disagreed, saying that wealthy people like Trump sign large checks all the time for personal expenses. Trump very well may have had Cohen doing enough work for him that he genuinely didn’t know exactly what he was paying for. This comment raised the intriguing question, which the reporters briefly touched on, that Trump might have been reimbursing Cohen for other payoffs or activities that he did not want revealed to the public.

Camerota is right.

Here’s Trump in a New York Times interview in 2016:

TRUMP: Now, according to the law, see I figured there’s something where you put something in this massive trust and there’s also — nothing is written. In other words, in theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business, which I am phasing out of very rapidly, you know, I sign checks, I’m the old-fashioned type. I like to sign checks so I know what is going on as opposed to pressing a computer button, boom, and thousands of checks are automatically sent. It keeps, it tells me what’s going on a little bit and it tells contractors that I’m watching.

But he’s just blindly signing checks in the oval office from his personal account without knowing what they are?

Please.

Xenophobia defines him

by digby

More evidence of Trump’s disordered mind:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo grew testy in a recent newspaper interview when asked to explain why President Trump would take North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “at his word” about the death of a U.S. college student taken prisoner in North Korea.

National security adviser John Bolton, making the rounds of Sunday talk shows, flatly refused to offer his personal assessment of whether Trump’s summit with Kim — which ended early and without an agreement — had effectively handed the autocrat an unearned victory.

And Trump and his top trade adviser quibbled in front of reporters and Chinese officials late last month during an Oval Office meeting over how to describe the contracts that would form the basis of any trade deal between the United States and China.

Two years into a presidency that has upended assumptions about the U.S. role in the world and flipped the script on core Republican tenets such as arms control, ardent support for democratic principles and free trade, Trump’s national security officials and Republican allies are still struggling to defend or even explain the president.

“The party is silent on foreign policy for the same reason it’s silent on other issues: fear and trying to keep open lines of influence,” said former senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a Trump critic.

Trump’s foreign policy is part nationalist, part conservative, part isolationist, part militaristic pageantry. He distrusts traditional alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and slaps punitive tariffs on adversaries and allies alike.

In many ways, Trump’s worldview has been boiled down to a mantra lacking labels and ideology: It is what Trump says it is.

Let’s not forget “bomb the shit out of ’em and take the oil” and “to the victors go the spoils.” Also, “spend as much as humanly possible on the military.”

Part of what vexes Republicans is Trump’s unpredictability and insistence on relying on his gut impressions. Several former aides said this side of Trump’s foreign policy was cultivated during the early days of the 2016 campaign, when Trump would sharply criticize the GOP elite for becoming entangled in foreign wars and argue that he could do better as a businessman and outsider who does not have an orthodox method.

“He used to say that everyone else who thought they could send representatives to cut big deals was stupid and that the protocols set up by those administrations seemed designed to fail,” former Trump aide Sam Nunberg said. “There was certainly an element of hubris to how he thought he could be the one who’d be able to solve things that others couldn’t solve.”

At a fundamental level, the GOP has also flailed in adjusting to Trump because most of its leading policy figures have had their ideas forged over decades through the prism of conservatism and a firm belief in a muscular foreign policy during the Cold War and through the administration of George W. Bush.

High-profile Republicans in Congress, such as the late senator John McCain of Arizona, have usually been hawkish defenders of alliances such as NATO.

While some veteran Republican hawks — such as Vice President Pence, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James E. Risch (Idaho) — have become staunch Trump defenders, others have grown frustrated or resigned to Trump’s dominance.

“The Republican Party has been a free-trade party, a party of strategic alliances, and it’s been tough for a lot of Republicans to get used to this,” said Thomas H. Kean (R), a former governor of New Jersey and former chairman of the national 9/11 Commission. “Some have adjusted better than others, and the hawks have taken a step into the background.”

Since 2017, several Trump administration officials — including Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley during their tenures as secretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations, respectively — have frequently appeared uneasy about, if not outright opposed to, aligning with Trump’s most incendiary statements about geopolitics.

Less than two months after joining the administration, Haley said she did not “trust Russia” despite Trump’s outreach to President Vladi­mir Putin. “We should never trust Russia,” she said.

Trump’s apparent reluctance to challenge Kim about the case of Otto Warmbier, the American college student detained in North Korea, caused a breach with Warmbier’s parents, who had previously praised Trump for calling attention to their son’s detention and successfully demanding his 2017 release. Warmbier died days after he returned to the United States with severe brain damage.

At a news conference following his meetings with Kim in Hanoi, Trump said he took the North Korean leader, who intelligence analysts say rules his country with an iron fist, at his word that he did not know what happened to Warmbier until after he fell into a coma.

“He felt badly about it,” Trump said.

In his interview with USA Today, Pompeo bristled when pressed about Trump’s comment — he said he had been “very patient” with the questions, according to the paper — before saying the North Korean regime was responsible for Warmbier’s death.”

It’s hard out here for a toady.

Just as his trade “policy” such as it is, is driven by his infantile playground worldview and simple xenophobia, so too is his foreign policy.

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The trade deficit has exploded under the stable genius

by digby

Oh look, yet another failure:

President Trump’s 2016 campaign didn’t include very many solid predictions of what he might accomplish, but a few nonetheless stand out. Trump insisted he would punish foreign countries that he said were taking advantage of the United States economically and bring manufacturing back to America’s shores. He isolated Mexico and China as particularly bad actors in this light.

We learned on Wednesday morning that, in broad strokes, Trump’s effort has been unsuccessful: The trade deficit has climbed during his presidency.

But it’s worse for Trump’s rhetoric than it appears.

Overall, the deficit hit $621 billion, the widest since 2008. But that was boosted by a net surplus in trade of services, which helps pull the overall trade balance — which is a combination of both services and manufactured goods — upward.

If we consider goods alone — precisely the deficit that Trump pledged would shrink — we see that it has hit its widest margin in decades.

Since the data provided by the Commerce Department only goes back to 1992, this graph obscures the truth: It’s the highest in American history.

See that spike in goods at the end of the graph? That was a drop in the trade deficit in manufactured goods that occurred in November. (Since it was a “drop” in the deficit, which moves downward, the line on the graph moves upward.) Trump even bragged about this change, crediting it to tariffs his administration had imposed. We noted last week that this argument was incorrect. We learned on Wednesday that it was also short-lived.

If we similarly look at the change in the trade balance for various countries since the first quarter of Trump’s presidency, we see how his administration compares to his campaign. In some places, the trade balance has improved (green circles), with the surplus growing or the deficit decreasing. In many, it’s gotten worse — including, dramatically, in Mexico and China.

In fact, the most recent quarterly data by country shows that the manufactured goods deficits with Mexico and China are at their widest points since 1999. In the third quarter of 2018, the goods balance with China was a deficit of $106 billion. With Mexico it was about $24 billion.

The problem here isn’t really with Trump’s administration. The president can have some effect on international trade, but most of it is driven by the massive American economy: Who buys what, from where. The problem was really that Trump made campaign trail promises that he would always have had a challenge in fulfilling.

Not exactly. Trump doesn’t understand how global trade works or what the very real problems are. He thinks it’s some kind of zero-sum game where the president “wins” by “making big deals” that disadvantage foreign competition. He’s very stupid. But we knew that.

His cult understood him to mean that he would bring back all the heave manufacturing jobs to the US that existed in the good old days. He hasn’t accomplished that either.

It was always gibberish. His “trade policy” is really just another expression of his extreme xenophobia. The bad foreigners are “taking advantage” and he’s going to put them in their place. That’s all he knows.

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Cohen and the pardon

by digby

My Salon column today:

A new Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday found that 64 percent of Americans surveyed said they believed Donald Trump had committed crimes before he became president — and that even included 33 percent of Republicans. The country is split on whether or not Trump has committed crimes while in office, which isn’t exactly good news for the president either.

Even more astonishingly, the poll also asked whether people believe the president of the United States or the convicted perjurer Michael Cohen — and by a margin of 50 to 35 percent they said they believed the convicted perjurer. This no doubt comes as a relief to prosecutors and Cohen’s legal team as the president’s team begins to fight back against Cohen’s accusations.

In the House Oversight Committee hearing last week, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican member, kept questioning Cohen about his contention that he had been happy to accept the job as the president’s personal lawyer rather than a job in the administration. His accusation was clear: Cohen was pursuing a vendetta against Trump because he’d been passed over. This made little sense since Cohen has bigger problems these days than whether Trump failed to give him a promotion.

The day after the hearing a British tabloid ran a story claiming that Cohen had written a “manuscript” extolling Trump’s virtues. This turned out to be nothing more than an abandoned book proposal, written before Cohen was targeted by the FBI. That didn’t stop Trump from tweeting about it several times, as if it proved anything that his longtime lawyer had once said all kinds of nice things about his boss and is now saying something quite different in sworn testimony. We knew all that.

Apparently, Trump and the Republicans on the Oversight Committee didn’t understand that Cohen’s testimony under oath was full of admissions that he’d lied and done far worse things for years when he was working at the Trump Organization. He wasn’t hiding it. Cohen once said he’d “take a bullet” for Trump. He now says that was a mistake — and half the country believes him, with another 14 percent keeping an open mind.

There have been various other attempts to show that Cohen is still lying, but not much that might be considered to have teeth. But on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen’s lawyer had approached the president’s legal team, feeling them out over a possible pardon, back in the spring of 2018, right after Cohen was served with several search warrants. Cohen had testified that he had never asked for a presidential pardon and would not accept one.

Cohen and his legal team at that time had an unusual relationship. The Trump Organization had agreed to pay both the law firm representing him and the special master who had been assigned to review the thousands of documents seized in the raids on Cohen’s office and homes to remove those that would involve attorney-client privilege. The bills piled up quickly and Trump reportedly balked at paying them (of course,) so Cohen’s attorneys decided to leave the case last June. By July, Cohen had hired new lawyers and had decided to cooperate.

Those few weeks in which they were all sharing information is when Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, allegedly spoke to Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about a pardon. Ryan isn’t talking. Giuliani is, telling this to the Washington Post:

I can’t confirm or deny whether I had a conversation with any of the attorneys because it’s attorney-client privilege, but what I can say is that I’ve said the same thing to everyone, privately and publicly, which is that the president is not considering pardons at this time. The president, as he has said, will not consider pardons during this time. It’s not on his mind. He’s not thinking about it.

Obviously, they aren’t ruling out pardoning anyone, even today. But that’s been a big part of Trump’s strategy from the beginning. Those search warrants were served on Michael Cohen on April 9. Just 10 days before that, the New York Times had reported that Trump attorney John Dowd had discussed pardons with the lawyers for Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, so the issue was already in the air when Cohen got nabbed.

As things began to heat up with the Cohen case, so did the public talk of pardons. By the end of May, it was a major topic in the press. Trump pardoned right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, and told reporters he was also thinking of commuting the sentence of disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and issuing a pardon to Martha Stewart. Eli Stokols of the Los Angeles Times told Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC Tuesday that the conversation had been off the record but Trump made a point of telling the journalists present that they could print that particular comment.

Trump’s old friend Roger Stone put it all right out there:

It has to be a signal to Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and even Robert S. Mueller III: Indict people for crimes that don’t pertain to Russian collusion and this is what could happen. The special counsel has awesome powers, as you know, but the president has even more awesome powers.

On June 15, after Manafort was sent to jail for witness tampering, Giuliani told the New York Daily News that “when the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons.”

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday on conversations with an anonymous source close to Cohen:

Cohen has not alleged that he was offered an explicit quid pro quo that would tie a pardon to his cooperation with law enforcement, the person said. The person said Cohen felt that Trump’s team was using innuendo and suggestion to imply there would be a benefit for his loyalty.

This tracks with Cohen’s testimony about the way Trump generally does business. Like a mob boss, when he is involved in something nefarious he speaks in code that the people around him understand. When you look back to that period, it’s easy to see why Cohen would believe a pardon was on the table. It’s even easy to see why his lawyer would mention it in a meeting with the joint defense attorneys. The New York Times had already reported that it was open for discussion.

Attorney General William Barr wrote a memo to the White House in which he made the case that a president cannot obstruct justice simply by exercising his executive power. But there is at least one exception in his mind. During Barr’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked whether a president can “offer a pardon in exchange for a witness’s promise not to incriminate the president.” Barr answered, “No, that would be a crime.”

We may never sort out what actually happened with Cohen and the lawyers, and we already know how unlikely it is that Trump will be charged with a federal crime, at least until he leaves office. But you can bet that his last act as president will be to pardon himself for all federal crimes, an action that may or may not pass constitutional muster. He’d still have to take his chances with the state of New York, which isn’t covered by a presidential pardon.

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Focus on where you are
by Tom Sullivan

People ask me if Donald Trump can win reelection in 2020 or which Democrat might beat him. They are taken aback when I haven’t given it much thought. North Carolina has two congressional seats to contest in 2019. Filing opened Monday for the special election to fill the NC-3 seat vacated by the death of Walter Jones. Filing opens next Monday for the do-over election in the now-infamous NC-9.

So many people would rather focus on the presidency. A Jedi master once said of that, “All his life has he looked away … to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.”

Every other new activist I meet at the local Democratic Party office wants to work on messaging, right out of the box, because Democrats suck at it. As if, at this redoubt in the provinces of a state under siege, they will formulate the plan that will vanquish the right’s mighty messaging machine, change the Democratic Party’s national course, find funding for distributing said message, and get buy-in from electeds who’ve never heard of them and who already know something about what their voters want. Howard Dean couldn’t accomplish that as DNC chair.

It’s good to have goals and you’ve got to start somewhere. But they not only want to run before they can walk, they want to dance before they can crawl.

Many progressives would rather elect presidents before they can elect Democrats to city council or the state legislature. Those un-sexy races develop candidates who might eventually undo state gerrymandering, or become U.S. senators who vote to approve the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court or stop the next Brett Kavanaugh. I said often during the 2016 election, President Bernie can’t help me with that. Neither can President Hillary.

Elections are not only contests of ideas, they are contests of skills. Start there.

In distributing my For The Win primer to 2,300 counties in 2018 (see map above), what I found was just how many Democratic county committees where Democrats are uncompetitive don’t have as much as a web presence or listed email addresses. There is a blank band of counties spanning south-central Georgia. They have Facebook pages at least, but cookie-cutter sites someone set up that were promptly abandoned. Little help there.

And what’s with Louisiana? people ask. Former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu visited town last fall and I asked why more parishes did not have any web presence. Oh, they do, Landrieu said. An aide standing aside shook his head, no.

You cannot win if you cannot compete. You cannot compete if you only show up to play once every four years. It might, just might, also help if you show up for the big game having practiced.

That’s more than showing up at the eleventh hour with an attractive candidate, popular policies, and a winning message. Candidates need effective infrastructure in place to support their election bids. Democrats lose in districts they might win for lack of it.

Gerrymandering “with almost surgical precision” has had a deleterious effect on our politics. There is no center. Martin Longman writes at Washington Monthly, “the two parties are too ideologically distinct and internally coherent for there to be any meaningful cross-pollination of ideas or common agendas. We can barely keep the government open.”

Uncompetitive districts at the state and federal level means bipartisanship to get things done has no reward. It also means there is no incentive for attempting to compete where the odds of winning are low, which impedes development of supporting Democratic campaign infrastructure and perpetuates the legislative stalemate.

As the study we looked at last week found, “A party disadvantaged by gerrymandering fails to contest more districts. The candidates it does nominate have weaker credentials. Donors give less money to these candidates. And voters are less inclined to support them.”

But in many places across the country where Democrats cannot compete gerrymandering is not to blame, nor is their being conservative districts. My argument has never been that Democrats should waste time chasing white nationalists or whatever we’re calling them this week. It is that Democrats cannot regain ground by abandoning it. For years, little support has gone to red-state Democratic redoubts to help them develop the skills and fundraising chops to build teams that can win again. Such places do not win because they have no “game” and have forgotten how to win.

And because progressives newly activated by the recent troubles are are too busy worrying about the presidential race. Never their minds on where they are.

What’s up with Ivanka?

by digby

I wish I knew why Ivanka needs a top security clearance but apparently, Trump thinks she does:

President Donald Trump pressured his then-chief of staff John Kelly and White House counsel Don McGahn to grant his daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump a security clearance against their recommendations, three people familiar with the matter told CNN.

The President’s crusade to grant clearances to his daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, rankled West Wing officials.

While Trump has the legal authority to grant clearances, most instances are left up to the White House personnel security office, which determines whether a staffer should be granted one after the FBI has conducted a background check. But after concerns were raised by the personnel office, Trump pushed Kelly and McGahn to make the decision on his daughter and son-in-law’s clearances so it did not appear as if he was tainting the process to favor his family, sources told CNN. After both refused, Trump granted them their security clearances.

The development comes on the heels of Thursday’s New York Times report that President Trump ordered Kelly to grant Kushner a top secret security clearance despite concerns raised by intelligence officials. The President has denied he had any role in Kushner receiving a clearance.

The latest revelation also contradicts Ivanka Trump’s denial to ABC News three weeks ago, when she said her father had “no involvement” regarding her or Kushner’s clearances.

Several sources told CNN it is feasible that she was unaware of the red flags raised during her background check process, as well as the President’s involvement in it. According to a source familiar with her process, she “did not seek, nor have, outside counsel involved in her process as no issues were ever raised.” A separate person added that she was notified by career officials that her clearance had been granted.

Right. She’s so important that she needs a top security clearance but she had no idea that Daddy had ordered that she get one despite the determination of the intelligence community that she should not have it. 

But aside from all that — why shouldn’t she have it?  Maybe all the fraud she participated in with those Trump branded condo developments?  That sort of thing makes you vulnerable to blackmail…

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Yes, the convicted liar is more credible than the President of the United States

by digby

New polling from Quinnipiac:

President Donald Trump committed crimes before he became president, American voters say 64 – 24 percent in a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.

Republicans say 48 – 33 percent that President Trump did not commit crimes before he was president, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University National Poll finds. Every other listed party, gender, education, age and racial group says by wide margins that Trump committed crimes.

But U.S. voters are divided 45 – 43 percent on whether Trump committed any crimes while he has been president. A presidential candidate paying money to hide a negative story during a campaign, and not disclosing that payment, is unethical and a crime, 40 percent of voters say. Another 21 percent say it is unethical, but not a crime, and 20 percent say it is not unethical.

So most people know he was a crook in business but aren’t sure if he’s committed actual crimes while in office.

But they aren’t at impeachment yet even though they know Trump is an inveterate liar:

Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, American voters say 59 – 35 percent. But Congress should do more to investigate “Michael Cohen’s claims about President Trump’s unethical and illegal behavior,” voters say 58 – 35 percent.

American voters believe Cohen more than Trump 50 – 35 percent. Cohen told the truth, 44 percent of voters say, while 36 percent say he did not tell the truth.

Voters approve 41 – 36 percent of the way Democrats in Congress handled Cohen’s testimony before the U.S. House Oversight Committee. Voters disapprove 51 – 25 percent of the way Republicans handled the Cohen hearing.

“Cloudy and 38. The future of Donald Trump’s presidency and the percentage of people who support him mirror the March weather in D.C.,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

“The answers to two survey questions deliver a double-barreled gut punch to the honesty question.”

“When two-thirds of voters think you have committed a crime in your past life, and almost half of voters say it’s a tossup over whether you committed a crime while in the Oval Office, confidence in your overall integrity is very shaky,” Malloy added.

This poll shows him still mired in the 30s approval rating:

American voters give Trump a negative 38 – 55 percent job approval rating, compared to a negative 38 – 57 percent in a January 29 Quinnipiac University National Poll.

Voters say 65 – 30 percent that Trump is not honest, his worst grade ever on that character trait. He gets negative grades on other traits:

• 39 – 58 percent that he has good leadership skills;
• 39 – 58 percent that he cares about average Americans;
• 22 – 71 percent that he is a good role model for children.

Trump gets mixed or negative grades for handling key issues:

• 49 percent approve his handling of the economy and 45 percent disapprove;
• Negative 38 – 56 percent for handling foreign policy;
• Negative 40 – 58 percent for handling immigration issues.

His only positive rating is on the economy and he doesn’t even get 50%.

I think people are wrong about impeachment with this one. I always tend to believe it’s better to use election to get rid of miscreants. But Trump is an exception and I think impeachment is important even if it doesn’t succeed in the Senate.

Regardless of whether they impeach Trump, the investigations are essential. If there is any chance of moving forward in a positive way, this has to be done. If there’s no accountability for someone as clearly dishonest, unethical and criminal as Donald Trump, I think the whole experiment in democracy is pretty much doomed.