Worse than her emails? Impossible.
by digby
Dem. @RepRoKhanna calls reports Kushner was using WhatsApp to communicate with foreign officials “ironic": Pres. Trump “ran his whole presidential campaign accusing Hillary Clinton of having a private server. … Here you have something that’s much worse.” https://t.co/gynmzazL6p pic.twitter.com/whTzaXMk8G— CNN (@CNN) March 22, 2019
Well no. It’s totally fine because Jared isn’t Clinton.
See how easy that is?
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He’s touchy about Conway because he’s worried about dementia
by digby
Conway and McCain’s feuds nonetheless revealed a handful of truths about the president and his White House, starting with the president’s hair-trigger sensitivity over accusations of mental instability. After the author Michael Wolff raised questions about Trump’s mental health in a 2018 book, the president lashed out — despite warnings that he was only inflating Wolff’s book sales — and insisted that he was a “stable genius.” Those who know him say these barbs are a point of particular sensitivity, and his dispute with Conway appears to have originated from the attorney’s recent suggestions that Trump is mentally ill.
After tweeting images from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the text medical professionals use to diagnose mental illness — listing the characteristic of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Conway charged that Trump is “unfit and incompetent for the esteemed office you temporarily hold.”
“I don’t think that Trump is laughing at that,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump casino executive who has become a critic of the president. “He takes that stuff pretty personally.”
The two disputes also highlight Trump’s inclination to personalize disagreements and disputes, roping in family members and friends and working to divide them against one another to inflict maximum damage.
The Conway-Trump grudge match grew even more heated midday Wednesday when Trump stopped to take questions from reporters before boarding Air Force One en route to Ohio and described George Conway as “a tremendous disservice to a wife and family.”
The accusation mirrored the president’s response through the winter to the cooperation of his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, with federal prosecutors. The president took aim at Cohen’s father-in-law, retweeting a conservative author who had suggested he was a “loan shark” and telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in mid-January that rather than provide investigators with information on him, Cohen should “give information maybe on his father-in-law, because that’s the one that people want to look at.”
“He makes it personal so that it hurts a little bit more. That’s when he enjoys it,” O’Donnell said. “He’s very calculating in that way.”
I have written this before, I think he takes it personally because he is terrified that he’s going to get Alzheimer’s disease like his father. And maybe, he’s actually having some symptoms, some of which are manifesting themselves in ways we don’t know. But even if he isn’t, he’s got to be acutely aware that it could be coming.
I don’t see evidence of it, personally. I think his psychological problems are something quite different. He’s always been a pathological narcissist and he’s undoubtedly got some other serious problems. The stress of the job may be making all that worse. But his problems seem to be different than the dementia I’ve seen in my life. (But what do I know?)
In any case, whether he’s feeling some symptoms or is just worrying about getting them, it woudn’t be surprising that he’d get very defensive on that subject.
Also, he’s an asshole.
But there’s no excuse for this:
Kellyanne Conway was drawn into the dispute on Wednesday, seemingly forced to choose between her husband and her boss. She chose the latter, perhaps one reason White House aides say her standing with Trump has not been diminished by her husband’s bitter exchanges with the president.
“You think he shouldn’t respond when somebody, a nonmedical professional, accuses him of having a mental disorder? You think he should just take that sitting down?” Conway told POLITICO.
I have no idea what game she’s playing, but to take the side of Donald Trump over her own husband and father of her four kids is just … awful. If she couldn’t bear to lose her stupid job and stick up for her spouse, she could at least have kept her mouth shut. Of course, this may just be part of their good cop-bad cop strategy, which at this point is just … weird.
I still think she’s the infamous op-ed writer … setting herself up as the hero when the whole thing falls apart. Whether this is part of that I couldn’t say.
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More incitement from the president?
by digby
“I have a deputy who appoints a man who will make a determination on my presidency. The people will not stand for it.”
“The people” are his people, of course. Either that or he truly is so delusional that he believes the whole country is behind him regardless of the evidence.
He doesn’t know what’s going to happen. But he’s laying the groundwork in case it goes wrong. Discrediting the Special Counsel because he wasn’t elected is a new one but he’s saying it a lot even though it dosn’t make sense. (It’s also short-sighted. Impeachment is done by people who are elected so he’s inadvertantly legitimizing the idea that the congress should pursue it.)
And part of that groundwork is prepping his followers to … do something.
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The Fox News Factor is everything to Trump
by digby
President Donald Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden this week hosting Brazil’s new President and beamed from ear to ear as this fellow right-wing demagogue parroted his favorite catch phrase “fake news” in front of the White House press corps assembled before him. Trump said he was very proud to hear the president use the term and he went off on an extended rant against social media as well as certain networks, promising once again to “do something about it.”
He complained again last weekend about Saturday Night Live mocking him and suggested that the FEC and the FCC look into stopping them from doing that. His top henchman in the House of Representatives, Devin Nunes, just this week filed a 250 million dollar lawsuit against some small time Twitter parody accounts that made fun of him and Trump Junior is writing op-eds complaining about twitter and Facebook censorship.
The “fake news” charge is nothing new, of course. Trump has used the phrase even more than “no collusion” and “witch hunt” over the past two years, clearly trying to indoctrinate Americans into believing that they must believe him and his allies and no one else. He has said it outright:
“Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
The attack on social media stems from a daft conspiracy theory that says the various platforms are censoring conservatives. It’s not true. They don’t know how the internet works and they thrive on victimization and conspiracy theories so this fits in nicely with their worldview. Attacking satire and humorists for being disrespectful to people who are in power, as Trump and Nunes are doing, is a new thing but it is obviously designed to intimidate. Trump is known for doing that.
But for all the complaining about bias and fake news, there actually is a plethora of right-wing propaganda on the internet and we’ve seen some disastrous results with the burgeoning international white identity movement using it for inspiration and organization. The Christchurch killer was steeped in it and obviously drew much of his murderous ideology from participating in chatrooms and forums.
Even Fredrick Brennan, the 25 year old creator of the website 8chan (which he cut ties with in December) expressed regret saying, “it was very difficult in the days that followed to know that I had created that site.” He told the Wall Street Journal he believed it could happen again.
Still, as dangerous as these propaganda outlets are and as much necessary attention as we pay to such things as Facebook algorithms and twitter bots, they really aren’t the major propaganda tools that are responsible for the political culture that results in a president like Donald Trump. The president’s hold on his true believers, which number in the tens of millions, isn’t a consequence of his twitter feed. The medium he has truly mastered and which seems to be the one that has the greatest influence on the people who love him is good old-fashioned television.
New polling by a group called Navigator, published by the Daily Beast, shows that Fox News viewers hold very different views than everyone else. Indeed, they seem to be indoctrinated just a thoroughly as those 8chan posters. The poll surveyed more than 1,000 registered voters to determine the beliefs of people who watch Fox news and compare them to people who don’t. The portrait that emerges shows a group of people who took Donald Trump to heart when he said “stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from the fake news.”
They conclude, “there is an alternate reality in American politics, and it plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country.”
The other word for this alternate reality is propaganda. One can see this most clearly in this one finding. Among Fox viewers:
78% believe the Trump administration has accomplished more than any administration in history, compared to 17% of all others.
This is an absurd belief but it’s one that is constantly promoted by the network and the president himself in the feedback loop between the network and the White House. The Trump base believes this despite there being no evidence at all, in the real world, that it is true.
There has been some interesting reporting by Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair in recent days about changes at Fox as Lachlan Murdoch steps up to take over the empire now that the new Fox Corp. began public trading as the new parent of Fox News following the sale of the 21st Century Fox film and TV division to Disney. Apparently the younger Murdoch isn’t keen about their role as Trump TV. There are rumors that some of Trump’s most vociferous supporters might be leaving the network, Sean Hannity being the most likely.
Trump himself has been pushing hard from his twitter feed for Fox to keep the faith, obviously exhorting his loyal followers to push the network to stay on the team:
Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro. The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country. They have all out campaigns against @FoxNews hosts who are doing too well. Fox …..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019
….must stay strong and fight back with vigor. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country. The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them. Be strong & prosper, be weak & die! Stay true….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019
At the moment Trump has a stranglehold on the Republican party. And even if Fox were to change direction there’s no way to know for sure that the Trump supporters’ alternate reality wouldn’t be maintained by conservative talk radio and online journalism. But it’s doubtful. Fox is by far the most important influence on Trump’s most loyal voters, particularly the older, white faction that makes up such an important part of the GOP base. These are not the people deeply enmeshed in the trolling, “shitposting” culture of the online right. They are just standard right-wingers who have been inculcated with non-stop Trump fanfiction for the past three years.
Reporters often say that GOP officials are stymied about how to wrestle the GOP base away from Trump, that his popularity keeps them under his thumb and unable to fight back. What profiles in courage they are. But they may be saved by the Murdochs. If they decide to sell their much smaller Fox Corp, as is widely believed to be the plan, Trump could lose his most important propaganda arm. Whether his followers can ever be deprogrammed remains to be seen but it will definitely never happen unless Fox News changes its tune.
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Doom. DOOM! they say
by Tom Sullivan
President “NO COLLUSION” has been tossing around the term “socialism” lately. Not like collusion maybe, but frequently enough. With the unflappable freshman Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y., a.k.a. AOC) identifying as a democratic socialist as well as presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Donald Trump believes attacking this straw man will make Democrats’ brand toxic in 2020.
The press took Trump’s bait, as it will, and asks Democrats running for president if they are “capitalists” or “socialists,” as if the question is at all illuminating. I’m waiting for Democrats to reply if by making the charge Republicans are committed to eliminating “Socialist Security.”
Modern countries are a blend of the two systems. Capitalism may be king on Wall Street, but the traffic lights at the intersections, the roads and schools are public, as is law enforcement, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and all those farm and industrial subsidies. No market fundamentalist insists true capitalists save for their own carrier strike group.
Catherine Rampell notes we still have private property and “government does not control the means of production.” Trump’s attempt to red bait Democrats with the socialist label is falling flat. Most Americans don’t even know what the term means:
In fact, in a Gallup poll last year that asked Americans to explain their understanding of the term “socialism,” responses were all over the map. The most common answer, volunteered by about a quarter of respondents, was that it had something to do with “equality” — “equal standing for everybody, all equal in rights, equal in distribution,” something to that effect. Smaller percentages mentioned communism, government control of utilities or even “talking to people, being social, social media, getting along with people.”
The term might trigger Cold Warriors who haven’t died off, Rampell writes, but Trump already had that vote locked up:
Whether it will scare younger people is a separate question. A majority of adults under age 30 already view the term “socialism” positively; about 40 percent of those ages 30 to 49 say the same.
That might be because of dissatisfaction with the results of the existing (predominantly capitalist) economic system. But it might perversely also be because Republicans have been so relentless in their alarmist attacks on socialism — or, rather, “socialism.”
People’s dissatisfaction stems from the fact the country’s capitalist side is no longer functioning as one. In our resurgent Gilded Age, “Checks and balances such as antitrust enforcement, regulation of major industries, progressive taxation and unions have been gutted since the 1980s,” wrote in the Seattle Times. Capitalism, like our democracy, is broken. The question at hand is what to do about our slide into oligarchy.
AOC’s proposal for a 70 percent top tax bracket and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s for a wealth tax hark back to days when the John Birch Society tried to brand the former WWII supreme commander of Allied forces in Western Europe, President Dwight Eisenhower, a communist. The top federal tax bracket then was over 90 percent.
Attacks on Democrats as socialists (and Democratic policies as socialism) are even older. So is AOC’s getting right back in the faces of critics:
For the last 17 years [Republicans] have called every new Democratic measure “socialism” or “communism,” and they have made constant predictions of doom and disaster. The plans and proposals that we have advanced for improving the conditions of the people of this country have been greeted by these same old scare tactics during all these years.
[…]
For the past 17 years, the same outcry has greeted every proposal advanced by the Democratic Party–whether it has been for better housing, social security, rural electrification, farm price supports, minimum wages, or any other program for the general welfare of the people.
[…]
The Democratic Party is going right ahead to meet the needs and carry out the aspirations of the American people.
“For the past 17 years” refers to 1933. President Harry S. Truman said that in 1950. Two years later, he was even more in-your-face:
“Creeping socialization”–or “creeping socialism”–those are the words that give the game away. Socialism–sometimes “creeping” and sometimes “galloping”–is the slogan and patented trademark of the special interest lobbies. Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Now listen to this:
Socialism is what they called public power.
Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for anything that helps all the people.
What Republicans really mean, Truman said, is “Down with Progress.”
Warren proposes reforming the un-capitalism decades of bad policy has created. She wants to make capitalism work for everyone again, not just for the rich. Naturally, the conservative Heritage Foundation brands her proposal, say it with me….
Oh look. Nunes thinks they’re “very fine people” too
by digby
BREAKING: Video of Devin Nunes defending protestors who yelled the "n-word" at US Rep John Lewis: "I think people have every right to say what they want. If they wanna smear someone, they can do it." Nunes is terrible. Dug up @TheDemCoalition. From 2010. pic.twitter.com/lk51mSSGW8— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) March 21, 2019
Scott Dworkin at the Democratic Coalition unearthed an old video of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) where the thin-skinned Congressman appears to defend tea party protesters using the N-word to refer to civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA).
The protest happened around the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare. Lewis joined Congressman Rev. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) and Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) and later noted that the tea party members were shouting insults that included the racist term.
During a C-SPAN episode of “Washington Journal,” Nunes was asked about the protesters, where he claimed they had “every right to say what they want.” He said the N-word was “not appropriate,” but didn’t call them out for their racist language. He excused away the bigotry by claiming the protesters were just emotional about the healthcare law.
“Can you give us a sense of the flavor of the debate on the floor, and what you’re hearing?” asked host Steve Scully. “A lot of angry comments yesterday aimed at a couple of your colleagues including Barney Frank and Congressman John Lewis, using the N-word as some of the protesters jeered at him as he walked through the halls of the Capitol.”
Nunes explained the protesters were only losing it because of President Barack Obama’s leadership, which he claimed was dictatorial.
“Yeah, well, I think that when you use totalitarian tactics, people begin to act crazy,” Nunes claimed. “I think there’s people that have every right to say what they want. If they wanna smear someone, they can do it.”
He went on to say that he’d “stop short” of calling “the 20,000 people who were protesting” racists and that “not all of them were doing that.”
Scully explained that those were just “some” of the stories and “some of the comments” overheard by the leaders.
“Yeah, of course, and I think that the left loves to play up a couple of incidents here or there, anything to draw attention away from what they are really doing,” Nunes said.
It’s not hard to see why he became Trump’s number one henchman is it?
Nothing personal, strictly business
by digby
Remember this major scandal of the Carter administration?
In late 1978 and early 1979, Billy Carter visited Libya three times with a contingent from Georgia. He eventually registered as a foreign agent of the Libyan government and received a $220,000 loan. (Edwin P. Wilson claimed he had seen a telegram showing that Libya paid Billy Carter $2 million.) This led to a Senate hearing on alleged influence peddling which the press named Billygate. A Senate sub-committee was called To Investigate Activities of Individuals Representing Interests of Foreign Governments (Billy Carter—Libya Investigation). On August 4, 1980, President Jimmy Carter wrote: “I am deeply concerned that Billy has received funds from Libya and that he may be under obligation to Libya. These facts will govern my relationship with Billy as long as I am president. Billy has had no influence on U.S. policy or actions concerning Libya in the past, and he will have no influence in the future.”
He didn’t have any influence on Libya policy. Obviously. Billy was a very small time hustler who didn’t know Libya from Connecticut and nobody ever thought the president would actually listen to anything he said.
This from another brother,however, is very different:
In late October 2017, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser, dropped into Saudi Arabia for an unannounced visit to the desert retreat of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was in the process of consolidating his power. The two men talked privately late into the night.
Just a day earlier, Mr. Kushner’s younger brother, Josh, then 32, was flying out of the kingdom.
Jared came to talk policy, but Josh was there on business.
The founder of an eight-year-old venture capital firm, Josh Kushner had spent the three days before his brother’s arrival at an investor conference, where Prince Mohammed had promised to spend billions of dollars on a high-tech future for Saudi Arabia.
As others sat through speeches in a gilded conference hall, several participants said, the younger Mr. Kushner frequently ducked out for more exclusive conversations with Saudi officials.
Some government ethics lawyers say those conversations — never hidden, but not previously reported — create the appearance of a potential conflict of interest. Although Jared Kushner severed his ties with his brother’s company and divested his interest in his brother’s funds around the time he entered the White House, he was nonetheless discussing American policy with the rulers of the kingdom at virtually the same time that his brother was talking business with their top aides.
There is no doubt that Saudi officials have been playing with brother Jared in a big way, for a lot of reasons. There is evidence they even ran a blockade against American ally Qatar, with Trump’s approval, to pressure the Qataris to lend the Kushner family a boatload of money.
By all accounts Joshua Kushner is not his brother and is antagonistic toward Trump. But I’d guess that didn’t get in the way of trying to make a deal knowing his brother was deep in the Saudis pocket. Nothing personal, strictly business.
Trump, Ivanka and Jared refused to divest themselves of their global businesses with billions of dollars putting American national security at risk.
Jummy Carter, on the other hand, was forced to sell his family’s peanut farm so as to ensure there was no appearance of conflict of interest.
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Health care FTW
by digby
This piece by Paul Waldman about where the Democrats are heading on health care is very good news, as far as I’m concerned.
Something quite remarkable is happening right now among Democrats on the issue of health care: After an intense period in which rhetoric, policy and politics were all seemingly in flux, the party is rapidly moving toward something like consensus on where it ought to go next on its most critical domestic priority.
As you may know, almost every Democrat running for president has said he or she supports Medicare-for-all, but most of them (with the exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has been proposing a single-payer plan for years) have been vague about what that might mean. Maybe private insurance will be eliminated, or maybe not; maybe people will continue to get coverage through their employers, or maybe not. They will all presumably present specific plans eventually, but they haven’t yet.
What they are doing is circling closer and closer to something that doesn’t yet have a name, but which I’ll call “Medicare For Anyone.” The fundamental difference between that and Medicare-for-all is that instead of eliminating (or minimizing) private insurance and putting everyone into the same pool, it would open up Medicare or something like it to anyone who wants it.
In most of the variations that have been proposed, large numbers of Americans (newborns, people with low incomes, the uninsured) are automatically enrolled to make sure they’re covered. Employers can choose to stay with the insurance they have, or put their employees into the government plan. It’s paid for through a combination of taxes and premiums, with low-income people paying nothing and premiums rising with income.
For the moment I won’t get too deep into the policy details. But if you’re looking for a full version of it, there’s a proposal from Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Jan Schakowsky called “Medicare for America” that is probably what most Democratic candidates will either specifically endorse or which will be very similar to what they present.
But if you want to sum it up in the most simplified form, this kind of proposal is like Medicare-for-all, except instead of everyone being put into Medicare, there will still be private insurance plans that people can stay with if they want to. If the policy heart of it is that everyone gets insured, the political heart is that it’s voluntary.
Beto O’Rourke is already saying that the DeLauro-Schakowsky plan is what he wants. Pete Buttigieg says he supports Medicare-for-all either actually for all or “as a public option to buy in,” but either way with private insurance remaining involved as it is in the current Medicare program.
And Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said at an MSNBC town hall on Monday night that she wants to “allow anyone to buy into Medicare at a price they can afford. Something like 4-5 percent of income. They buy in, so it’s an earned benefit, and they are qualified automatically for Medicare.” She concluded, “Let’s have a not-for-profit public option compete for the business. I think over a couple years, you’re going to transition to single payer.”
That’s also something you’ll hear from multiple candidates, not just because it’s a reasonable prediction of what would happen, but also because it’s a way of appealing to strong single-payer supporters. But not necessarily from all of them. In fact, a public option or a Medicare buy-in or Medicare For Anyone could encompass a wide variety of plans, some more sweeping than others, depending on how it’s designed.
Not every non-Sanders candidate is endorsing Medicare For Anyone. Elizabeth Warren’s position at the moment is essentially that we’ll get everyone together and work it out, so long as we find a way to cover everyone at lower cost. But I can confidently predict that in the coming days, candidates who have also been vague on the question are going to be drawn to this idea like iron filings to a magnet.
Why is this where the party is arriving? There are three main reasons. First, this kind of plan satisfies, at least for the most part, the progressive desire to insure everyone and eliminate the pathological features of the current system. Second, it addresses what is probably the greatest vulnerability of single-payer plans: the fear of change. It’s foolish to think that fear can be eliminated through sufficient logical persuasion, and Republicans will absolutely exploit it when they fight against whatever Democrats propose. So the fact that joining Medicare would be voluntary is essential to these proposals.
And finally, it’s easy to explain. I cannot stress enough how important this is. The ACA was an absolute nightmare to explain to people, which left it vulnerable to all the demagoguery and lies Republicans could muster. Like Medicare-for-all, Medicare For Anyone is just three words, and it requires no explanation at all. You know what Medicare is, right? It’s the program your grandmother is on, the one she loves. Now anyone can join. That’s it.
To be clear, there won’t be complete consensus, since many Democrats still favor an immediate move to single-payer, like the one Sanders has proposed, or the one offered by Rep. Pramila Jayapal. And there are others who have proposed more modest expansions of Medicare. But if and when the presidential candidates come together around a basic idea, that becomes the party’s position — and the one the next Democratic president will have to pursue.
That’s what happened the last time we went through this. After Bill Clinton’s health reform failed in 1994, Democratic politicians and policy wonks spent a decade and a half working to devise a health-care reform they thought would be effective and politically possible. The result was a combination of expanded Medicaid, subsidies for those with low incomes, individual and employer mandates, and stronger regulation of insurers to protect patients.
In the 2008 primaries, all the leading candidates proposed something like that, and it eventually became the ACA. But now, instead of spending 15 years working it out, Democrats are trying to do it in just a couple of years. And just as they were then, they’re trying to adjust based on what went wrong on both policy and politics in the last reform.
There are going to be a lot of details to debate. But this is where Democrats are heading.
This makes sense. I don’t know whether we will end up with single payer in the long run. But we do have a large number of people already in government-guaranteed health care: Medicare, Medicaid and the VA. The idea here is to take the ACA one step further and add the Medicare opt-in to the menu for people who aren’t covered by any of those or their employers. I suspect that this will end up being part of the menu for employers as well, making Medicare buy-in a benefit that employers pay for their employees. Over time most people will probably gravitate to the program because of the affordability and seamlessness of it.
This is a big step that the Democrats can get done right away if they win a majority.
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But his WhatsApps!
by digby
House Democrats are raising new concerns about what they say is recently revealed information from Jared Kushner’s attorney indicating that the senior White House aide has been relying on encrypted messaging service WhatsApp and his personal email account to conduct official business.
The revelation came in a Dec. 19 meeting — made public by the House Oversight and Reform Committee for the first time on Thursday — between Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Rep. Trey Gowdy, the former chairman of the oversight panel, and Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell.
Cummings, who now leads the Oversight Committee, says in a new letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone that Lowell confirmed to the two lawmakers that Kushner “continues to use” WhatsApp to conduct White House business. Cummings also indicated that Lowell told them he was unsure whether Kushner had ever used WhatsApp to transmit classified information.
“That’s above my pay grade,” Lowell told the lawmakers, per Cummings’ letter.
Lowell added, according to Cummings, that Kushner is in compliance with recordkeeping law. Lowell told the lawmakers that Kushner takes screenshots of his messages and forwards them to his White House email in order to comply with records preservation laws, Cummings indicated.
I’m sure you all remember how traitorous it was for Hillary Clinton to decide which emails to forward to the State Department.
Kushner, whom the president charged with overseeing the administration’s Middle East policies, reportedly communicates with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman via WhatsApp.
The details of the discussion about Kushner’s email and messaging practices came as part of a new Oversight Committee demand for a slew of new documents from Kushner and other current and former White House officials, including his wife Ivanka Trump, former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, and former top strategist Stephen Bannon.
I’m sure that’s fine.
And I think it’s really awesome that the scourge of Banghazi, Trey Gowdy is still licking Trump’s boots even after finding that out. He quit the Congress so there’s no excuse about “fear of the base.”
According to Cummings, Lowell also told him and Gowdy that Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter who also serves as a top adviser, conducts official White House business through her personal email account. Cummings suggested that Ivanka Trump was in violation of the Presidential Records Act because she was not forwarding emails to her official White House account that deal with government-related business.
Cummings also told Cipollone that the committee obtained a document showing that McFarland was using an AOL.com account to conduct official White House business. Cummings said the document shows that McFarland was in communication with Tom Barrack, a longtime Trump confidant and the chairman of the president’s Inaugural Committee, about transferring “sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.”
Barrack pitched the plan to Bannon through Bannon’s personal email account, according to Cummings.
We already know what the Republicans would do if they found out a Democrat had used a personal email server. “Lock her up!”
Take a moment to ponder what would be happening if a different president’s top aide and son-in-law was using a personal encrypted application to communicate with the leader of a foreign country.
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The problem is Fox
by digby
 |
| It’s Fox viewers who think Trump is the greatest president in history. No one else does. |
I know most of you don’t watch Fox. I watch as much as I can take just to keep up. It’s always been bad, but it’s much worse than it was in the past. Since Ailes checked out, the network has become Trump TV, period. He would not be at 40% in the polls if it weren’t for Fox:
Almost 8 in 10 Republicans who watch Fox News say Donald Trump is the most successful president in history.
That was just one finding of a new poll showing the deep ideological divide between Fox News viewers and everyone else. The poll results were provided to The Daily Beast by Navigator, a project launched by Democratic groups Global Strategy Group and GBA strategies. They surveyed more than 1,000 registered voters online with the goal of examining the differences in views between Fox News viewers and non-Fox viewers.
It comes after Democratic strategists have debated whether candidates and officeholders should appear on Trump’s favorite cable news channel to win over its regular viewers. Candidates like Sen. Amy Klobuchar have deliberately made efforts to speak to Fox News viewers, and the Democratic National Committee briefly entertained the idea of hosting a debate on Fox News before deciding against it.
But Thursday’s survey shows why many in the party have largely written off the network’s viewers as a lost cause.
The survey’s authors argue that the network presents an “alternate reality” in American politics, and plays an “outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country.”
The data show numerous ways in which Fox News-watching Republicans have radically different beliefs from non-Republicans and even Republicans who do not watch Fox News.
Republicans who don’t watch Fox News, for example, are over twice as likely to believe climate change is man-made, compared to just 12 percent of Republicans who watch Fox News. According to the poll, 78 percent of Republicans who watch Fox News believe Trump has accomplished more than any other president in history, compared to 49 percent of Republicans who do not watch Fox News. And 79 percent of Republican Fox News viewers said they believed people within the FBI and US intelligence agencies were trying to sabotage Trump, compared to 49 percent of non-Fox News viewing Republicans and just 8 percent of non-Fox News viewing registered voters who did not identify as Republican.
“Where Republican partisan affiliation and the Fox News echo-chamber overlap, there is near unanimity on the politics and even the facts defining the Trump presidency. This is the ‘FoxHole,’” the pollsters said. “What the Navigator data demonstrates is this particular segment of the public is so vastly different from the rest, it may serve progressives best to focus their attention on everyone else.”
Thursday’s poll also found that Fox News viewers say they are much more aware of many progressive issues because Fox News has covered the issues more often than other news sources. The survey found that twice as many Fox News viewers reported being aware of the Green New Deal compared to those who do not watch Fox News, because the right-wing network’s personalities endlessly lambaste the Democratic proposal as a plan to implement socialism.
“When evaluating national polling about progressive items like the Green New Deal, it should be acknowledged that opinion can often be driven by this highly aware, but relatively narrow slice of Fox News-watching Republicans,” according to the survey’s findings.
But while the numbers may show why many Democratic presidential candidates have focused their media attention elsewhere, the survey/poll suggests that Democratic candidates should not completely neglect the network.
We hear a lot these days about “Fake news” and radicalizing propaganda.
Well, there you have it. It’s not hidden in some dark corner of the internet or raised up to the innocent person’s attention through sophisticated algorithms. It’s right out in the open on your cable box.
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