Month: April 2019

It’s nice to see Warren’s ideas getting some traction

by digby

I know the latest polling of the Democratic field shows Biden getting a sizeable bump since he announced, which doesn’t surprise me. He’s like an old shoe, familiar and comfortable. A lot of people probably think he presents a return to normal life. ( FWIW, I don’t think life will ever go back to that old “normal.” But it can go forward to something better….)

But it’s a long campaign and I honestly have no idea where it’s going to end up. I don’t think anyone can realistically guess at this point.But I was happy to see that Warren is finally getting a little love, and it’s fair to guess that it’s mostly for her policy proposals which are as progressive as it gets.

I don’t know if it’s enough to carry her all the way — again, I wouldn’t hazard a guess about the race at this point. But if she continues to poll well because of her policy ideas, I think it bodes well for the party going forward. They won’t adopt them in whole cloth but they provide a road map for Democratic governance in this era and I hope whoever gets the nod will take her agenda and use it as the basis for his or her agenda.

Of course, it’s always possible that the voters will decide they like her too. You never know. I know I do. (Always have …)

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Ady Barkan is a true hero

by digby

Health care rights activist Ady Barkan took what might be his last big trip to advocate for Medicare for All at a congressional hearing:

The degenerative neurological disease ALS has robbed Ady Barkan of his ability to walk and his ability to talk. But that didn’t stop him from traveling across the country, from California to Washington, D.C., to make an impassioned plea for Congress to guarantee universal health care by passing Medicare For All.

As the disease has rendered his diaphragm and tongue too weak to speak, Barkan gave testimony at a Thursday hearing of the House Rules Committee using a synthetic computerized voice.

Barkan delivered heartbreaking opening remarks in which he talked about his diagnosis with the terminal disorder, and how battles with his private insurance company over the treatment he needed has cost him not only of thousands of dollars but also precious time with his family.

“Like so many others, Rachael and I have had to fight with our insurer, which has issued outrageous denials instead of covering the benefits we’ve paid for,” Barkan said in his opening remarks, referring to his wife. “We have so little time left together, and yet our system forces us to waste it dealing with bills and bureaucracy. That is why I am here today, urging you to build a more rational, fair, efficient, and effective system. I am here today to urge you to enact Medicare For All.”

Tuesday’s hearing was on a Medicare For All bill introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), which would move the U.S. to a single-payer health care system where all Americans are able to get health insurance through the government, rather than being forced to rely on private insurance companies.

The bill is just one idea being floated by Democrats, who are working to ensure that the U.S. health care system works better for Americans.

Meanwhile, Republicans, led by Trump, are still leading the effort to make the system worse by weakening key protections created by the Affordable Care Act under former President Barack Obama’s tenure.

Trump’s Department of Justice has gone as far as joining a lawsuit that calls for the entire law to be repealed — which would cause an estimated 20 million Americans to lose their insurance coverage.

Republicans get very angry when it’s suggested that their opposition to guaranteed, universal healthcare will kill people.

It will.

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Fox News sees nothing wrong with this

by digby

This fascist garbage is very much being mainstreamed by the right wing media and the President of the United States:

Fox News is consistantly repeating the white supremacist talking point “immigrants will replace you” and it’s not just Tucker and Laura. pic.twitter.com/DsXu2cEXZk

— John Kerr (@JohnnyHeatWave) April 30, 2019

Amanda Marcotte wrote about it on Salon:

Replacement theory is an elaborate conspiracy theory that is just as unhinged as it is hateful. Adherents believe that a cabal of secretive Jews are deliberately trying to undermine white hegemony by pushing anti-racism and feminism and other such social justice notions, sneeringly derided by white nationalists as “cultural Marxism.” These Jewish conspirators, the theory continues, exploit feminism to trick white women into having fewer babies while pushing for “open borders,” and all this is aimed toward the ultimate goal of “replacing” white people with Jews and people of color.

As civil rights organizer Eric Ward told Salon last year, white nationalists simply cannot accept that women and people of color are smart enough to agitate for equality and social justice all on their own, and therefore blame “a global conspiracy by Jews” for masterminding the whole thing.

Every piece of this conspiracy theory is now being championed, in one form or another, on Fox News and by other conservative luminaries, such as Canadian psychology professor-turned-reactionary darling Jordan Peterson.

The idea that immigrants from Asia and Latin America threaten to dislodge white people from their supposedly rightful roles and “replace” them has become a constant refrain on Fox News. Ingraham and Carlson repeatedly characterize immigration as an “invasion” and present the demographic shifts that come from immigration as inherently negative and a threat to “normal” (aka white) Americans.

As anyone even slightly familiar with American history knows, similar arguments were leveled against Italian, Irish and even German immigrants in the past. What’s frustrating about this argument is that of course it’s true that immigration causes cultural change. Spaghetti with marinara sauce used to be considered a novel and exotic dish in America, for instance. Garlic and sour cream were unknown commodities outside their relevant ethnic enclaves. What’s blatantly wrong is the interpretation of these changes as a threat, when the broader truth is that cultural change is both inevitable and beneficiary, in ways both small (spaghetti is tasty!) and tremendous (technologies like TV and computers could not have been developed without the “globalism” that white nationalists decry).

While Fox News hosts avoid directly accusing Jews of running this supposed conspiracy, they certainly employ a lot of euphemistic terms that gesture in that direction. Carlson, for instance, talks a lot aboutthe “ruling class” and the “elites,” terms that many liberal commentators and journalists may assume refer to the billionaire and ultra-millionaire class that uses its wealth to manipulate our political systems.

Carlson encourages this reading, particularly in interviews with progressive outlets like Salon, but there’s good reason to be skeptical that’s how his actual audience reads these terms. Carlson’s rhetoric tends to evoke not the actual super-rich, but a “liberal elite” compromised more of middle-class professionals like college professors and public intellectuals than the truly wealthy. Carlson tries to confuse this issue by name-checking a handful of billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros (both Jewish, by the way) who are are culturally identified as relatively progressive, while ignoring the larger class of billionaires like the Kochs, the Waltons, the Adelsons, the DeVoses and other ultra-rich Americans (including Fox News’ ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch) who tend to be more supportive of Republicans and right-wing causes.

Carlson and Ingraham lean heavily on these vague euphemisms to insinuate that liberal-minded, middle-class urban professionals are somehow more “elite” than right-wing billionaires. Full-blown white nationalists like the shooter simply take this to the next level, by explicitly blaming Jews. But the basic conspiracy theory is the same: A shadowy group of “elites” is out to destroy white Christian America, and they’re using progressive ideology, feminism and immigration to accomplish that goal.

While most conservatives tend to dislike feminism because they see it as an assault on traditional gender roles, white nationalists claim to see feminism as an aspect of the Jewish plot to undermine America. They argue that feminist movements for reproductive rights and equal pay are about distracting white women from their main duty in life, which is of course to perpetuate the white race.

Sure enough, this idea is starting to pop up on Carlson’s show. He’s begun to paint abortion rights as a conspiracy perpetrated by those vague “elites” in order to divert women into paid employment and away from their supposedly natural inclination to stay home and raise a bevy of children. Carlson has also tied day care into this supposed plot, arguing that it’s just being “used to justify more immigration,” again tying together the idea that America must stay white and that keeping women out of the workplace is an important element in accomplishing that.

When you have a president who brags about assaulting women and praises Nazi sympathizers as very fine people who are just trying to preserve their heritage, it’s not surprising to see this sort of thing escalating into violence.

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Trumpies never leave a penny on the sidewalk.

by digby

They have to pocket every last one, no matter what:

The day before special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted his report to the Justice Department last month, Washington was abuzz with what revelations it might contain about contacts between the 2016 Trump campaign and foreign officials. But President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, was an ocean away, delivering a paid speech to a room full of Romanian politicians and policy elites.

Legal analysts said that Parscale’s visit breaks no laws so long as he does not do any lobbying in the United States on behalf of foreign clients without registering. But ethics experts said any money changing hands between foreign citizens and campaign officials created an obstacle course of potential risks. And some ethics lawyers worried that Parscale’s engagement — which received little attention outside Romania at the time — is a sign that the 2016 Trump campaign’s freewheeling approach to foreign contacts may be carrying over to its 2020 successor.

“The appearances are terrible,” said Richard Painter, a chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush. “You would certainly think that a campaign manager would not take money from foreign nationals in this political environment.”

Trump has not banned his campaign officials from taking money from foreign sources, and the campaign declined to comment about any changes it has made this cycle to encourage caution in dealing with foreign entities.

In a statement, Parscale said the “handful of international speeches” he has delivered gave him a chance to see the world with his wife and recuperate from campaign responsibilities.

“We did not grow up with the opportunity to travel internationally, and speaking opportunities have allowed me to share my talent with other professionals in a university setting while having a brief break from the rigorous campaign schedule that I maintain,” Parscale said. “This speaking engagement was fully vetted and approved through the necessary channels in advance.”

He added: “This is yet another effort by the biased fake news media to systematically target another person in President Trump’s orbit.”

Parscale did not respond to a question about how much he had been paid in Romania — a trip sponsored by McCann/Thiess Conferences, an event-planning partnership co-founded by Romanian businessman Adrian Thiess and the Bucharest outpost of the McCann international marketing firm. Parscale also would not say how he decides which foreign engagements to accept. Parscale is listed with the Worldwide Speakers Group, an Alexandria-based agency. Its website notes his speaking fee as $15,000 to $25,000 and promotes his insider’s perspective as Trump’s 2016 digital media director.

Since 2016, Parscale has also spoken at conferences in Portugal, Monaco and Croatia.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany emphasized that Parscale was traveling “as a private citizen” and “followed the Trump campaign’s approval process governing invitations for outside speaking engagements.”

Here you have an administration under siege for its private relationships with foreign governments and they just keep on doing it, no matter what. According to the article, nobody can think of an example of someone doing this during a campaign because of the obvious appearance of influence peddling. But then, if Parscale waits until afterwards, Trump might lose and he wouldn’t make as much money, amirite? It’s amazing how much money you can make off the presidency if you have absolutely no shame.

And I’m sure the “Trump campaign approval process” is extremely arduous. The only question is how much of a cut they have to give the president.

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The WH is pushing the Democrats closer to impeachment whether they like it or not

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

People in the media and politics bemoan the cynicism of our age, saying that people vote for a liar like Donald Trump because they believe all politicians lie and he’s just more colorful about it. This era is producing men and women of such grandiose mendacity that it will be a miracle if the next generation believes that anyone in politics is even capable of acting in the national interest. It’s possible that Robert Mueller may be the last of his kind in the GOP and I’m not all that sure about him either. We’ll have to see how this plays out to know whether Mueller pulled too many punches but for the moment he’s all we have left of a “just the facts ma’am” Republican straight arrow.

You certainly cannot say the same for his friend William Barr, the new attorney general. He has proved to be the most rank partisan in that role since John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, who spent 19 months in jail for his part in the Watergate scandal. Even though I had my suspicions that Barr had spent too much time in the right-wing fever swamps, based upon the notorious unsolicited memo he sent to the White House and his comments to the news media, like most people I was hoping that he would be one of those old-school “institutionalist” types who would look at the evidence in the Mueller report and be as appalled by this norm-busting, law-breaking, power-abusing president as the entire world has been since it was released.

It turns out that we were not cynical enough. Not by a long shot. Rather than acting as an independent upholder of the law, serving the people, Barr is proving to be the most servile of all Trump’s henchmen. He’s not even as independent as the multiple yes-men in the administration who failed to follow Trump’s orders but stayed on anyway. Barr seems to see himself as the president’s trusted legal consigliere, helping him to avoid getting caught for his crimes. The president truly has found his new Roy Cohn, Trump’s notorious mentor and personal lawyer who was eventually disbarred for egregious unethical conduct.

From the four-page “Barr letter” and its fatuous conclusion that Trump did not obstruct justice to the pre-release press conference in which Barr attempted to spin the report in the president’s favor, the attorney general has been doing damage control. Over the last week, as Trump has said he will fight every request and every subpoena, Barr is now running interference between the Justice Department and the Congress. He is refusing to appear before the House Judiciary Committee unless chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., shelves his plan to have part of the session run by committee counsel and hold a part of the hearing in closed session. Apparently Barr does not like the idea that the legal staff could follow up closely with a line of inquiry. He prefers the disjointed five-minute questioning format that never gets anywhere, which is a sad statement coming from the attorney general of the United States.

If Barr can’t face a committee lawyer, perhaps he’s not really fit to be the top law enforcement officer in the federal government. The Judiciary Committee lawyers interviewed many of the other participants in the Russia investigation, including former FBI director James Comey, in closed session. The only difference with Barr is that this will be a public hearing, which one might expect the self-described most transparent government in history to be happy to accommodate.

Barr has been around long enough to remember all the times that congressional committees had counsel question witnesses, including cabinet members. It most famously happened during the Watergate hearings when lawyers like Sam Dash and Richard Ben-Veniste became national figures, holding the president’s men’s feet to the fire. Chief counsel to the Senate’s Iran-Contra committee, Arthur Liman, led the questioning in that inquiry. And considering that just a few months ago, the Republicans hired an outside attorney to question Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, it’s entirely absurd that Barr is balking.

Nadler refused to change his plans, explaining patiently that witnesses aren’t allowed to dictate procedure to congressional committees, nor is the attorney general allowed to dictate to the legislative branch. (The Trump administration remains very confused about the separation of powers in general.) Nadler says he’ll issue a subpoena if Barr refuses to show up. There is some talk about holding the hearings with an empty chair which would be very silly and unproductive.

Robert Costa of the Washington Post reported on MSNBC on Monday that Republican sources tell him the Democrats are being “political” and have no right to hold hearings that are impeachment inquiries in all but name. I think we know how to solve that problem, don’t we?

Barr’s outrageous behavior and the White House attempts to stonewall all forms of oversight are pushing the Democrats toward impeachment, whether they want it or not. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., a member of the House Democratic policy leadership team who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, “If we can’t fact-gather, we’re going to have to use the other tools at our disposal and make sure our oversight responsibilities are respected.”

Lieu added, “If it turns out we can’t investigate because the White House is not complying with anything that Congress requests, then I think the caucus would support an article of impeachment on obstructing Congress in order to maximize our court position.” As Sargent points out, Democrats have already said that fact-gathering and accountability is their mission for the moment, “but if Trump won’t allow that, they can threaten an impeachment inquiry in response, and note quite correctly that Trump is forcing them into it.”

The third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon was for defying congressional subpoenas and oversight. Trump may be leaving Congress no choice but to do that again, if only to defend its own constitutional prerogatives. For a president with an approval rating that’s been hovering around 40% for his entire tenure, that’s a risky strategy.

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“The biggest thing in transparency since transparency began”
by Tom Sullivan

He really, really does not want authorities peeking behind his gold curtains:

President Donald Trump and his family are suing Deutsche Bank and Capital One to block subpoenas issued by House Democrats seeking Trump’s financial records.

In the federal lawsuit filed Monday in New York, Trump’s lawyers argued that the subpoenas serve “no legitimate or lawful purpose.”

Trump hopes to quash efforts to examine bank records relating to the Trump Organization. Deutsche Bank has lent Trump more than $312 million since 2012. The loans helped Trump purchase properties and refinance old loans at a time no one else would lend him money. With Trump’s history of bankruptcies and stiffing contractors, he is a notoriously bad risk. And yet Deutsche Bank continued to lend him money.

Why does Obama believe he shouldn't comply with record releases that his predecessors did of their own volition? Hiding something?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2012

Democrats are looking “into allegations of potential foreign influence on the US political process,” said Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

The sitting president’s attorneys call that harassment, and the subpoenas “unlawful and illegitimate,” a “sweeping, lawless, invasion of privacy,” reports the Washington Post:

“This isn’t a close legal question,” said David Alan Sklansky, a professor at Stanford Law School. “I’m quite confident there has never been a situation where a congressional subpoena has been quashed without a finding that it violates a constitutional right.”

The claim that there is no legitimate need for the subpoena, or that it is politically motivated, is a “frivolous argument, even if it’s true,” he said. “That is not a basis for quashing a subpoena.”

In filing the suit on behalf of Trump’s sons Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump, his daughter Ivanka Trump, and the Trump Organization, the president’s attorneys, revealed details about what information Congress wants:

According to the suit, the request to Deutsche Bank — the president’s largest creditor — includes account records and other information related to “parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, branches, divisions, partnerships, properties, groups, special purpose entities, joint ventures, predecessors, successors or any other entity in which they have or had a controlling interest.”

For perspective, recall that The 10,000 Falsehoods Man claims he and his White House are committed to transparency.

“What I want is I want total transparency…. You have to have transparency,” Trump said in May last year in opening up a sensitive intelligence briefing on a confidential human source.

“All I want to do is be transparent,” Trump said in September 2018 when releasing classified documents related to the Russia inquiry.

Before leaving on Air Force One on Friday, Trump declared, “[I]n the history of our country, there has never been a President that’s been more transparent than me or the Trump administration.”

And finally, from Aaron Rupar:

Trump flagrantly lies to reporters while explaining why he doesn't plan to comply with subpoenas from Congress: "I have been the most transparent president and administration in the history of our country by far."

His tax returns couldn't be immediately reached for comment. pic.twitter.com/THfvluVawR— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2019

He is big. It’s the investigations that got small.

Infrastructure kabuki

by digby

I understand why Democrats will take this meeting. They feel they need to be seen as being willing to govern even if it means working with Trump. But if they give him this win, no matter what it is, they can kiss 2020 good-bye. We only have 18 months to go and infrastructure can wait until after the election. I’m sure they must know this, right?

And, by the way, everything this article quotes from the White House is pure bullshit designed to divide the Democrats and pressure them into committing political suicide.

But they know that too, right?

At last month’s St. Patrick’s Day lunch in the Capitol, President Trump told Richard Neal, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House’s tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, that he wants to spend close to $2 trillion on infrastructure, according to two sources to whom Neal recounted his conversation.

Trump’s 2020 Budget calls for just $200 billion in additional infrastructure spending. A spokesperson for Neal did not comment on this reporting. A former senior White House official told me that on infrastructure, Trump’s instincts are much closer to Elizabeth Warren’s than they are to his tight-fisted acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

Trump meets on Tuesday with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to discuss infrastructure. These meetings usually amount to nothing besides a media circus. But Democrats still take these meetings — in fact, Pelosi requested this one — because they know that, left to his own devices, Trump would happily spend a ton of federal money on infrastructure. (It’s his own party that won’t let him.)

The dirty secret — which multiple senior White House officials have confirmed to me — is that Trump hates the infrastructure plan his own White House released last year. In private, he has referred to it dismissively as “Gary’s plan,” a shot at his former top economic adviser Gary Cohn.

The heart of “Gary’s plan” was to build infrastructure through “public-private partnerships” — leveraging a modest amount of government spending to stimulate private investment in projects around the country.

Democratic leaders have no interest in public-private partnerships. Neither does Trump. Even though he himself has benefited richly from public-private partnerships (as with the Trump International Hotel in D.C.), he has told aides he thinks they don’t work and that they need to spend real federal money instead.

Behind the scenes: Trump came into office imagining a presidency in which new projects — “built by the Trump administration” — would be erected all over the country, sources close to him tell me.

“There was a genuine naïveté about the prospect of Democrats and Republicans coming together to do something on a grand scale with infrastructure,” a former White House official told me. “It was one of those things where Trump said it was gonna be easy. He really thought so.”

In an early 2017 infrastructure meeting at the White House with his friend, New York real estate billionaire Richard LeFrak, Trump laid out his grand Trumpian vision. “They say Eisenhower was the greatest infrastructure president. They named the highway system after him,” Trump said, per a source who was in the room. “But we’re going to do double, triple, quadruple, what Eisenhower did.”

What’s next? Nobody will come into the Tuesday meeting with an infrastructure plan, according to White House, administration and Democratic leadership sources who’ve discussed the meeting plans with me. And there are no plans to present even a top-line figure or a list of ways to offset new spending.

“The whole thing comes under the heading of an ongoing discussion,” a senior administration official with direct knowledge of the plans for Tuesday’s meeting told me. “Nobody wants to lay down specific markers. Nobody wants to rule in; nobody wants to rule out.”

The White House team working on the issue — led by Larry Kudlow — seems much less excited than Democrats are about new, large-scale federal spending on infrastructure. Instead, they are focused on cutting permitting regulations, making it easier to spur energy development, and signing a longer-term transportation funding bill.

It’s all bullshit. But I’m afraid I will never be able to totally trust Democrats not to tie their own hands in pursuit of a grand bargain.

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“This is the way you treat your friends?”

by digby

Maria Bartiromo asked Trump about this:

Maria Bartiromo asked Napolitano about this when he joined her on Fox Business, but he shrugged it off and asked “This is the way you treat your friends? How do you treat your enemies?”

Napolitano said the tweets pertained to a series of conversations he had with Trump when the latter was president-elect and trying to figure out who should take Antonin Scalia‘s place on the Supreme Court. Napolitano said that when he described how Neil Gorsuch had the judicial qualities Trump was looking for, the president-elect supposedly turned to him and said: “sounds like you’re describing yourself.”

“I said ‘no, no, I’m not describing myself,’” Napolitano recalled. “‘I’m describing Neil Gorsuch because you have this list of people from which you want to choose, and Judge Gorsuch is the person that I think most of your advisers are going to point to.’”

In terms of the “pardon” situation, Napolitano said Trump once asked for his opinion about the conviction of a “mutual friend” of theirs. Napolitano said he thought that the conviction was just, to which, Trump offered “a very strong term” to express his disagreement.

“He said ‘You know this person as well as I do. Call this person up and tell this person he’s going to be on the list of pardons that I will seriously consider.’ That was the extent of that conversation.”

Napolitano concluded by saying Trump’s comments were a “brilliant” way to divert attention from his Mueller commentary.

I don’t know who this “mutual friend” is but if it’s Cohen or Manafort it’s more evidence of a crime.

Oh, and Trump has no friends. None. He has sycophants.

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This Natasha Bertrand story about one of Jared’s buddies from the Mueller Report is just more evidence of what a lowlife he is. He’s an egomaniac with no intelligence and no ethics. No wonder Ivanka married him. He’s just like daddy:

Jared Kushner needed help. 

It was March 2016 and Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald Trump, was steamrolling to the Republican presidential nomination. But the businessman-candidate was taking heat for his campaign’s lack of foreign policy expertise, something Kushner was trying to remedy.

That’s when he found a Russian willing to assist. 

On March 14, 2016, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Kushner attended a lunch in Manhattan in honor of Henry Kissinger. Also in attendance was a tall, bearded Russian émigré with a booming voice. His name was Dmitri Simes, and for nearly 20 years he had been president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy think tank. 

Simes had been a Washington fixture since he left the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, obtained U.S. citizenship, and served as an informal foreign policy adviser to President Richard Nixon. A longtime advocate of warmer U.S.-Russia relations, he was also dogged by criticism that he was notably sympathetic to Moscow’s views. 

Kushner and Simes met at the lunch and began communicating, including in a meeting at Kushner’s office later that month. Although the Trump campaign never identified Simes as an adviser, he provided counsel to the Trump team, particularly with regard to Russia. In June 2016, Mueller found, he sent a memo to then-Senator Jeff Sessions, who headed up Trump’s foreign policy team, offering several policy recommendations, including “a new beginning with Moscow,” and in August he would send Kushner himself a “Russia policy memo.”

In April of that year, CNI hosted Trump’s first genuine foreign policy address, attended by Russia’s U.S. ambassador, in which the candidate offered a similar message. Mueller also discovered that Simes also offered Kushner disparaging information about former President Bill Clinton. 

The Simes-Kushner relationship was outlined in detail by Mueller’s report, which mentions Simes over 100 times. While the report concluded that Simes did not act as a campaign intermediary with Moscow, and did not allege that he works at the behest of the Kremlin, it did note that Simes and CNI have “many contacts with current and former Russian government officials.” 

To Simes’ allies the report was, as Trump might say, a total exoneration that should end the speculation over his Simes background and motivations: “I think what is in the report is very clear,” said Paul Saunders, a former CNI executive director and current board member. “They did not find evidence that he or the center were involved in passing any messages back and forth between the campaign and Russia. More than that, the report states that he advised the Trump campaign against hidden contacts with Russia.” 

Even so, former U.S. officials and people who know Simes say Mueller’s report is a fresh reminder that he is at best a mysterious—and at worst alarming—player in Washington’s foreign policy community. Depending on who you ask, he is either a shrewd foreign policy realist dedicated to defusing tensions between his birth-nation and the one where he chose to make a life — or a Kremlin advocate who cloaks his true agenda in Washington, D.C.

Of course, Kushner went in this direction. His wife undoubtedly told him that the Trump Org was planning some big projects in Moscow and greasing the skids with pro-Russia advisers would be a smart move.

The presidential campaign was conceived as a marketing plan, first and foremost. And Jared was in on it.

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QOTD: Michael Cohen

by digby

You are going to find me guilty of campaign finance, with McDougal or Stormy, and give me three years—really? And how come I’m the only one? I didn’t work for the campaign. I worked for him. And how come I’m the one that’s going to prison? I’m not the one that slept with the porn star.

He’s got a point. Trump is getting away with murder as he has his whole life. But then again, Cohen said he’d take a bullet for him …

That quote is from the Jeffrey Toobin interview with Cohen in the New Yorker. I know he’s a rotten person. He eagerly did Trump’s dirty work for years.  But I do feel sorry for him. He’s paying a huge price. And Trump is … not.

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