Month: April 2019

The Nunes and Barr tag team

by digby

Why should Radical Left Democrats in Congress have a right to retry and examine the $35,000,000 (two years in the making) No Collusion Mueller Report, when the crime committed was by Crooked Hillary, the DNC and Dirty Cops? Attorney General Barr will make the decision!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2019

If Barr agrees to conspire with Nunes over this bullshit we will know that no Trump critic or ethical law enforcement employee is safe. Nunes is acting as an agent of President Trump to use the power of the Attorney General to obstruct oversight and punish critics.

House Democrats are crying foul over a plan by the Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, Rep. Devin Nunes, to meet privately with Attorney General William Barr to push the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against officials involved in the investigation of President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

Nunes’ accusations of misconduct are aimed at a slew of former FBI and Justice Department officials, who he alleges committed crimes in their pursuit of allegations that President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign conspired with Russians to influence the election.

Nunes has in recent days foreshadowed plans to send eight “criminal referrals” — informal requests for the Justice Department to investigate — directly to Barr. He said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Thursday night that he intends to meet with Barr “when appropriate” to discuss the referrals, and plans to bring fellow GOP intelligence committee member John Ratcliffe, a former U.S. attorney, to the meeting. Nunes said he wouldn’t name the targeted officials publicly but would share his recommendations with Barr.

Barr told lawmakers earlier this week that he was anticipating Nunes’ information.

“I haven’t seen the referrals yet from Congressman Nunes,” Barr said during testimony to the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, “but obviously if there’s a predicate for an investigation it’ll be conducted.”

Nunes’ move is an escalation by Trump’s allies in Congress to pivot from Mueller’s still-unreleased findings to the conduct of the FBI and Justice Department investigators who initiated the Russia probe. Before seeing its contents, Nunes labeled Mueller’s report a “partisan document” and said “we can just burn it up,” even as most of Trump’s supporters were celebrating the news — as described publicly by Barr — that Mueller “did not establish” a conspiracy between the campaign and the Russian government.

The Justice Department declined multiple inquiries about whether Barr intends to meet with Nunes and Ratcliffe. Nunes and Ratcliffe also declined requests for comment. Democrats says such a meeting would be a significant break from protocol unless they are also included.

“We expect to learn more if and when the Department of Justice receives the referrals, assuming the Department follows appropriate protocol and Barr holds any such meeting only with representatives of the majority and minority present,” said a Democratic aide to the House intelligence committee.

A decision by Barr to meet alone with Nunes and Ratcliffe would further strain Barr’s relationship with Capitol Hill Democrats, who have ripped the new attorney general in recent weeks for what they say is his efforts to shield Trump from potentially damaging findings in Mueller’s report, which Barr has been reviewing for nearly a month.

Their frustration was inflamed anew this week when Barr told the Senate Appropriations Committee that he believed federal authorities spied on Trump’s campaign in 2016, a disputed premise that supported Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about the Russia probe.

The intelligence committee aide emphasized that Nunes had yet to share any details of his referrals with Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) or other members of the Democratic majority.

“[B]ut it is clear they believe they now have an ally in the attorney general to perpetuate their conspiracy theories of ‘spying’ and their determination to investigate the investigators, no matter how misguided and damaging their efforts are to our national institutions, or the dedicated public servants who work to keep us safe,” the aide said.

A senior House Democratic aide said Barr “must refuse the meeting and start down a path of redeeming his credibility,” especially as he prepares to issue a redacted version of Mueller’s final report.

I don’t think he’s actually redeemable at this point. It would take something extraordinary that he’s shown no sign of having the desire or the courage to do. But if he sits down alone with Nunes and his hand-picked former USA wingnut to “go over” the “charges” he’s completely gone and it will take an insurrection from the DOJ to save the institution.

I won’t hold my breath. After all, Trump is now offering pardons to government officials if they’ll break the law for him and instructing rank and file law enforcement to defy the courts. Barr is happily running interference for him, telling the public that he’s going to use his power to investigate anyone who investigates the president and making it very, very clear that he believes if the president does it it isn’t illegal.

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And then they fell in love…

by digby

I’m pretty sure this is what Trump find so appealing. Kim Jong Un is “strong.” And he doesn’t have to put up with all that folderol of the “rule of law” and “oversight.” He just gets ‘er done:

North Korean authorities staged a public trial and shot two female fortune tellers to death last month, forcing tens of thousands of people to watch, in what appeared to be a resumption of public executions.

The executions of the two women took place in March in North Hamgyong’s Chongjin city, and were aimed at forcing officials to stop patronizing fortune tellers and engaging in other “superstitious” behavior, according to two sources who spoke to RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity.

“Public trials and executions have resumed this year, with judicial authorities holding these trials in multiple locations for reasons of maintaining social order,” a source in North Hamgyong province, bordering China, told RFA’s Korean Service.

The public executions “shocked” city residents, RFA’s source said.

“They pronounced sentences of death and carried out public executions immediately,” the source said, adding that two of the three women put on trial were executed by shooting, with the third sentenced to life in prison.

“Tens of thousands of people from factories, colleges, and housing units from Chongjin were forced to attend the public trail in March,” added the source.

The three had created a group called Chilsungjo (Seven Star Group) to carry out what authorities described as “superstitious activities,” the source said.

“They had used a three-year-old and five-year-old child to carry out their activities, claiming that the children were possessed by a spirit oracle and receiving money for telling fortunes,” he said.

It is now common in North Korea for people to consult fortune tellers before planning weddings or making business deals, or considering other important decisions in their lives, the source said, adding, “Even high-ranking government officials and the families of judicial authorities often visit fortune tellers.”

Making an example

Also speaking to RFA, a second source in North Hamgyong said that government concerns over the involvement of high-ranking officials in “superstitious” activities has caused authorities to make an example of those caught telling fortunes.

“The Central Committee has emphasized the elimination of anti-socialist behavior and the preservation of social order, but it is hard to find residents who will follow these orders,” the source said.

“People fear that they will starve to death if they live by the law, so it is no exaggeration to say that illegal activities have now become common.”

In February, authorities held an unusual open trial in Chongjin’s Pohang district for middle school students aged from 15 to 16 who had organized themselves into groups of two to three to carry out robberies at night, the source said.

“They acted violently against residents and stole anything that they thought would earn them money. The atmosphere became uneasy in the area at night, and it was hard for a time to find people walking around after dark.”

Because the accused were minors, they were spared harsh sentences, the source said.

“But the adults tried in public are being sentenced to death, or at least receive life sentences, so the residents are living in fear,” he said.

Numbers unclear

Accurate statistics on North Korea’s use of the death penalty are hard to find.

In February, RFA’s Korean Service reported that a Seoul-based North Korean defector-led NGO had detailed that the Kim Jong Un regime had purged 421 officials since 2010 to consolidate power around Kim.

The report, “Executions and Purges of North Korean Elites: An Investigation into Genocide Based on High-Ranking Officials’ Testimonies,” by the North Korean Strategy Center, collected accounts by 14 North Korean elite group defectors, six North Korean officials in China, and five other defectors who witnessed executions.

The report notes the well-known case of Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek, a top official who was executed in 2013, and says that “more than 15 people were killed and 400 others were purged.

At a U.N. Security Council session on North Korea’s human rights situation in December 2017, then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley was quoted by Reuters and other news agencies as saying that “defectors have reported that all North Koreans, ages 12 and older, are required to attend public executions—a graphic reminder of consequences of disobedience of the government.” she said.

In a landmark report in 2014, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea found that “as a matter of state policy, the authorities carry out executions, with or without trial, publicly or secretly, in response to political and other crimes that are often not among the most serious crimes.”

“The policy of regularly carrying out public executions serves to instill fear in the general population,” said the report, based on extensive interviews with defectors from the North.

But they’ve got some awesome beachfront real estate…

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The new “get over it”

by digby

After the GOP successfully leveraged Jeb Bush’s Florida machine and daddy Bush’s Supreme Court to hand George W. Bush the election in 2000, the Republicans and many in the media taunted angry Democrats with the phrase “get over it.” It was a nice little strategy to disempower the opposition and it worked. Now they’re doing the same thing with the Barr Letter and are taking it to a new level. It’s as if after the 2000 recount the Republicans decided to investigate the Democrats for trying to steal the election.

Josh Marshall tweeted this in a series of tweets this morning and I think it succinctly outlines the monumental bad faith of the Republicans:

Through all the kicked up sand and misdirection, it’s worth remembering the importance of trying to make judgments on the basis of accepted practices, credited fact-finders, not pulling out completely contradictory arguments wily nily and judging people’s credibility by whether you like what they say. Some basic history. The Mueller probe began when a recently confirmed Trump appointee (with a strong but Republican reputation) Rod Rosenstein created a special counsel investigation. He, in turn, appointed Robert Mueller, a Republican with a strong reputation. Mueller’s team spent almost two years investigating the issue and produced a report. We still haven’t seen that report or what it says. We’ve seen about 80 words out of more than 400 pages.

We have a new Attorney a General who auditioned for the job with a memo stating that both parts of the probe, the 2016 election and 2017/18 obstruction, lacked merit. He now says neither the public or the congress will ever see the whole report. Both we will see versions of the report redacted at his sole discretion.

But the report allegedly closes the matter. So we need to move on to examining whether the investigation pre and post Mueller broke the law. This even though that question has already been investigated by an inspector generals probe. Not only this, but the full dimensions of the investigation were all visible to Mueller and it would have been in his power and his responsibility to either prosecute or refer wrongdoing he found there, which he apparently did not.

Let’s refer back to the earlier point: Mueller is a lifelong Republican albeit a fairly apolitical one who was appointed by another lifelong Republican of a somewhat more political cast, Rosenstein. Trump’s critics who are mainly but not exclusively Democrats and independents have accepted that the President is being investigated by people of his own party. A report was produced on that basis. And they would reasonably like to see what is in that report. Yet what we see is an effort to hide and move past that report and move on to seeing whether any efforts to investigate the President were themselves illegitimate.

This notwithstanding the fact that there’s never been any evidence that this is so (quite the contrary) and the question has already been investigated multiple times by Republicans.

Step back and you see a full context, investigate people who threaten the President again and again until you find something or simply wear them down. Or, take practices that are established practice in the past and decide they are actually illegitimate.

Maybe FISA warrants are too easy to get. But those who want the freest use of surveillance and law enforcement powers generally can’t really credibly become ACLUers for Trump only.

Again, we have an investigation run by Republicans. We have law enforcement and CI practices that are apparently good enough for everyone else, just not for Trump. Let’s see the report.

Remember, all special prosecutors since Archibald Cox have been conservatives and all but Jaworski were members of the Republican Party. If a Democrat is being investigated the Republicans insist that they must be investigated by a member of the Republican party. When a Republican is being investigated the Republicans also insist they be investigated by a member of the Republican party. Even that isn’t good enough for Trump, the most corrupt and inept president in history. He has taken it to a new level insisting that he should be above all oversight and investigation, no matter who is conducting it.

As Josh Marshall observes, the new approach is to use the power of the presidency to purge the government of any independent agency which might threaten him and empower his own propaganda while demeaning the free press.

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Promoting “the foreign menace”
by Tom Sullivan

WWE’s The Iron Sheik.

It is never clear how much the sitting president’s Trumpish (is that a word now?) behavior is WWE theater for atavist fans or the product of his genuinely warped soul. Accidents do happen in wrestling, a.k.a., sports entertainment, and performers sometimes get injured. But that’s never the plan. With Donald Trump, it is hard to tell the difference.

His incitement to violence, one can argue, has already provoked killings in Pittsburgh. It provoked an aborted spate of bombings against his critics across the country. Hate crimes are up 226 percent in counties that hosted Trump political rallies. Plus, death threats against prominent players known in wrestling tradition as “the foreign menace.” In wrestling, fans love to hate the foreign Others, with their strange dress and un-Real American™ accents. All-American wrasslin’ heroes shine the brighter for not fighting dirty. Not like Them.

In Trump’s America, however, fighting dirty is what fans come to cheer. What once was a democratic republic looks more like an arena event where Truth, Justice, and the American Way are for weaklings and losers. Vanquishing the Others and/or banishing those his fans have been trained to fear is all that matters. Their favorite promoter is happy to oblige. He’d throw a few foreign menaces to the lions in person if not for his squeamishness at seeing blood. But he’ll sponsor the spectacle from afar. Not, of course, without teasing it relentlessly first to maximize the audience.

Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today.@IlhanMN’s life is in danger. For our colleagues to be silent is to be complicit in the outright, dangerous targeting of a member of Congress.

We must speak out.

“First they came…” pic.twitter.com/ygOX1vhE9j— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 12, 2019

And so he has:

President Trump on Friday tweeted a video attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for the way she phrased a reference to 9/11, adding fuel to a controversy that has swelled in Republican political circles this week.

The thing is as vile as you’ve come to expect. It takes a poorly phrased line of a speech on Islamophobia and makes it an apologia for Islamist terrorism. Zak Cheney-Rice writes at New York magazine:

Such an ungenerous interpretation of her remarks is only possible if one is inclined to believe that Omar sympathizes more with terrorists than her murdered countrymen. That she spoke them in the course of decrying Islamophobia makes it especially disconcerting that her political opponents would decontextualize them to fan the flames — she receives regular death threats on the basis of her faith, including from one New York man who threatened recently to “put a bullet in her fucking skull.”

This man and the rest have crossed over from WWE kayfabe to real violence. In the land of the fear and the home of the knave, there is no longer any distinction.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

If you find me looking tired & stranded, the best thing to do is pop me onto a flower. If there aren’t any flowers around, a few drops of sugar water (made from equal parts water & white sugar) can really help. Remember to leave me outside, so I can 'bee' on my way asap! #bee pic.twitter.com/7hbuTvNunB— BBCT (@BumblebeeTrust) March 7, 2019

Some people have got in touch with us to tell us that they have found bumblebees lying on the ground, appearing tired and unwell. These are most likely to be new bumblebee queens that have recently left the nest to either set up their own nests, or go into hibernation. Because of the scarcity of flowers in winter, these bumblebees sometimes use a lot of energy in flying, but don’t have any food to replace that lost energy. If there are flowering plants available nearby, the best thing to do is to place the bumblebee on or near them. If you can’t find any flowers, you can still help, though! You can mix together a sugar solution of half white refined sugar and half warm water (brown sugar and honey are bad for bumblebees). Put this in a small saucer or plastic drinks lid, and place it near the bee’s head (see the photo below). It should then lap this up, and will use the energy to heat its body up and fly off.

Trump’s swamp is the size of the South Pacific

by digby

The corruption is overwhelming:

In the decked-out ballroom of a ritzy Washington hotel the night before Donald Trump took office, thousands of dollars flowed from political donors and a questionable casino company to an undisclosed bank account.

The lavish Asian Pacific American Presidential Inaugural Gala — the first of its kind, with a buffet-style dinner, cocktail tables draped in white cloth and live entertainment — drew more than 900 people who paid at least $75 per ticket and a handful of sponsors who shelled out much more.

But there’s no trace of the money raised that night, as required by law, The Palm Beach Post has found.

That includes donations by their biggest listed sponsors. Among them: an embattled Saipan-based casino later raided by the FBI, a Guam-based shipyard and a handful of Pacific Island hotel operators, all of which benefited from a foreign labor bill signed into law by Trump a year later.

Raising the political stakes further, one of the event’s four chief organizers, onetime Trump campaign aide Jason Osborne, followed up the event by lobbying for the labor bill to help the Northern Mariana Islands, home to the Saipan casino.

One man in charge of raising money for the event told The Post that the host, the National Committee of Asian American Republicans, collected between $5,000 and $15,000 each from up to 20 listed sponsors. It also took in hundreds of smaller contributions.

As a registered political committee, such contributions must, by law, be reported to the Federal Election Commission. But none were.

The committee’s executive director, Boca Raton tech entrepreneur Zhonggang “Cliff” Li, told The Post that he knows where the money went, “but I don’t want to tell you.”

“That almost sounds like an admission of a reporting violation,” said Erin Chlopak, a former Federal Election Commission attorney. “Political committees have to disclose all of their receipts and disbursements. There’s no ‘I don’t want to’ exception.”

Li has drawn international attention as an associate of Cindy Yang, the one-time head of fundraising for the committee that hosted the gala. Her access to Trump through his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach and involvement in groups linked to the Chinese Communist Party prompted top congressional Democrats to seek a federal investigation.

As the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York investigates allegations of financial abuse by the Trump inaugural committee, which raised a record $107 million, no public investigation has targeted the Asian American Republican inaugural ball, which has links to China and dubious donors but no financial records.

Political operatives often find creative ways to circumvent reporting requirements particularly for inaugural committees, said Chlopak, who now works for watchdog nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.

“This is one of the areas in which the dark money phenomenon is really clear,” she said.

Money ‘had to go into some box’

Some committees, including the Trump inaugural, set up nonprofits, which must be registered with the IRS. But in the case of the organizers of the Asian-American gala, no nonprofit appears in federal records.

And the guests included several Chinese nationals, said Washington lobbyist Puneet Ahluwalia, who headed the fundraising subcommittee for the event. Foreign nationals are barred from donating to American political committees.

Without public receipts, there’s no way to know who gave money and if any laws were broken.

Ahluwalia told The Post that checks were made out to the National Committee of Asian American Republicans. He said he reached out to potential donors to encourage sponsorship, as did several other organizers, but he didn’t personally see or collect checks.

“I wasn’t privy to who took the money or who wrote the checks,” Ahluwalia said. “All of the money that was pledged by the big donors, by the tickets, had to go into some box. That box was the National Committee of Asian American Republicans.”

More at the link. This one’s a doozy. Every savvy player on the world stage saw this ignorant grifter coming and immediately took advantage of it.

I assume this may find its way to the SDNY Inaugural Committee investigation but who knows? Barr may feel that it would entail improper spying or something. But there was a time, not long ago that people used to pretend to care about this. Of course, that was when the president was a Democrat. A totally different situation.

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One Half of All Republicans Believe Trump Was Chosen by God 

by tristero

If so, s/he sure as hell works in mysterious ways:

Almost half of registered Republican voters agree with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president,” a new Fox News poll shows. 

Forty-five percent of Republicans agree with the sentiment—the Fox poll didn’t mention Sanders by name, referring to a recent comment by a “White House spokesperson.” That number represents a plurality, as 37 percent of Republicans disagree.   

Overall, one-quarter of registered voters share that view…

But fortunately:

…62 percent said they do not believe God wanted Trump to be commander-in-chief.

For the past 40 years or more, liberals and progressives have tended to dismiss public God-Talk as, at best, inappropriate for a secular democracy or, at worst, as puerile and even dangerous.

Fair enough. Basically, I agree. But there’s a problem.  When liberals don’t talk about religion, it cedes the public discourse to the most cynical of political operatives, the kind — like Mike Pence or George Bush — who are perfectly happy to invoke God to control what we do with our bodies, place our children in cages, deny our marriages, and basically burn anyone who’s not a Bible-beating Republican at the virtual stake.

That’s now changing. If intolerant Republicans are prepared to wrap their bigotry around a cross,  a new crop of liberals and progressives won’t let them get away with it.  Thank God:

Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., is a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, a Rhodes scholar, married to a junior high school teacher. He’s gay and, more surprising for a modern Democrat, he is an out Christian, as quick to quote St. Augustine as Abraham Lincoln. On Sunday, he is expected to formally announce his run for president. 

Like Abrams and Senator Cory Booker, Mayor Pete says his faith made him a progressive. Scripture directs him to defend the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the societal castoffs.

Ditto AOC, who simply loves setting traps for the rightwing to fall into. She makes it look easy:

Afer Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sent a holiday greeting to “everyone … including refugee babies in mangers,” some critics launched into an ongoing, highly politicized debate about whether Jesus was a refugee.  

“Merry Christmas everyone – here’s to a holiday filled with happiness, family, and love for all people. (Including refugee babies in mangers + their parents),” the progressive Democrat from New York tweeted Tuesday.  

When critics protested that Jesus wasn’t a refugee, she followed up with a link to a Jesuit magazine article arguing he was. The link was meant “for all the anti-immigrant pundits uncomfortable with and denying that Christ’s family were refugees, too,” she wrote.

He’s dangling pardons again

by digby

It’s not like he’s abusing his office or anything. No need to consider impeachment:

During President Donald Trump’s visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago, where he told border agents to block asylum seekers from entering the US contrary to US law, the President also told the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, that if he were sent to jail as a result of blocking those migrants from entering the US, the President would grant him a pardon, senior administration officials tell CNN.

Two officials briefed on the exchange say the President told McAleenan, since named the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that he “would pardon him if he ever went to jail for denying US entry to migrants,” as one of the officials paraphrased.

It was not clear if the comment was a joke; the official was not given any further context on the exchange.

The White House referred CNN to the Department of Homeland Security. A DHS spokesman told CNN, “At no time has the President indicated, asked, directed or pressured the Acting Secretary to do anything illegal. Nor would the Acting Secretary take actions that are not in accordance with our responsibility to enforce the law.”

Trump gets no benefit of the doubt for “joking” about dangling pardons to people who break the law for him. There’s just too much evidnce that he’s prepared to do it.

Recall that on the same visit, Trump told border patrol agents that they should just tell judges that “we’re full” if they the give them any trouble. They took the president seriously enough that they asked their bosses if they should follow his orders and were told they shouldn’t break the law.

He’s testing the boundaries to see how far he can go.

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Hannity, radical transparency activist

by digby

Well, except for Trump’s tax returns, of course.

For some reason I find this old interview to be hilarious:

Fox News host Sean Hannity reflects on his interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which will air in full tonight. He met Assange at his house arrest in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been imprisoned for more than four years.

“I believe every word he says, to be perfectly honest,” Hannity said about Assange. “Here’s the bottom line. What did he reveal here? Two things that I think come out of this, that if we looked at it from the proper perspective– Look, I was an early critic of him. He is well aware that I thought he was waging war on the United States. My opinion of it has evolved largely because of what I have seen that he has done in ten years. Nothing he has published has ever been proven false. Nobody has questioned the veracity or truthfulness of what he’s doing. Just like the New York Times had information about Donald Trump’s taxes illegally, they still ran with the story… I’m convinced any media outlet that was colluding with the Clinton campaign, they would have run with the story.”

“So the two things the United States ought to take out of WikiLeaks is, number one: As a country, we do not have cybersecurity, and if we don’t fix it, we’ll never have it. The second thing is, I think he exposed, at a level I never expected… What we learned in this election is how deeply corrupt… the level of our politics is, and collusion between media outlets and campaigns. There is not objective journalism in America. And of course, the media doesn’t want to cover that story.”

Surely Hannity will offer to testify on Assange’s behalf, right? Being such a true believer in objective journalism and all.

Truthfully, I think the charges against Assange are dangerous to the First Amendment. There’s a reason the Obama administration didn’t run with them. If Emptywheel is correct, it’s possible they are going to add more charges before the extradition that are less dicey but if not this seems to be a real reach.

That doesn’t mean I have any more respect for what Assange has become in recent years than I do for his soul brothers Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. He’s a member of the political media and one of the worst practitioners now that he’s aligned himself with authoritarian right-wingers like Trump and slants his “journalism” in favor of Trump’s politics. He’s just another rabid partisan wingnut — but that’s a legitimate exercise of the First Amendment.

However, I think the mainstream media needs to take a gut check and ask themselves whether or not they properly contextualized his “work” during 2016 and made proper note of the fact that the vaunted radical transparency organization was playing the same role as Breitbart or Drudge when he openly admitted he was hostile to one side and only releasing information that helped that cause. Instead, they drooled and grunted over every risotto recipe like they’d uncovered a new Rosetta Stone. They were the ones who mainlined all that banal campaign bullshit and enabled the right to treat “her emails” as a federal case, even as they were comically inept at dealing with the rampant criminality and unfitness of Donald Trump.

Assange is entitled under the first amendment to support corrupt, authoritarian scumbags like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin if he chooses. That’s the price we pay for freedom. It’s up to the rest of the press to put what he does in proper perspective.

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He knows this sanctuary cities gambit is illegal. He knows his xenophobic base is fine with that

by digby

Update to the post below:

The White House’s formal statement on the story that the White House had proposed to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities as political etribution:

“The simple question that was informally asked was whether — in order to relive burdens on these receiving communities — illegal aliens already being released on a daily basis could be sent to and cared for by Sanctuary Jurisdictions whose stated policy is to welcome and embrace illegal aliens. The idea was briefly and informally raised and quickly rejected. No one at ICE was pressured by anyone at any time.”

Ok. Somebody forgot to tell the president:

This is, as I write below, his political strategy. He has to do everything possible to keep white wingers on board. That includes the college-educated whites who don’t live in diverse areas who aren’t happy with him in most ways but have become terrified of immigrants. This is the issue that will keep that fragile coalition together.

Bussing immigrants to sanctuary cities has the additional benefit of being a snotty, adolescent exercise in owning the libs which also appeals to his followers. The case of arrested development among these people is very acute.

I guess we’re going to see if going full fascist will repel enough other Americans to beat him at the ballot box. I wish I felt sure of that. But the fact that 60 million Americans still back this guy has shaken my faith in my fellow Americans.

Aaaand there’s this:

When some of President Donald Trump’s top national security advisers gathered at the White House Tuesday night to talk about the surge of immigrants across the southern border, they discussed increasing the U.S. military’s involvement in the border mission, including whether the military could be used to build tent city detention camps for migrants, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the conversations.

During the meeting, the officials also discussed whether the U.S. military could legally run the camps once the migrants are housed there, a move the three officials said was very unlikely since U.S. law prohibits the military from directly interacting with migrants. The law has been a major limitation for Trump, who wants to engage troops in his mission to get tougher on immigration.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan was at the White House meeting Tuesday night and was open to sending more U.S. troops to support the border mission, so long as their assigned mission is within the law, according to the three U.S. officials.

Thousands of troops are currently deployed along the southern border, and are mainly used for reinforcing existing fencing with barbed wire.

Potential new projects for the troops that were mentioned Tuesday, according to the three officials — two from the Pentagon and one from Homeland Security — also included conducting assessments of the land before the construction of new tent cities in El Paso and Donna, Texas. They would also be used in assessments before construction of a new central processing center for migrants in El Paso, said the DHS official.

The creation of the processing center was announced last month. It is being designed to temporarily detain arriving immigrants, many of whom are being released in El Paso due to the lack of detention space.

The processing center will be similar to one currently used in McAllen, Texas, where children were kept in chain-link areas, which some called “cages,” while the Trump administration’s family separation policy was in effect last summer, according to two Customs and Border Protection officials.

The tent cities would hold immigrants while Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities continue to be at capacity. The Obama administration also used tents to hold immigrants in Donna, Texas, in 2016.

The idea has trickled down into planning meetings held this week at DHS, one of the officials said.

As I wrote in my column this morning, Trump is serious about all this. He is a true believer, as is Miller. But it’s also their strategy for solidifying the base for 2020.

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