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Month: April 2019

Summary Judgment

Summary Judgment

by digby


Marcy Wheeler’s take
on the NYT article reporting “concerns” among Mueller’s investigators is typically perspicacious. She begins by pointing out that the NYT is too credulous about Barr’s apparent “surprise” at being accused of being political and then goes to the heart of the matter:

But I want to look at the actual news detail in the story: that Mueller’s team wrote multiple summaries. The article uses the word four times (plus a caption) including these three references:

Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter. 

However, the special counsel’s office never asked Mr. Barr to release the summaries soon after he received the report, a person familiar with the investigation said. And the Justice Department quickly determined that the summaries contain sensitive information, like classified material, secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal investigations that must remain confidential, according to two government officials.

The detail is useful because it tells Jerry Nadler and FOIA terrorist Jason Leopold precisely what they’re looking for: Mueller’s own summaries of their findings (which in fact may be parallel summaries, addressing multiple questions).

But it’s also significant that NYT’s sources used that term — summary. As I’ve noted, Barr’s original memo claimed he was “summarize[ing] the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation.”  Two things: The principal conclusions and the results.

Then after Jerry Nadler scoffed that Barr had released a four page summary (note, one of the journalists on this story, Nicholas Fandos, spent his morning covering the House Judiciary Committee voting to subpoena the report), Barr pretended he hadn’t claimed to be summarizing the investigation and claimed he wouldn’t dream of summarizing the report.

I am aware of some media reports and other public statements mischaracterizing my March 24, 2019 supplemental notification as a “summary” of the Special Counsel’s investigation and report. For example, Chairman Nadler’s March 25 letter refers to my supplemental notification as a “four-page summary of the Special Counsel’s review.” My March 24 letter was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report. As my letter made clear, my notification to Congress and the public provided, pending release of the report, a summary of its “principal conclusions” [sic] — that is, its bottom line.
[snip]
I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the report or release it in serial fashion.

We now learn, only after Barr pretended he hadn’t claimed to write a summary, that Mueller’s team wrote not just one but multiple summaries (possibly customized to each of several audiences for the report).

And now Barr is offering dubious excuses about why the summaries that tax payers have already paid for couldn’t be released.

My guess is Barr’s claim, which he backtracked off of, to have summarized even “the principal conclusions” of the Mueller report — much less the “results of his investigation” — is going to really come back to embarrass him, if he’s still capable of embarrassment.

I think it already has …

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Whistleblowers in the White House

Whistleblowers in the White House

by digby


The Deep State is now using the whistleblower statute
to destroy that poor Donald Trump, who’s only trying to make the world safe:

Tricia Newbold set an important mark when she became the first official currently serving in Donald Trump’s White House to take accusations of wrongdoing to Congress—and to put her name publicly behind them.

But Democrats on Capitol Hill say that beyond Newbold, a small army of whistle-blowers from across the government has been working in secret with the House Oversight Committee to report alleged malfeasance inside the Trump administration. Lawmakers and aides are reluctant to discuss information they have gleaned from anonymous government tipsters in detail. But the list of whistle-blowers who either currently or previously worked in the Trump administration, or who worked closely with the administration, numbers in the “dozens,” according to a senior aide from the committee now led by Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland.

The Oversight Committee, like many committees in Congress, has a long history of working with federal whistle-blowers regardless of which party is in charge. Though some come forward publicly, most provide information or leak documents anonymously, helping to lead to investigations and, sometimes, hearings. “It’s entirely proper, and it’s really the point of what the Oversight Committee does,” says former Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, a Republican who headed the panel during the mid-2000s. When he was the chairman of the committee, many whistle-blowers’ reports led nowhere, he says, as they frequently came from “disgruntled employees” or others whose complaints were frivolous. But that was not always the case. Davis recalled, for example, that whistle-blowers were crucial to the investigation that exposed the military’s cover-up of the 2004 friendly-fire incident that killed Army Corporal Pat Tillman, a former NFL star who died fighting in Afghanistan.

Committee veterans told me, however, that the number of whistle-blowers who’ve come forward since Trump became president is far higher than the number who cooperated with the panel during previous administrations. “The biggest difference wasn’t necessarily us switching to the majority; the biggest difference was Donald Trump being elected president,” said the Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the committee’s investigative work. Democrats began hearing from whistle-blowers almost immediately after Trump was sworn in, the aide said, beginning with a report that then–National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been exchanging text messages with his business partner during the inauguration.

Of the dozens of whistle-blowers Democrats said they are working with, they have publicly confirmed that a handful work in the White House. All but Newbold, however, have come forward on the condition that they remain anonymous. Newbold spoke to the committee as part of its investigation of White House security clearances, and she’s not the only whistle-blower involved in that matter, the panel confirmed in a memo describing her testimony. “Committee staff have spoken with other whistle-blowers who corroborated Ms. Newbold’s account, but they were too afraid about the risk to their careers to come forward publicly,” the memo reads. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

I suspect many of them are afraid of more than losing their careers. Newbold said openly that she’s afraid of Republicans and Mark Meadows had to reassure her that they weren’t going to do something to her.

Newbold has accused her superiors of repeatedly retaliating against her after she began raising concerns about the clearance process. In October, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that her boss, Carl Kline, would move security files to a higher shelf that she could not reach. (Newbold has a form of dwarfism.) And in January, she was suspended without pay for two weeks soon after NBC News reported that Kline had approved a security clearance for Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, after it was denied by two career security specialists. The NBC story mentioned Newbold’s complaint to the EEOC.

Legislation passed in 1970 and expanded numerous times since protects government whistle-blowers from retaliation. But Democrats say the charges from Trump allies of a “deep state” conspiracy against the president within the federal government—along with reports, including one from an unnamed whistle-blower, that the administration planned to purge the State Department of career civil-service officers deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump—have created a climate of fear among potential whistle-blowers.

“I’ve never seen this many whistle-blowers reporting waste, fraud, and abuse, and just general concern,” the senior Oversight Committee aide told me. “On the flip side of that, I’ve also never seen whistle-blowers so afraid of what could happen to them if somebody finds out who they are.”

At a public committee meeting on Tuesday, Cummings defended his handling of Newbold’s testimony, which he said was taken on a Saturday on short notice at her request because she feared further retaliation at the White House if her planned deposition became public in advance. “I will protect whistle-blowers. Period,” the chairman declared.

Connolly told me that Democrats have more power in the majority to protect whistle-blowers and to ensure that their reports “won’t fall on barren ground.” But, in a nod to the fears that potential whistle-blowers confront, he added this warning: “Nothing’s foolproof, and there’s always a risk.”

Yes. With these people, it’s very risky. It’s not as if they play by the rules or follow the law …

There have been more leaks out of this White House than any I can ever remember. Some of it is palace intrigue, people jockeying for power within this bizarre administration. But it stands to reason that some people, like Newbold, have come to congress to seek some kind of serious oversight and simply aren’t willing to become targets of the Trump cult. That’s understandable.

You’ll notice that the Republicans don’t give a damn about this either. All hail Trump.

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Trump again rails against … courts. Again. And says many other dumb things.

Trump again rails against … courts

by digby

He also doesn’t care if the congress approves his “new” NAFTA. This would be because he plans to just keep slapping tariffs on anyone he wants to under his bogus theory of “national emergency.” So far, he’s used this rationale on China and he’s threatened the EU.

He honestly belives that asymum seekers deserve no due process. In fact,”courts” in general are just supposed to rubber stamp whatever he wants.

He’s now saying that he’ll slap tariffs on cars a year from now if Mexico doesn’t stop Central American immigrants from coming to the US border and if that doesn’t work he’ll close the border. That would only hurt American car makers, but he’s fine with that too, I’m sure. I suspect he was talked out of his temper tantrum threat to close the border this week by Arizona and Texas Republicans who managed him by saying it would hurt his re-election chances. That’s all he cares about. After all, he needs to win in order to run out the statute of limitations on his crimes.

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It’s only Thursday

It’s only Thursday

by digby



It’s not going well for him:

The Democrats have formally requested six years of his tax returns, and are ready to formally subpoena the full Mueller report. And after nearly two years of work without a single leak Robert Mueller’s team is making it known they are frustrated with Attorney General Barr’s apparently misleading 4-page summary of the Special Counsel’s investigation, and believe Trump is not as innocent as Barr suggests. Federal investigators have launched an investigation into how foreign governments may be using Mar-a-Lago to target Trump, which will likely uncover the pay-for-access natureof his golf club. And under Trump more than two dozen administration officials and others were granted security clearances despite being rejected by career civil servants– at the top of that list is Jared Kushner.

I don’t think it’s going to get any better for him.

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Sneaky little bastages by @BloggersRUs

Sneaky little bastages
by Tom Sullivan


Still image from Johnny Dangerously (1984)

“You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead,” USA Today warns. Thousands upon thousands of bills introduced each year bear traces of “model” bills written by industry groups and promoted by special-interest lobbyists. USA Today, The Arizona Republic, and the Center for Public Integrity spent two years examining the issue and found at least 10,000 bills introduced across the country over the last eight years “almost entirely copied” from model legislation. More than 2,100 became law:

The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.

The phenomenon of copycat legislation is far larger. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.

Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They’ve called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks. They’ve limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters.

With deceptive names that hide their true purpose and traveling “experts” paid to promote them to legislatures, copycat bills have proliferated. They sometimes arrive in state capitols to override the will of voters who passed local legislation opposed by industry or well-funded interest groups. The bulk of such bills, the study found, reflect the interests of industry and conservative groups.

“One that passed in Wisconsin limited pain-and-suffering compensation for injured nursing-home residents, restricting payouts to lost wages, which the elderly residents don’t have,” the report adds.

Naturally, the American Legislative Exchange Council gets name-checked more than once:

“This work proves what many people have suspected, which is just how much of the democratic process has been outsourced to special interests,” said Lisa Graves, co-director of Documented, which probes corporate manipulation of public policy. “It is both astonishing and disappointing to see how widespread … it is. Good lord, it’s an amazing thing to see.”

It’s a stunning read, though not earth-shattering news. Given recent history, next thing you know hostile countries will be phoning it in. And our own lawmakers will help them.

Ways and Means stops dragging its feet and demands those tax returns!

Ways and Means stops dragging its feet and demands those tax returns!

by digby

I wrote about this for Salon just this morning and lookee here. (I get results!)

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal has formally requested President Donald Trump’s tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service, likely launching a battle with the administration that could stretch months or even years in the courts and could shed light on the President’s finances.

In a letter to the IRS sent Wednesday and first obtained by CNN, Neal cites a little known IRS code in his request for six years of Trump’s personal tax returns from 2013 to 2018. He also requested the tax returns of eight of Trump’s business entities, a nod to escalating pressure from liberals in the caucus who have argued that Trump’s personal returns wouldn’t sufficiently paint a picture of the President’s financial history.

While the move will largely be seen by Republicans as a political escalation, Neal explained in the letter the request is part of his oversight role. Neal wrote that the committee needed Trump’s tax returns to consider legislation related to the IRS’s practice of auditing sitting presidents.

“Under the Internal Revenue Manual, individual income tax returns of a President are subject to mandatory examination, but this practice is IRS policy and not codified in the Federal tax laws,” Neal wrote in a letter to the IRS. “It is necessary for the committee to determine the scope of any such examination and whether it includes a review of underlying business activities required to be reported on the individual income tax return.”

In a statement to CNN, Neal stressed that the committee’s request was about “policy, not politics.”
“My preparations were made on my own track and timeline, entirely independent of other activities in Congress and the administration,” Neal said. “My actions reflect an abiding reverence for our democracy and our institutions, and are in no way based on emotion of the moment or partisanship. I trust that in this spirit, the IRS will comply with federal law and furnish me with the requested documents in a timely manner.”

Neal has given the IRS until April 10 to comply with the request.

Yeah baby.

I’d look for a Trump tweet-tantrum of epic-proportions over this. he’s going to explode like Mt Vesuvius.

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Keeping the report under wraps is simply not optional

Keeping the report under wraps is simply not optional

by digby

“Russia if you’re listening …”

Brian Beutler makes the case for why this Mueller Report simply must be released. It’s way beyond politics:

The House Judiciary Committee has authorized chairman Jerrold Nadler to subpoena Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full, unredacted report on Russian election interference, and unless Attorney General William Barr reverses his opposition to providing Congress the report voluntarily, it is critical that Nadler deploy the subpoena unreluctantly.

When Barr remains defiant, or President Trump intervenes to conceal the report, the ensuing battle will be waged in the lofty language of precedent and checks and balances and separation of powers. But those terms will paper over the underlying question that makes this particular fight a matter of enormous public interest: What are they hiding?

That question has fairly obvious and crass political force, but in this case it’s one that needs to be answered, not just asked, because without at least a complete accounting of what happened in 2016, and a credible response from the government, the basic trust that allows our political system to function with legitimacy will be shattered.

After briefly pretending to support complete transparency, based on a dishonest assertion that Mueller had exonerated him, Trump has backpedaled almost all the way. He has even suggested that the Justice Department should shelve the Mueller report, and ignore congressional demands for any further disclosure.

But even partial concealment from Congress would cause permanent damage, and not just to the institutions of Congress or the Justice Department.

The way things have shaken out since Mueller completed his investigation has left the country deeply vulnerable. For reasons that won’t be entirely clear until his report becomes public, Mueller was not able to establish that the ways the Trump campaign worked knowingly and in tandem with the Russian government throughout the 2016 election amounted to a criminal conspiracy. Between that conclusion, and Barr’s subsequent intervention to declare Trump should not be subject to prosecution for obstruction of justice, the full weight of the Justice Department now rests behind the view that presidential campaigns can partner tacitly with hostile foreign intelligence services to sabotage their opponents, then try to conceal the relationship, and face no legal consequences for it.

What that really means in practice is that Trump and future Republican candidates, contemptuous of the rule-based international order, can undermine U.S. sovereignty to get themselves elected by encouraging authoritarian regimes to play in our campaigns, and do so with complete impunity. Nobody will have any recourse.

Plenty of Republicans would be satisfied with that outcome—as House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff memorably scolded his Republican colleagues, “You might say that’s just what you need to do to win.” But it’s not acceptable, and most people in the country won’t abide by it.

Congress thus needs the full Mueller report for two reasons. First, to instl confidence that the redacted report the government issues for public consumption (to protect intelligence equities and ongoing investigations) has been redacted in good faith—and that what remains accurately conveys the thrust of the full document.

Second, so that Congress itself can take appropriate steps to safeguard American elections, from this president and future ones based on the complete set of facts.

More at the link.

I agree with this 100%. If Trump has done anything he’s persuaded Republicans that they have license to win by any means necessary. Allowing this to go unopposed will mean they are right.

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The meme war

The meme war

by digby

Mother Jones takes a look at one of the little discussed right wing propaganda techniques:

Benny Johnson took to the stage at the convention center in Palm Beach, Florida, before an audience of cheering young Trump supporters in December to lead a session titled “How to Own the Libs.”

“I ask myself every day: How do we own the libs?” said Johnson, at the time a reporter for the right-wing Daily Caller. “How do we do it in a way that makes a difference? Because these people deserved to be wrecked.”

According to Johnson, the answer to that question is memes. These bits of humor or political propaganda—generally images overlaid with a caption designed to go viral—are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump. Or as notorious internet troll Chuck Johnson has said, “We memed the president into existence.”

Following that unexpected meme-driven success, well-funded conservative groups are making a more organized push to train young internet-savvy right-wingers in the art of meme-making, enlisting a growing army in what they see as the coming meme war of 2020. Turning Point USA, the conservative campus group that organized the conference, is merely one of these organizations seeking to sway hearts, minds, and elections via meme trainings. And it’s clear that when it comes to political memes, the left—which has never taken them very seriously—is trailing the right badly, and falling even further behind.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which did a study of Facebook memes last summer. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry. What you’re looking at here with memes is storytelling around the bend, and what you’re seeing is the future.”

Memes are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump president.
Trump’s presidential campaign keyed into the power of memes early on, monitoring obscure meme sites and boosting pro-Trump images and videos onto mainstream platforms like Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms favor images and videos over more nuanced text posts or links to news articles, so pro-Trump memes quickly went viral. During the campaign, memes also helped spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton’s health and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that prompted an armed North Carolina man to show up at a DC pizza parlor to break up a nonexistent child sex ring supposedly led by Democratic Party operatives.

Perhaps no one understood the effectiveness of memes better than former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who had served as executive chairman of the far-right publication Breitbart News. In 2016, only 5 percent of Breitbart‘s posts were of images, but those images accounted for half of the site’s most-shared posts on Facebook.

Jeff Giesea, a consultant who has worked with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers, is a self-described “memetics” expert. During the 2016 campaign, he joined with men’s rights agitator Mike Cernovich to organize MAGA3X, a grassroots army of online trolls who worked to meme Trump to the White House. The effort produced tens of thousands of social media accounts, all working in concert to promote Trump, with a heavy emphasis on iconography. They even created a flash-mob meme generator to make it easy for Trump supporters to hook up in real life.

Giesea has long argued that memes are such a powerful tool they should be used as cyberwarfare to combat propaganda from ISIS and other foreign threats. In 2015, he wrote in a NATO journal on information warfare that “it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies…Memetic warfare is about taking control of the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space. It’s about denigrating, disrupting, and subverting the enemy’s effort to do the same.”

The same could be said of memes in politics. Cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare. Republicans have gotten Giesea’s message, while Democrats have all but ignored it.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Media Matters president Angelo Carusone. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry.”

Johnson’s skill in this area launched him to Washington media fame for a while, until he was ousted from BuzzFeed and then the Independent Journal Review after being accused of plagiarism. He seems to have found his calling with Turning Point USA, the conservative campus activist group that sponsored the student convention in Palm Beach and is itself something of a meme factory.

Founded in 2012, TPUSA got its startup funding from Foster Friess, a wealthy Republican donor, and it has since raked in donations from the oil and gas industry and organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers. With a budget of more than $8 million last year, TPUSA amplifies its campus presence by churning out endless “Big Government Sucks” memes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Like most memes, a few of TPUSA’s are clever and spread far, and many more have been trashed by internet trolls, who have created a whole meme subgenre they call “Toilet Paper USA.” Johnson was on hand in Florida to help TPUSA members up their game.

Johnson started his tutorial with “based Lindsey Graham,” a video montage of the South Carolina senator’s angry performance during the contentious confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in high school. “That is a special moment,” he explained, noting that Kavanaugh was confirmed in spite of the allegations. “In your lifetime, there has never been a culture war that conservatives have won except for this.”

He proceeded to walk the audience through the evolution of Graham memes that went viral during the hearing and may have helped change public opinion on Kavanaugh. On the big screen, Johnson showed photos and a video he had taken of Graham coming out of the Capitol after a day of hearings. In the video, Graham is coolly adjusting his tie and smiling, while in the background, a police officer restrains a hysterical-looking woman who’s screaming at him about Kavanaugh. Johnson tweeted that he had just taken “the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.”

From there, the internet took care of the rest. “Did this sucker meme?” Johnson asked, laughing. The answer was yes. Creative internet users tweaked and photoshopped the image, both still and video, as it spread. Johnson showed one meme of the tie-adjusting Graham superimposed on the burning Twin Towers. Then one featuring Joe Biden planting a kiss on the screaming woman. And finally, one that turned Graham into a “thug life” rap video star.

“This is how you know you’ve made it in this profession,” Johnson told his audience. “When memes take life.”

The article goes on to point out that Democrats lag badly at this sort of thing. (Late night TV is not enough …)

But Republicans have always been better at being snotty little assholes. It’s one of their great talents. Even St Reagan was king of low blow insults:

“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”

Still, Democrats should be more aware of the power of these memes. If you look at Pinterest or Instagram they are everywhere. Trump fans love them and they make the right looks dominating even when they aren’t.

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QOTD: AOC

QOTD: AOC

by digby

On Jared’s little security problems:

I think it’s important that we refocus what is at stake here in this investigation, in this matter. We are getting reports from press and from a wide variety of sources … folks are suggesting that we are conducting foreign relations with folks with security clearances via WhatsApp. I mean, every day that we go on without getting to the bottom of this matter is a day that we are putting hundreds, if not potentially thousands, of Americans at risk. I mean, really, what is next, putting nuclear codes in Instagram DMs?

Don Jr and Roger Stone were communicating with Russian hackers and Wikileaks on twitter DM so this isn’t farfetched.

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Bring on the health care debate

Bring on the health care debate

by digby

New polling on “The Party of Health Care” :

The poll shows that any health care battle will be fought on Democrats’ turf. Asked whom they trust when it comes to health care, 45 percent of voters pick Democrats in Congress, while 35 percent choose Republicans in Congress. A majority of voters, 54 percent, have “a lot” or “some” trust in congressional Democrats to protect the health care system or make improvements to it — significantly more than have those levels of trust in congressional Republicans (41 percent) or Trump (41 percent) on the issue.

A 59 percent majority of voters say they don’t have much trust or any trust at all in Trump on health care.

“As health care is pushed to the forefront of the 2020 agenda, our polling suggests President Trump may struggle to attract voters with his promise of a new plan,” said Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president. “While over eight in 10 Republicans (82 percent) have ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ trust in the president to overhaul the U.S. health care system, independents and Democrats trust the president ‘not much’ or ‘not at all’ on this issue (65 and 93 percent, respectively).”

Republicans have zero credibility on this issue. Donald Trump even less. Sure his cult followers will believe anything he says but they represent 40% of the country.

Mitch McConnell persuaded Trump to pull back from his plan to win the lawsuit that repeals Obamacare and then force the House Democrats to the table to pass his bill because people would terrified and dying all over the country so they’d vote for anything. Apparently that was too nihilistic even for McConnell and that’s saying something.

Trump is now saying that running on his “great plan” will give incentives to vote Republican and Trump in 2020. Sadly for them, they have no credibility.

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