Month: April 2019

Maybe Democrats should stop “agonizing”

by digby

… and just do the right thing. Who knows, most Americans might even find some respect for them.

The New York Times reports:

Senate Republicans see the special counsel’s report — with its stark evidence that President Trump repeatedly impeded the investigation into Russian election interference — as a summons for collective inaction.

Republicans in the upper chamber, who would serve as Mr. Trump’s jury if House Democrats were to impeach him, reacted to the report’s release with a range of tsk-tsk adjectives like “brash,” “inappropriate” or “unflattering.” Only Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, called out the president’s behavior as “sickening.”

Yet no Republican, not even Mr. Romney, a political brand-name who does not face his state’s voters until 2022, has pressed for even a cursory inquiry into the findings by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that the president pressured senior officials, including the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II and the former attorney general Jeff Sessions, to scuttle his investigation. Where Democrats see a road map to impeachment, Republicans see a dead end.

“I consider this to be, basically, the end of the road,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, who once tried to thwart Mr. Trump’s presidential nomination and now serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has the authority to investigate Mr. Mueller’s findings.

“There is no question that some of these revelations are unflattering,” Mr. Lee said in an interview on Wednesday. “But there is a difference between unflattering and something that can and should be prosecuted.”

Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, has been as critical in private of Mr. Trump’s actions as Mr. Romney has been in public, but he, too, said it was time to move on.

“While the report documents a number of actions taken by the president or his associates that were inappropriate, the special counsel reached no conclusion on obstruction of justice,” Mr. Portman said in a statement.

That is factually accurate; in releasing his findings a week ago, Mr. Mueller laid out about a dozen instances in which the president may have obstructed justice, but he left it to Congress to reach that conclusion, counseling “that Congress has authority to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of his authority.” House Democrats responded by ramping up committee investigations, kicking off what is likely to be a long, rending intraparty debate over impeachment.

Senate Republicans saw Mr. Mueller’s invitation in far more cynical terms, as a quintessential Washington punt of responsibility, according to aides and political consultants. One senior aide to a Senate Republican put it this way: If the most respected law enforcement official of his generation did not have the temerity to accuse Mr. Trump of obstructing justice, why should they?

“The Republican Party, and the Senate, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist based in Florida who has been a sharp critic of Mr. Trump’s. “Occasionally, a few guys in the Senate will furrow their brows, but it will never be backed up by action. They wake up every day and pray, ‘Please, God, don’t let Trump be mean to me on Twitter.’”

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, urged the Republicans on the panel to investigate the report’s findings. “The report makes a strong case for obstruction of justice,” she said on Thursday. “Congress has both the constitutional duty and authority to investigate the serious allegations laid out in the Mueller report. We need to understand not only the president’s actions, but also why he was so determined to conceal the truth from investigators and the public.”

In the short term, the Senate will provide a backdrop for the next big public event in the Mueller story, with Attorney General William P. Barr set to testify about the report next Wednesday before the Judiciary Committee. Next week, a bipartisan group of eight Senate and House leaders are scheduled to review an unredacted version of Mr. Mueller’s findings when they return from their spring recess.

If either event brings anything new to light, Republican leaders may have to recalibrate, but they do not expect that to happen.

An investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election is still continuing, but that, too, may have been compromised by the special counsel’s work; Mr. Mueller’s report found that the committee’s chairman, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, “appears to have” sent “information about the status of the F.B.I. investigation” to the White House.

The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, said he had no plans to investigate — and has even suggested that if he pursues a new inquiry it would be to focus on allegations that federal law enforcement agencies conducted surveillance of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

“I’m all good. I’m done with the Mueller report,” Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told CNN this week.

That sense of finality was echoed by Republican senators who are considerably less inclined to take Mr. Trump’s side, including Mr. Portman, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who in private have all harshly criticized Mr. Trump’s conduct of his presidency, according to aides.

You can see why they feel calm. The Democrats are dithering about what to do which means they will likely do little. Approximately 536 times a day, people in the media say that Democrats are upset that they have to deal with this because they just want to talk about their 10 point plans and “kitchen table issues.” This is because everyone insists the public only cares about money and maybe a little bit about some social issues. But a criminal president and the threat of authoritarianism and criminal oligarchy? Nah.

I actually don’t believe that. And I have ro wonder if this insisence that voters are so self-involved that they don’t care abou their country might start sounding just a bit insulting. It sure as hell insults me.

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Lindsey Graham, maverick man o’ integrity is a hypocrite? Say it ain’t so.

by digby

"The media isn't covering the @realdonaldtrump presidency, they're trying to destroy it."@LindseyGrahamSC, in his first interview since the Mueller report dropped, said that Dems would "pay" in 2020 for their desire for collusion and pursuit of obstruction. pic.twitter.com/utxec5cFYh— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 23, 2019

Lindsey Graham explains that a president stonewalling Congressional oversight is an impeachable offense. pic.twitter.com/tv88AilKUJ— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 26, 2019

Graham will undoubtedly be re-elected in a landslide in South Carolina because of his unstinting support of Donald Trump. And after he secures his next six years, he will attempt to reaffirm his old maverick reputation. (His mavericky mentor, John McCain, did this with his “build the damn wall” re-election campaign in 2016.)

He should never be allowed to do that. he is Trump’s most servile toady in the Senate. He is tied to Trump’s legacy in the history books forever. He, of all people, cannot be allowed to rehabilitate himself.

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I always knew Rosenstein was a weasel

by digby

The moment I read that ridiculous “Comey firing” memo that Rosenstein wrote for Trump I knew he was a brown-noser (or, as Comey reportedly said, “a survivor”.)  He was clearly ready to take out Comey, which wasn’t wrong in itself since Comey had behaved very badly. But he did it to curry favor with Trump, knowing that his reasoning was being used dishonestly.

I think we were all misled into thinking that he was protecting the investigation when, according to the Mueller Report, it appears that the investigation was being protected from inside the White House.

Now he’s out there giving speeches basically sucking up to Trump and blaming the Obama administration for the Russian interference:

At a Public Servants Dinner of the Armenian Bar Association, Rosenstein unloaded on the Obama administration, saying that its handling of the Russian election interference disadvantaged the probe from the start.

“The previous administration chose not to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America,” he said. “The FBI disclosed classified evidence about the investigation to ranking legislators and their staffers. Someone selectively leaked details to the news media. The FBI director announced at a congressional hearing that there was a counterintelligence investigation that might result in criminal charges. Then the former FBI director alleged that the President pressured him to close the investigation, and the President denied that the conversation occurred. So that happened.”

He sprinkled in a colorful metaphor to fully depict the burden he shouldered when he took on the deputy AG gig.

“There is a story about firefighters who found a man on a burning bed. When they asked how the fire started, he replied, ‘I don’t know. It was on fire when I lay down on it,’” Rosenstein said. “I know the feeling,” he quipped.

Nevertheless, he was quick to illustrate the aplomb with which he and his team handled the tough hand they were dealt: “Today, our nation is safer, elections are more secure, and citizens are better informed about covert foreign influence schemes.”

But, in case listeners forgot how hard Rosenstein labored to be a beacon of judicial integrity in the swamp of Washington, he added: “Not everybody was happy with my decision, in case you did not notice.”

He rounded out the evening with a quick potshot at the news media, a must in the time of Trump.

“Some of the nonsense that passes for breaking news today would not be worth the paper it was printed on, if anybody bothered to print it,” he said.

Read his full comments here.

Remember this?

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is flying Monday with President Donald Trump on Air Force One to a police chiefs’ conference in Florida and the president said before leaving that he has no plans to fire the overseer of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

“No, I don’t,” Trump responded when asked if he planned to remove Rosenstein.

“Looking forward to being with him,” he added. “We’ll be talking on the plane. I have a good relationship other than there’s been no collusion.”

After landing in Florida, Trump described his conversation on the plane with Rosenstein as “great.”

The flight provided an opportunity for their most extensive conversation since news reports last month that Rosenstein had discussed possibly secretly recording Trump to expose chaos in the White House and invoking constitutional provisions to get him removed from office.

The reports, which Rosenstein denied, fueled speculation that Rosenstein might be fired or resign. Rosenstein told officials that he would be willing to resign and met at the White House with chief of staff John Kelly during a chaotic day two weeks ago that ended with him still in his Justice Department job.

Did that ever make any sense? No it didn’t.

You want a “tarmac meeting”? This is the one that really stinks.

Update

He was “on his team”:

Rod J. Rosenstein, again, was in danger of losing his job. The New York Times had just reported that — in the heated days after James B. Comey was fired as FBI director — the deputy attorney general had suggested wearing a wire to surreptitiously record President Trump. Now Trump, traveling in New York, was on the phone, eager for an explanation.

Rosenstein — who, by one account, had gotten teary-eyed just before the call in a meeting with Trump’s chief of staff — sought to defuse the volatile situation and assure the president he was on his team, according to people familiar with matter. He criticized the Times report, published in late September, and blamed it on former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, whose recollections formed its basis. Then he talked about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and told the president he would make sure Trump was treated fairly, people familiar with the conversation said.

“I give the investigation credibility,” Rosenstein said, in the words of one administration official offering their own characterization of the call. “I can land the plane.”

The episode illustrates the political tightrope Rosenstein has had to walk in his two years as the Justice Department’s second-in-command. To keep his job, the deputy attorney general has worked to mollify an often angry Trump, while at the same time protecting the special counsel’s investigation of the president and his campaign. Rosenstein’s actions have come under renewed scrutiny, as he has played a key role in releasing Mueller’s findings in a way even some of his supporters say has been overly favorable to Trump.

In a statement for this article, Rosenstein said: “The only commitment I made to President Trump about the Russia investigation is the same commitment I made to the Congress: so long as I was in charge, it would be conducted appropriately and as expeditiously as possible. Everyone who actually participated in the investigation knows that.”

He added: “My relationship with the President is not one-dimensional. The Russia investigation represents only a fraction of my work and the work of the Department of Justice. I talk with the President at every opportunity about the great progress we have made and are making at the Department of Justice in achieving the Administration’s law enforcement priorities and protecting American citizens.”

A person familiar with Rosenstein’s account said the deputy attorney general disputes that he was teary-eyed in the meeting before the call with Trump. “He was reacting appropriately given the circumstances, which was a discussion about his forced resignation,” the person said.

But Rosenstein — whose representatives were approached for comment for this report earlier in the week — acknowledged in a combative speech Thursday night in New York that there were times during his tenure as deputy attorney general that he grew upset.

“One silly question that I get from reporters is, ‘Is it true that you got angry and emotional a few times over the past few years?’ Heck yes! Didn’t you?” Rosenstein said, deviating from his prepared script.

Trump ended the call with Rosenstein thinking he was “on the team after all,” one senior administration official said, adding that the president has been further swayed by Rosenstein’s deference in meetings and other settings.

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Fox news IS a white supremacist chat room

by digby

Doug McKelway, neo-Nazi sympathizer

I guess there are a few dissenting voices. They don’t seem to get much traction on the air:

A Fox News reporter on Thursday called out two of his colleagues for sounding “like a White Supremacist chat room” when they attempted to defend President Trump’s infamous “both sides” comment about white supremacists in Charlottesville, according to internal emails reviewed by The Daily Beast.

Shortly after former Vice President Joe Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign with a video bashing Trump’s comments that there were “good people on both sides” at the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally, general assignment reporter Doug McKelway sprang into action to defend the president.

McKelway, a nine-year Fox News veteran, sent an email to dozens of network employees, saying he was “Putting this Biden statement out there, next to Trump’s original presser, and a live interview I did in C-ville with ‘good people on both sides’” to supposedly fact-check Biden. The emails were first published by FTV Live.

McKelway began his email with a Winston Churchill quote: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” He then proceeded to echo the pro-Trump claim that the president never said what he said about the neo-Nazis who marched at the deadly event.

McKelway contrasted portions of Biden’s script against the same quotes that pro-Trump outlets have used to claim the president never defended white nationalists. And then the reporter highlighted a quote from his own interview with Brian Lambert, an armed Unite the Right attendee, who portrayed the neo-Nazi rallygoers as victims: “They’re denying people their right to assemble. They’re denying their right to speak freely, however hateful their views may be,” he bemoaned.

Moments later, Fox News digital senior editor Cody Derespina replied-all, agreeing with McKelway, and adding to it a snippet of a Fox News interview with Jarrod Kuhn, a Charlottesville marcher who claimed he was not a white supremacist, but simply there to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

Within minutes of that email, Fox News Radio’s White House correspondent Jon Decker stepped in to chastise his colleagues.

“I really don’t understand the point you are making,” he wrote. “Jarrod Kuhn was one of those individuals in Charlottesville holding a tiki torch while the mob chanted ‘Jews will not replace us.’”

An hour later, a seemingly humbled McKelway returned to the thread, walking back his previous words. He linked to an article from C-Ville, a Charlottesville alt-weekly, that showed his one-time interviewee Brian Lambert was, in fact, a white nationalist who trespassed in local parks, removed tarps off Confederate statues, placed rebel flag stickers on surfaces, and flashed a white-power symbol to supporters during his sentencing hearing.

“[I]t appears Lambert revealed himself to be not the squeaky clean 1st amendment supporter he claimed to be on live TV,” McKelway confessed.

“So much for your Winston Churchill quote,” Decker shot back hours later for all to see.

He scolded McKelway for “invoking Churchill to what happened in Charlottesville,” calling it “rather offensive.”

In fact, Decker continued, “Based upon the slew of emails that I’ve received today, both of you should send an apology to your Fox News colleagues—many of whom are hurt and infuriated by your respective posts. Your posts read like something you’d read on a White Supremacist chat room.”

McKelway has a history of questionable comments about the deadly Charlottesville rally. Several days after anti-racism protester Heather Heyer was killed by white nationalist James Alex Fields at the rally, McKelway retweeted one user telling his Fox News colleague Shep Smith to “keep some comments to yourself.”

As it turns out, moments before, when McKelway equivocated on-air to Smith about how all Charlottesville residents—regardless of political beliefs—couldn’t wait for the national media to leave town, Smith replied, “Yeah, they probably can’t wait for the neo-Nazis to leave either.”

When asked for comment on the retweet telling his colleague to shut up, McKelway snarkily offered an autographed picture of himself.

Additionally, prior to the 2016 election, McKelway defended the alt-right on Fox News, claiming it was simply “using the same tactics that the left has used for generations now.” He further asserted that the alt-right is “much more than” an anti-Semitic, white-nationalist movement, citing Milo Yiannopoulos for his efforts in combating “the left’s obsession with… safe spaces.”

And year before that, McKelway compared the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse to the Soviet practice of airbrushing purged dissidents out of official photographs.

And in the aftermath of the deadly Charlottesville rally, several prominent Fox News hosts like Smith did admonish Trump for his “both sides” comment, but plenty of others publicly defended him. Most notably: The Five co-host and Trump booster Jesse Watters said the president was just trying to get “all the facts,” while host and unofficial Trump adviser Sean Hannity asked why the media was not focusing on the “alt-left.”

It’s nice that there are some dissenters. But this isn’t a debate. Those  marchers were shouting
Jews will not replace us” and anyone who stuck around claiming they were defending “their heritage” whether of slavery or naziism (or both) was owning the label “white supremacist.” There are no fine people among them.

Defending these mainstream white supremacists and deflect to a very fringe “alt-left” is reflexive at this point.

Update:

Asked if he still thinks there were "very fine people" on both sides of the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Trump says, "I was talking about people that went b/c they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E Lee. A great general, whether you like it or not" pic.twitter.com/D7O5vFWy29— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019

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Are powerful GOP lawyers starting to peel off?

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

We may be heading into a real live constitutional crisis, folks. A special counsel has carefully documented a series of events showing the president committed high crimes, using sworn testimony of people directly involved. Since the Justice Department has decided it cannot indict a sitting president, the only path to remove a criminal president resides with the Congress, but the president is refusing to acknowledge its constitutional power by failing to provide documents or allow witnesses to testify, even under subpoena. This showdown is obviously heading to the courts, although the president seems to be quite confused about how that works:

The Mueller Report, despite being written by Angry Democrats and Trump Haters, and with unlimited money behind it ($35,000,000), didn’t lay a glove on me. I DID NOTHING WRONG. If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 24, 2019

…..are there no “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” there are no Crimes by me at all. All of the Crimes were committed by Crooked Hillary, the Dems, the DNC and Dirty Cops – and we caught them in the act! We waited for Mueller and WON, so now the Dems look to Congress as last hope!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 24, 2019

It’s tempting to make fun of Trump’s twisted logic and addled understanding of the basic process of government, but this is a serious matter. He’s not just venting before the world on his puerile Twitter feed. The administration is refusing to cooperate with the Congress at all, and that is highly unusual even for presidents under siege.

Normally there is some form of accommodation in these cases, even if the White House wants to claim executive privilege. This administration has decided to totally stonewall everything, from tax returns to testimony about security clearances. Trump and his minions are claiming this privilege after they’ve already waived it even as the president is blabbing about the matters under subpoena on TV and Twitter.

Trump may not know much about how the government works, but he does understand TV ratings. So I would guess that the main reason for this stonewall is to keep the Democrats from staging dramatic public hearings to illustrate for the American people what Robert Mueller found in his investigation. He apparently understands that he can’t keep Mueller from testifying, but Mueller doesn’t seem to be the one Trump is worried about. He almost certainly doesn’t want to see former staffers like Hope Hicks or Rob Porter on screen testifying about his rampant corruption. But the one who scares him the most is former White House counsel Don McGahn.
According to Vanity Fair, Trump is “furious” with McGahn and has even asked Rudy Giuliani to sue him for defamation. (Giuliani denies this.) Trump told the Washington Post that he hasn’t “made a final, final decision” on executive privilege but he believes congressional testimony is unnecessary. He said there was “no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it’s very partisan — obviously very partisan.” He’s right about that. It is partisan. In fact, politics is partisan. Someone should have alerted him to that fact before he ran for office.

There’s more at stake here than politics, however. The founders had in mind that the three branches would jealously guard their own prerogatives, so it would be unlikely they would ever allow a president to defy them as blatantly as Trump is doing. Obviously, they didn’t expect such slavish devotion from a president’s allies as we see in the current Congress.

There is one faction of the Republican party that may be peeling off, however, and it’s the faction that Trump has been counting on to keep the Democrats at bay. I’m speaking of conservative lawyers, some of whom seem to feel a bit queasy about what they saw in the Mueller report and Trump’s reaction to it. McGahn’s testimony in the report is likely a big part of the realization that this is getting serious.

I have written quite a bit about McGahn over the years because he’s obviously been leaking to the press for some time in ways that made him look like a hero. It’s different seeing his name attached to testimony under oath, but the events chronicled in the Mueller Report about Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel and McGahn’s resulting threats to quit were published in the newspapers months ago. It’s clear that McGahn has been carefully strategizing how to salvage his reputation once he was done packing the courts with as many hard-right conservatives as he could find. He’s a smart guy and he’s walked that fine line effectively.

Some other Republican lawyers seem to be finding their voices as well. Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway’s husband George has formed a group of high-powered conservative legal scholars called Checks and Balances, which has now called on Congress to open an impeachment inquiry on the basis of the Mueller report:

We believe the framers of the Constitution would have viewed the totality of this conduct as evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. Accordingly, Congress, which carries its own constitutional oversight responsibilities, should conduct further investigation.

Law professor and former Trump transition official J.W. Verret wrote an essay for The Atlantic stating that the evidence clearly showed obstruction of justice and likewise called for impeachment hearings. Even Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano is on the record with the opinion that Trump obstructed justice.

Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano: “When the president asked Corey Lewandowski … to get Mueller fired, that’s obstruction of justice. When the president asked his then-White House counsel to get Mueller fired & then lie about it, that’s obstruction of justice.” pic.twitter.com/5k3dSpD76v

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 25, 2019

All of this goes much further than simply kvetching about Trump’s intemperance or general unfitness. These are high profile Republican lawyers saying that the president has apparently committed a crime. Trump, meanwhile, is determined to continue to obstruct by stonewalling Congress, and has now publicly suggested that his former White House counsel committed perjury:

As has been incorrectly reported by the Fake News Media, I never told then White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, even though I had the legal right to do so. If I wanted to fire Mueller, I didn’t need McGahn to do it, I could have done it myself. Nevertheless,….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2019

Saying that is unwise. It’s not the “Fake News Media” that said this. It’s Don McGahn himself. He refused to obstruct justice and commit perjury on Trump’s behalf. From a legal standpoint, this accusation against McGahn makes Trump’s claim of executive privilege look even more absurd, now that the president is disputing the testimony in public.

From a political standpoint, this is likely to make some of Trump’s most important allies unhappy: judges and lawyers upon whom he will have to depend in the coming legal battles. Many of them think highly of Don McGahn, a respected member of the Republican legal establishment. George Conway even wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post calling Trump a “cancer on the presidency,” clearly an allusion to the famous testimony by another former White House counsel, John Dean, which transformed him from a Nixon stooge to a national hero.

If McGahn eventually testifies on Capitol Hill and comes off well to the public, that could change everything. Other Republicans might get the idea that it’s time to get off the Trump train too. By slamming McGahn, Trump is unwittingly playing into his former lawyer’s self-serving heroic narrative. That may inspire others to follow McGahn’s lead.

Update

Another one:

A member of the independent counsel team that recommended the impeachment of President Bill Clinton says that President Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice are “blunter by a thousandfold” than anything Clinton did and more than justifies the House Judiciary Committee opening impeachment proceedings.

In an interview with the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Ken Starr, said that a “significant number” of his former colleagues from the independent counsel office share his views — although notably not Starr himself.

“My view is that there’s ample reason right now for the House Judiciary Committee to begin an impeachment inquiry … and if it were up to me, I would recommend them to impeach,” said Rosenzweig. “I mean, if I were called to testify today at the first of those hearings, I would say that Trump’s obstruction of justice and frankly, more importantly, Trump’s dereliction of duty in failing to address the issue of Russian interference in our electoral processes, are by themselves grounds for his impeachment.

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Trump’s unhinged call to Hannity

by digby

To save you the whole interminable 45 minutes of crazy, here are some highlights. Your president, ladies and gentlemen:

Trump awkwardly calls in to Hannity’s show mid-segment, prompting Geraldo to get cut off pic.twitter.com/ngrAeNf7dK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019

Hannity and Trump are pushing conspiracy theories about the Obama-era Justice Department.

“Really it’s a coup,” Trump says, before admitting that his (unfounded) claim about the Obama DOJ wiretapping him was based on “a little bit of a hunch.” pic.twitter.com/WFCi3SjIRN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019

Trump accuses Hillary Clinton of “destroying the lives of people that were on our campaign. She’s destroyed their lives.”

“This was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government,” the president adds, referring to the Mueller probe. pic.twitter.com/Uvfcr1mQeo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019

Check out the chyron. Trump isn’t even trying to hide the fact that he’s pressuring the Inspector General to write a report accusing the DOJ of being out to get him. pic.twitter.com/fRpVIJqJ0q

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019

Trump completely makes stuff up about @maziehirono pic.twitter.com/BR40XZMP2O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019

This type of talk coming from the head of government on a quasi state-run television station wouldn’t sound out of place in a dictatorship pic.twitter.com/If1jMHxr0q

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019

This morning:

TRUMP, who is 72, says, “I’m so young. I can’t believe it. I’m the youngest person. I’m a young, vibrant man.” pic.twitter.com/kYsCg643xE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019

For unfathomable reasons, tens of millions of people love this infantile ignoramus.

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The party of white, male landowners
by Tom Sullivan

In a unanimous ruling Thursday, a three-judge federal court struck down nearly thirty of Michigan’s voting districts as partisan gerrymanders “of historical proportions.” The ruling affects nine of the state’s 14 congressional districts as well as state House and Senate districts. The court ordered special corrective elections next year for some state seats and new congressional districts for the 2020 elections. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey announced within hours the Senate would appeal the League of Women Voters v. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The Enacted Plan was devised with discriminatory intent,” the court wrote in its ruling. “[T]he predominant
purpose of the Enacted Plan is to subordinate the interests Democrats and entrench Republicans in power by diluting the weight of Democratic voters’ votes.”

The ruling comes as the U.S. Supreme Court deliberates twin partisan gerrymandering cases it heard in March from Maryland and North Carolina. Language from the Eastern District of Michigan court declaring Michigan’s Republican gerrymander “of historical proportions” now joins the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals phrasing condemning North Carolina’s law that targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

The glee Michigan’s GOP lawmakers displayed in designing maps to their advantage echoes the “try and stop us” frankness with which North Carolina Republicans drew theirs. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with eleven Republicans and two Democrats,” state Rep. David Lewis stated publicly. Lewis led North Carolina Republicans’ redistricting efforts after the 2010 census.

Talking Points Memo reports on the Michigan ruling:

The case featured evidence — including emails between the GOP staffers in charge of drawing the maps – that was notable for how explicitly the partisan intent was spelled out. In one email, a staffer bragged that a map was “a glorious way that makes it easier to cram ALL of the Dem garbage in Wayne, Washtenaw, Oakland, and Macomb counties into only four districts.”

Another staffer cheered that a map that the Michigan Republicans were drawing was “perfect” because “it’s giving the finger to [S]andy [L]evin,” referring to a Democratic U.S. House member in the state.

The court ordered the legislature and the governor to enact new maps by August 1. Should they fail, “the Court will draw remedial maps itself,” a move mirroring the court order in North Carolina.

Gerrymandering is only one front in the GOP’s war on the American voter.

In Washington, the Trump administration hopes the Supreme Court will uphold the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The administration ignored “a unanimous warning from Census Bureau professional staffers” that including the question would result in an undercount, writes former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder in the Washington Post. Holder and others believe the effort is, like gerrymandering, a deliberate attempt to undermine the voting strength of left-leaning voters to Republican advantage:

A targeted undercount would shift political representation and critical federal support away from areas with large populations of people of color, immigrants and Latinos.

Republicans will also likely attempt to use citizenship data to further shift power to their political base within the states. In 2016, the Supreme Court’s decision in Evenwel v. Abbott left unanswered whether states could draw congressional and state legislative districts based solely on the number of citizens, not total population, as it is currently done. Lawmakers and officials in Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas have already indicated they might use citizenship data this way.

Democrats in New Hampshire’s the state legislature are attempting to repeal a Republican election law passed to make it harder for resident college students to vote. Democrats and other plaintiffs hope a lawsuit will block another new law impacting voter registration procedures.

“They sought information from the voter database to make their case,” reports the New Hampshire Union Leader, “and last year Republicans passed a bill specifically precluding the release of voter information under those circumstances.”

Florida voters last fall passed a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to felons who have “complet[ed] all terms of [their] sentence.” Now, Republicans there are trying to thwart that clear voter intent by making it more difficult for them to do so, Michael Morse writes in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. They are taking advantage of courts’ habit of tacking on fines and fees to convictions to include payment of all fines under “terms of sentence.”

Morse explains:

The Republican-dominated Legislature has tried to hang Amendment 4 by its own advocate’s words. When the campaign went before the state supreme court to qualify for the ballot, it explained to the seven justices that “completion of sentence” meant that the payment of fines and fees were also required to vote. The campaign has since called that concession a mistake. Regardless, the amendment’s general language offers a cautionary tale about how the many metastasizing consequences of the carceral state can complicate well-intentioned efforts at reform.

Although a fragmented criminal justice system has made data collection difficult, my previous research using court records in Alabama found that the typical ex-felon faced a staggering bill of about $4,000 in fines and fees. Perhaps recognizing the potential impact, the ACLU of Florida, which helped draft Amendment 4, has tried to offer a saving construction to the legislature. They have suggested that “fees not specifically identified as part of a sentence . . . are therefore not necessary for ‘completion of sentence’ and thus, do not need to be paid before an individual may register.”

But that will have to get by a Republican legislature and a Republican governor. What this effort amounts to, says Morse, is the criminalization of poverty.

Add these cases to the litany of creative, devious, and sometimes surgically precise means by which Republican lawmakers from coast to coast hope to synthesize indefinite control by rigging elections in their party’s favor. Russian assistance is simply gravy. The slippery slope the GOP has greased leads, if not to autocracy, towards rule again by white, male landowners. Just as the sainted founders originally intended.

Former New York Times book critic “reviews” the Mueller Report

by digby

She basically says, read the book. It’s a gripping yarn:

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and his team have laid out a minutely detailed narrative that authoritatively exposes the lies and false storylines that we have been living with since the 2016 campaign. His narrative validates reporting by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CNN, and other news outlets. It’s a riveting account that has the visceral drama of a detective novel, spy thriller, or legal procedural—with the added and alarming dimension that it is fact, not fiction, and concerns the very governance of the United States of America.

From the start, Donald Trump has been determined to maintain narrative control—that is, control of storylines about matters including his career as a businessman, his promises to middle-class America, and the investigation into Russia’s interference in the election.

Trump’s accelerating stream of lies (as of March 17, TheWashington Post tabulated that he had made 9,179 false or misleading claims during his first 787 days in office) has been part of an Orwellian effort to convince people to deny the reality in front of their eyes, just as his assaults on the press (“enemies of the people”) and the judiciary, F.B.I. and intelligence agencies (parts of “the Deep State”) represent efforts to undermine the institutions that might hold him to account.

For nearly two years, Trump has attempted to inoculate himself against the findings of the Mueller Report by assailing it as a “witch hunt.” He has cynically used the right-wing echo chamber to amplify his false assertions (“no collusion”) and last week he received a big assist from William Barr, his servile attorney general, who first released a highly misleading summary of the report and then held a news conference in which he again distorted its content in an effort to pre-emptively seize control of public perception.

The best antidote to this is the report itself which, in methodically putting the jigsaw puzzle pieces together, gives us a potent, clear-eyed and factual account of what happened.
[…]
Trump emerges from this volume as a shameless, narcissistic, and impetuous megalomaniac—someone who puts himself before the country, before any principles, before policies or people. His default settings seem to be anger and self-pity. He berates and bullies his staff, and rages against perceived enemies. He is willfully ignorant about governance and national security concerns, scornful of experts, the policy-making process, and the checks and balances written into our Constitution.

Learning that Mueller had been appointed as special counsel, authorized to conduct the Russia investigation, Trump’s first reaction is not alarm over a foreign adversary’s attacks on American democracy, or thoughts about what might be done to thwart future attacks, but panic (and an apparent guilty conscience) about what this means for him personally: “Oh my God,” he is quoted saying. “This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”

Donald McGahn, former White House counsel, complains that Trump had asked him to “do crazy shit”—like order him to have Mueller removed—and recounts conversations in which Trump says off-the-wall things like “lawyers don’t take notes.” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, recalls that, as a candidate, Trump remarked that his campaign would be a significant “infomercial” for Trump-branded properties. You can practically hear the eye rolling going on in the Trump Tower and West Wing corridors.

As Comey observed in his book, Trump’s behavior often resembles that of a mob boss: all that matters to him is loyalty. But the “boss man,” as Hope Hicks, former White House Communications Director, referred to him, often seems to inspire more fear and loathing on the part of his staff than respect. Though some aides, like Sarah Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, lie as reflexively as the president does, others draw the line when they realize Trump’s orders could land them in legal jeopardy.

They hope that he will forget what he told them to do, or change his mind. They secretly write memos to document their exchanges with him, and stash the notes in safes. The Mueller Report reveals that the President’s efforts to shut down or derail the investigation “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

Trump’s White House often sounds like it belongs in a Joseph Heller satire, a Three Stooges comedy, or an absurdist play like Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” about a dishonest, infantile clown of a king. It’s a place that reflects Trump’s nihilistic view of the world, as he’s spelled out in interviews and books: “I always get even”; “For the most part, you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect”; and “The world is a horrible place. Lions kill for food, but people kill for sport.”
[…]
Trump thrives on chaos and distraction (like the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” he seems to instinctively know that if you “introduce a little anarchy” and “upset the established order… everything becomes chaos”). The report is a painstakingly judicious work embodying all the opposite qualities: logic, reason, fair-mindedness, Apollonian order.

Part of the appeal of traditional mysteries and thrillers (including TV series like “Law & Order,” “CSI,” and “Columbo”) is the process of watching a detective like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, John LeCarré’s George Smiley, or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot use reason and their investigative skills to connect the dots. As Holmes says in one story, “detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.” At the end of detective stories, order is usually restored with the solving of a crime, and with the identification and prosecution of the perpetrators.

Over the past several years, the sheer volume and velocity of Trump scandals and lies (analogous to what Russian analysts have called the Kremlin’s “firehose of falsehood”) have numbed many of us—causing us to turn away out of disgust or weariness, or to normalize the abnormal with the cynical shrug that authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin count on to reduce public engagement in politics.

But in its clarity and coherence, the Mueller Report slices through outrage fatigue. It provides a compelling roadmap for further inquiries and investigations, and reminds us of what is at stake.

It’s a bestseller on Amazon.

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It’s long past Miller time

by digby

But he has such a high Q rating:

The White House rejected Democrats request to bring senior adviser Stephen Miller before the House Oversight Committee to testify, according to a letter obtained by the Washington Post late Wednesday.

“We are pleased that the Committee is interested in obtaining information regarding border security and much needed improvements to our immigration system,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote to Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) in the letter, but only offered to make “cabinet secretaries and other agency leaders” available to discuss policy. In his initial request Cummings asked that Miller specifically come to testify on May 1.

“It appears that you are one of the primary moving forces behind some of the most significant — and in my view, troubling — immigration policies coming out of the Trump White House,” Cummings wrote in the initial request.

Miller is believed to be the shadow figure behind President Trump’s most hardline immigration moves, especially his recent interest in making cuts to legal immigration and visa programs.

Stephen Miller can go on TV to talk about immigration policy but not the congress?

I can’t imagine why they don’t want that incubus testifying. But there’s no reason that he shouldn’t…

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The Christan Right has no problem with immorality

by digby

The latest on Trump’s most fervent followers:

From 2011 to 2016, white evangelicals dramatically changed their minds about the importance of politicians’ private behavior

Back in 2016, many journalists and commentators pointed out a stunning change in how white evangelicals perceived the connection between private and public morality. In 2011, a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Religion News Service found that 60 percent of white evangelicals believed that a public official who “commits an immoral act in their personal life” cannot still “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” But in an October 2016 poll by PRRI and the Brookings Institution — after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape — only 20 percent of evangelicals, answering the same question, said that private immorality meant someone could not behave ethically in public.

Other religious groups didn’t see such a dramatic shift. Between 2011 and 2016, Catholics only had a 14-point drop — substantial, but nothing like the white evangelicals. We also looked at changes over time among black evangelicals and white mainline (i.e., nonevangelical) Protestants; the trend for those groups was very similar to that for Catholics. However, people without a religious affiliation shifted in the other direction, with a nearly five-point increase — that is, they became more likely to say that private immorality translates to unethical public behavior.

White evangelicals still hold Bill Clinton to the old standard — while giving Trump a pass

What about now? To find out, we posed the same question in the post-election wave of the nationally representative 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). The numbers generally held steady with those in 2016. In fact, white evangelicals are now slightly less likely to say that privately immoral behavior means a public official will be unethical in public life, with only 16.5 percent saying yes. The views of Catholics and secular Americans are essentially unchanged (as are black evangelicals and white mainline Protestants).

Have white evangelicals made an allowance only for Trump, or have they reconsidered their opinions on private and public morality more broadly? We tested this with two other versions of the same question. One starts with, “Many supporters of Donald Trump have argued,” followed by the identical statement about an elected official who commits a privately immoral act. The other harks back to the Monica Lewsinky scandal that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. “When he was president, many supporters of Bill Clinton argued . . .” To avoid the possibility of one question affecting responses to the others, respondents were randomly assigned to receive only one of the three variations: the “generic,” Trump, or Clinton version.

White evangelicals had a substantially different reaction when asked about Trump or Clinton. When primed to think about Trump, only 6 percent of them say that an elected official who acts immorally in private is incapable of being ethical in public life. But when Bill Clinton is mentioned, that rises to 27 percent — a 21-point increase.

By comparison, Catholics differed by only five points when asked about Trump or Clinton. And, as we might expect, mentioning Clinton makes secular Americans less likely to worry about the public ethics of a privately immoral official.

In short, white evangelicals are far more likely to shift their view of a politician’s private behavior when asked about Trump than when asked about Clinton.

To see whether this varies by the respondents’ party identification, we compared Republicans to non-Republicans (which combines independents and Democrats because of the very small number of evangelical Democrats) within the evangelical and Catholic traditions. Among both white evangelical and Catholic Republicans, the view that private immorality precludes ethical behavior in public life is far greater when we prompt our respondents to think about Clinton rather than Trump. For evangelicals who identify as Republicans, the level of concern about private morality declines by 34 points moving from Clinton to Trump. Unease about private immorality leading to unethical public behavior declines even more among Catholic Republicans — a 40-point drop from 54 to 14 percent.

In contrast, non-Republican, white evangelicals are slightly more concerned about politicians’ private morality when Trump is mentioned than when Clinton is mentioned. Catholic Democrats and independents are much more likely to be worried about private immorality when prompted to think about Trump.

In short, party loyalty is the driving force here. White evangelicals as a group are less concerned about private immorality when Trump is involved than when Clinton is involved because they are overwhelmingly Republican.
[…]
There is, however, more to the story. It appears that white evangelicals’ support for Trump has led to a more general change in their attitudes on private morality, even when evangelical Republicans are thinking about Clinton. Recall that, in 2011, six out of 10 evangelicals did not believe that a privately immoral official could still perform their duties ethically. In 2019, less than half that many evangelicals as a group and only 36 percent of evangelical Republicans say the same about Clinton — a president who was anathema to those on the religious right.

In contrast, during the Clinton impeachment, many white evangelicals argued that presidents’ private behavior determined the performance of their public responsibilities. As one evangelical put it recently, in those days the mantra was “character matters.” Today, it appears to matter a lot less — at least to evangelical Christians on the right. Now, criticism of the president’s character comes from progressive Christians on the left, like Buttigieg.

Thus, one legacy of Trump may be reduced attention to a president’s private behavior among those who used to care about it most.

Progressive Christians criticized Clinton too, btw.

These people are the worst hypocrites in the country. And they will turn on a dime against the next president who has a personal morality scandal.

The good news, as I have said many times, is that we never have to cater to their alleged morality again. When they pull their usual sanctimonious handwringing, just laugh, lean in and say “you voted for Trump” and walk away.

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