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Month: April 2019

The moneybags are getting worried

Published by digby on April 25, 2019

The moneybags are getting worried

by digby

This made me chuckle. If there has been a more malevolent big money group than the Chamber of Commerce in recent yeears, I don’t know who it might be. Maybe the Kohs. But what’s the difference, really?

Anyway, they seem to be getting a little bit nervous:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, navigating dramatic cultural change that’s transforming the worlds of politics and business, plans to become less aligned with the Republican Party than it has been for decades.

The largest and most powerful corporate lobbying group in Washington is changing the way it evaluates lawmakers for the first time in 40 years, launching a $250 million capital campaign to remodel its headquarters and even rethinking its approach to regulation.

Several dues-paying companies have balked as the Chamber endorsed fewer and fewer Democrats over the past several election cycles. The GOP’s drift toward protectionism, nativism and isolationism since Donald Trump took over the party in 2016 is also at odds with the Chamber’s longtime support for expanding free trade, growing legal immigration and investing in infrastructure.

The Chamber’s major strategic shift, outlined here for the first time based on a series of exclusive interviews with its leaders, grew out of more than two years of intensive conversations. The deliberations began in earnest shortly after Trump became president but long before the Democratic takeover of the House in the midterms ushered in divided government.

Tom Donohue, the Chamber’s longtime president and chief executive, compares it to making substitutions during a basketball game. “It’s very unfortunate that the far right has gone very far right, and the far left has gone very far left. If you think about this, there is a hole in the middle,” he said. “So what we’re doing – and this is critical – is adjusting and responding to the new politics. We’re adjusting and responding to the new Congress and the way the administration operates. The people that win in sports and in politics and in business are the people that are not so focused on one approach but are ready to adjust.”

The Democratic establishment soured on the Chamber as the group came to more reliably support GOP candidates. Democrat Evan Bayh even worked for the Chamber for five years after leaving the Senate, for example, but the group spent $1.4 million on television ads against him when he ran unsuccessfully to get his old seat back in 2016.

“It’s not just about telling a different story. We have to fundamentally act differently, too,” said Tom Wilson, the chairman of the Chamber’s board of directors and the CEO of Allstate Corp. “We cannot just single-source our politics through one party. We need to be more accessible and more bipartisan than we were. You can decide how much we were, and everyone’s got their own views on that, but we just need to reach across the aisle to more Democrats.”

The story is the story and their behavior has been odious for decades. I’m sure there will be Democrats who want to buy into their very pro-business agenda, but there are way fewer than there once were.

It shows just how short-sighted many of these wealthy business lobbies have been. They overlooked the increasingly nihilistic and irrational behavior of the GOP because they believed the party elites could keep them in line. They were stupid, as rich elites often are, in thinking that, and now they’re worried they have participated in destroying their golden egg. If they had been even slightly practical (much less moral and ethical) and tried to ensure that all the wealth didn’t flow to the very top, they wouldn’t be in this position today. They were greedy and wanted to control everything and own everything and people will eventually catch on and they will seek to reverse that.

Now they have a simple-minded criminal in charge and he’s scaring them a little bit, not because he’s against their policies, but because he’s so corrupt and stupid that he may just take down the whole thing. They should have thought of that before.

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Trump pays the hostage takers if he needs to

Published by digby on April 25, 2019

Trump pays the hostage takers if he needs to

by digby

There is nobody on this earth who cares more about America being “screwed” financially by other countries than Donald Trump. Indeed, it is the entire basis of his “foreign policy” to the extent one exists at all. He hectors American allies constantly and the only complaints about adversaries hinge on how much it costs to oppose them. He basically sees America’s role in the world as a paid enforcer.

It is, therefore, unsurprising that he would keep this a secret. It hurts “the brand.”

North Korea issued a $2 million bill for the hospital care of comatose American Otto Warmbier, insisting that a U.S. official sign a pledge to pay it before being allowed to fly the University of Virginia student from Pyongyang in 2017.

The presentation of the invoice — not previously disclosed by U.S. or North Korean officials — was extraordinarily brazen even for a regime known for its aggressive tactics.

But the main U.S. envoy sent to retrieve Warmbier signed an agreement to pay the medical bill on instructions passed down from President Trump, according to two people familiar with the situation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The bill went to the Treasury Department, where it remained — unpaid — throughout 2017, the people said. However, it is unclear whether the Trump administration later paid the bill, or whether it came up during preparations for Trump’s two summits with Kim Jong Un.

The White House declined to comment. “We do not comment on hostage negotiations, which is why they have been so successful during this administration,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders wrote in an email.

I have no problem paying to return hostages. This amount of money is a drop in the bucket. But I think you can easily imagine what Trump would say if another American president had done such a thing, can’t you?

Speaking of the bromance, this has to have Trump green with jealousy. Vlad got Kim in for a state visit and Trump had to cancel his invitation:

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Trump didn’t just abuse his power to protect himself

Published by digby on April 25, 2019

Trump didn’t just abuse his power to protect himself

by digby

He behaved like a petty banana republic dictator in the most odious way.

This is an underreported aspect of the Mueller report. Trump wasn’t just blowing smok on twitter to feed his cult some red meat. He was angling behind the scenes:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions had a tenuous hold on his job when President Trump called him at home in the middle of 2017. The president had already blamed him for recusing himself from investigations related to the 2016 election, sought his resignation and belittled him in private and on Twitter.

Now, Mr. Trump had another demand: He wanted Mr. Sessions to reverse his recusal and order the prosecution of Hillary Clinton.

“The ‘gist’ of the conversation,” according to the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, quoting Mr. Sessions, “was that the president wanted Sessions to unrecuse from ‘all of it.’”

Mr. Mueller’s report released last week brimmed with examples of Mr. Trump seeking to protect himself from the investigation. But his request of Mr. Sessions — and two similar ones detailed in the report — stands apart because it shows Mr. Trump trying to wield the power of law enforcement to target a political rival, a step that no president since Richard M. Nixon is known to have taken.

And at the time Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Sessions, the president was already under investigation for potentially obstructing justice and knew that his top aides and cabinet members were being interviewed in that inquiry.

Mr. Trump wanted Mrs. Clinton investigated for her use of a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state, the report said, even though investigators had examined her conduct and declined to bring charges in a case closed in 2016.

No evidence has emerged that Mr. Sessions ever ordered the case reopened. Like many of Mr. Trump’s aides, as laid out in the report and other accounts, Mr. Sessions instead declined to act, preventing Mr. Trump from crossing a line that might have imperiled his presidency.

Instead, Mr. Sessions asked a Justice Department official in November 2017 to review claims by the president and his allies about Mrs. Clinton and the F.B.I.’s handling of the investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia. The department’s inspector general had already been scrutinizing the issues and painted a harsh portrait of the bureau in a report last year but found no evidence that politics had influenced the decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton.
[…]
The report gave a detailed account of Mr. Trump’s bids to wield power. Nine months into office in October 2017, he reminded Mr. Sessions in a private meeting that he believed the Justice Department was failing to investigate people who truly deserved scrutiny and mentioned Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Two days later, Mr. Trump repeated his desires publicly, accusing law enforcement officials in a pair of tweets of “a fix” in the Clinton inquiry and asking, “Where is Justice Dept?”

A month later, Mr. Sessions found a way to satisfy Mr. Trump’s demands without opening a new investigation into Mrs. Clinton. He told Congress that he had asked the United States attorney in Utah, John W. Huber, to examine the allegations Mr. Trump and his allies made about Mrs. Clinton and the F.B.I. No charges have arisen from that examination, which is continuing.

But Mr. Trump wanted more. He pulled Mr. Sessions aside after a cabinet meeting in December 2017 and “again suggested that Sessions could ‘unrecuse,’” according to the report. A White House aide who witnessed the encounter believed Mr. Trump was talking about the since-closed Clinton investigation and the open Russia inquiry.

“I don’t know if you could unrecuse yourself,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Sessions, according to notes taken by the aide, Rob Porter. “You’d be a hero. Not telling you to do anything.”

Noting that Alan Dershowitz, a prominent lawyer and informal adviser to Mr. Trump, said Mr. Trump had the power to order an investigation, the president took pains to suggest he was not trying to influence the attorney general.

“I don’t want to get involved. I’m not going to get involved,” the president said, according to Mr. Porter’s notes. “I’m not going to do anything or direct you to do anything. I just want to be treated fairly.”

Mr. Sessions replied that he was “taking steps” and had a new leadership team in place at the F.B.I. “Professionals; will operate according to the law,” Mr. Porter wrote in his notes, according to the special counsel’s office.

“Porter understood Sessions to be reassuring the president that he was on the president’s team,” the report said.

By trying to have Mrs. Clinton prosecuted, Mr. Trump was following through on a campaign promise. At rallies, he often stood on stage denouncing her as crowds chanted, “Lock her up!”

“This reeks of a typical practice in authoritarian regimes where whoever attains power, they don’t just take over power peacefully, but they punish and jail their opponents,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian and professor at George Washington University.

The report chronicled how Mr. Sessions fell further out of favor with Mr. Trump after he declined to commit to prosecuting Mrs. Clinton or to resume control of the Russia inquiry. Mr. Trump mixed private arm twisting with the bully pulpit of his Twitter account until he forced out Mr. Sessions in November.

“I put in an attorney general that never took control of the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” in August 2018, according to the report.

Beyond Mr. Mueller’s report, there is evidence that Mr. Trump has continued to try to push the Justice Department to bend to his wishes. He told the White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II in April 2018 that he wanted the Justice Department to prosecute Mrs. Clinton and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, two people familiar with the conversation have said.

Mr. Mueller’s report made no mention of the encounter with Mr. McGahn. He never conveyed the request to the Justice Department but had aides write Mr. Trump a memo that laid out the risks of impeachment or losing re-election if he took such a step.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, faulted the Obama administration for declining to prosecute Mrs. Clinton.

“It was crying out for prosecution,” said Mr. Giuliani, the former United States attorney in Manhattan. “I could have prosecuted that case with my eyes closed.”

It was unclear from the report whether Mr. Trump appreciated the difference between using his power to target Mrs. Clinton and trying to insulate himself from law enforcement scrutiny, Mr. Buell noted. It is more likely, he said, that Mr. Trump simply viewed the Justice Department and the F.B.I. as institutions that worked for him.

“All of his demands fit into a picture that he believes the apparatus is mine,” Mr. Buell said.

Mr. Trump has kept up the public lashings of law enforcement officials and Mrs. Clinton. “There are no Crimes by me at all,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “All of the Crimes were committed by Crooked Hillary, the Dems, the DNC and Dirty Cops — and we caught them in the act!”

He is a twisted psycho, enabled by fellow psychos and sycophants.

You must realize, however, that just as Comey’s reckless commentary during the campaign put pressure on Mueller to be very circumspect in his findings, so too will this grotesque crusade to persecute Clinton be used as a reason that any pursuit of Trump once he’s out of office is out of bounds. It’s a proven GOP gambit that keeps working for them: Break the rules, bust the norm for a petty partisan purpose and then use the arguments against it to defend themselves for accountability for much more serious crimes.

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Out among the Normals by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 25, 2019

Out among the Normals
by Tom Sullivan


Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) at town hall meeting, Henrico High School, outside Richmond. (Image from her Twitter feed)

One of the first things campaign schools teach is attendees are not normal people. Normal people do not spend days learning campaign craft. Nor do Normals spend their days in front of computer screens consuming headlines and the daily play-by-play of inside-the-Beltway fights.

With the U.S. House on break for a “District Work Period,” Politico offers one of those “from the heartland” reports — this one on what Democrats are hearing from Normals at town halls in their districts.

Democrats’ town hall audiences expect an update on Mueller report fallout, it seems, but then it’s on to the kitchen-table issues.

“I’ve been very surprised by how few people brought [Mueller] up since I’ve been back,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) said after two weeks back in his suburban Twin Cities district:

Phillips said he sees Mueller mentioned much more on Twitter than in his district events. For him, immigration has been a far more dominant issue: “If you wake up thinking you’re being deported every day, the Mueller report doesn’t really matter to you.”

Livestreamed events by Reps. Antonio Delgado (D-N.Y.) and Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) began with Mueller briefings, Politico reports, but quickly pivoted to “education funding and local pollution and mostly stayed there.”

No one brought up the Mueller report at Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s (D-Va.) town hall in her district west of Richmond:

“In the big spectrum of everything, people are still deeply concerned about prescription drug prices,” Spanberger said. “People are still deeply concerned about the opportunity to get their kids education. They’re wanting to see Washington focused on immigration reform.”

Rep. Josh Harder of California tells Politico he had “’10 times the amount of interest’ on issues like health care, immigration and student debt than on impeachment or investigations into Trump.” The news provides a distorted view of what the country’s concerns, he believes.

It’s almost a given that these sorts of reports rely heavily on reportage from centrist- to conservative-leaning Democrats. Politico’s is no exception. Spanberger is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition. She and Phillips both belong to the Problem Solvers Caucus. Harder is a New Democrat.

Hayes and DelGado, members of the large Congressional Black Caucus, get a mention, along with Angie Craig of Minnesota. Craig is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest House caucus. But the centrists get the quotes.

So, it is also good to remember that while town hall crowds may be more representative than Twitter, people who attend them are not exactly at the center of the bell curve either. Someone should do a study.

That said, campaign instructors remind students that when knocking doors, it’s best not to talk to normal people as if they too are politicos. You are the weird ones.

“I am breaking down the swamp”

Published by digby on April 25, 2019

“I am breaking down the swamp”

by digby

Then we went to an event about opioids. It’s pretty clear his mind was elsewhere.

He was undoubtedly anxious to get back to his lifeblood — Fox News.

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Here comes Deutsche Bank

Published by digby on April 25, 2019

Here comes Deutsche Bank

by digby

No wonder he’s even more agitated than usual agitated today:

Deutsche Bank has begun the process of providing financial records to New York state’s attorney general in response to a subpoena for documents related to loans made to President Donald Trump and his business, according to a person familiar with the production.

Last month, the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James issued subpoenas for records tied to funding for several Trump Organization projects.

The state’s top legal officer opened a civil probe after Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in a public hearing that Trump had inflated his assets. Cohen at that time presented copies of financial statements he said had been provided to Deutsche Bank.

The New York attorney general’s office declined to comment.

The bank is in the process of turning over documents, including emails and loan documents, related to Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC; the Trump National Doral Miami; the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago; and the unsuccessful effort to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.

A spokeswoman for Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

He can sue, I guess. But he’s not in the driver’s seat on this one.

It cracks me up that anyone thinks there’s a question that he inflated his assets. It would be so unlike him.

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Barr used to think the AG should defend an independent investigation from presidential criticism

Published by digby on April 24, 2019

Barr used to think the AG should defend an independent investigation from presidential criticism

by digby

How times have changed:

William Barr said in a 1998 interview that he was “disturbed” that Attorney General Janet Reno had not defended independent counsel Ken Starr from “spin control,” “hatchet jobs” and “ad hominem attacks.”

Two decades later, Barr is now attorney general himself — and defending another president who has repeatedly blasted a special counsel’s investigation of his activities. Barr stayed silent as President Donald Trump railed against special counsel Robert Mueller’s “witch hunt.” And as Barr released a redacted version of Mueller’s report last week, the attorney general offered the best possible portrayal of the unflattering findings about his boss.

Barr’s 1998 comments about “spin control” came several months after he co-authored a public statement with three fellow former attorneys general expressing concern that attacks on Starr from officials in the Clinton administration appeared “to have the improper purpose of influencing and impeding an ongoing criminal investigation and intimidating possible jurors, witnesses and even investigators.”
Barr, then several years removed from his time as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, co-authored the March 1998 open letter with former Attorneys General Ed Meese, Dick Thornburgh and Griffin Bell — two fellow Republicans and a Democrat, respectively. All four men opposed the Independent Counsel Act but thought Starr was being unfairly maligned.

”What I don’t understand about the modern psyche is that nobody cares about the truth,” Barr said in the September 1998 interview with Investor’s Business Daily that was dated just days after the public release of the Starr report, which detailed President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and outlined a case for impeachment. “The whole system should be geared to getting the truth. But it has been geared to stonewalling and spinning what people think.”

CNN’s KFile found the letter and interview during a review of Barr’s public comments during the Whitewater investigation, which led to Starr’s report. Hillary Clinton at the time had referred to the Starr investigation as part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband, with the White House and allies attacking Starr as a partisan prosecutor.
”We were also disturbed that the incumbent attorney general wasn’t coming to (Starr’s) defense. There has been only silence,” Barr said, concluding Starr should be allowed to finish his work free from White House attacks.
”Starr should be given the chance to get the facts out. We live in a world of spin control and ad hominem attacks,” he said. ”And we’re seeing a lot of hatchet jobs.”
Twenty years later, Mueller’s special counsel investigation has similarly homed in on the White House inner circle amid daily efforts by Trump and his allies to undermine its credibility.
Barr, now in his second tenure as attorney general under Trump, has come under intense scrutiny as he ushered the Mueller investigation to its conclusion and through the public release of its redacted report last week.

He seems to have “evolved” on this issue…

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Backstage, it’s all about revenge

Published by digby on April 24, 2019

Backstage, it’s all about revenge

by digby



You knew this would happen, right?

On the surface, Easter weekend at Mar-a-Lago was an alternate reality, one in which Donald Trump had triumphed and finally put Robert Mueller’sinvestigation in the past. “He got cheers and standing ovations when he walked into places. They made him feel like he won,” one guest said. But there were seams in the performance. “Trump knew he was being watched,” a Republican close to the White House said. Backstage, Trump realizes the damage the report has done, and has taken a much darker view of the post-Mueller landscape.

With Democrats weighing impeachment and his approval rating dropping to its lowest levels of the year, the risks are very real. In response, Trump is lashing out at former West Wing officials whom he blames for providing the lion’s share of damaging information in Mueller’s 448-page report. The former officials Trump has vented about, sources told me, are a group known as “the notetakers” that includes former White House counsel Don McGahn, McGahn’s deputy Annie Donaldson, and staff secretary Rob Porter. “The thing that pisses him off is the note-taking,” a former West Wing official interviewed by Mueller told me. “Trump thinks they could have cooperated with Mueller without all the note-taking.”

Of all Trump’s former staff members, McGahn is receiving the brunt of Trump’s post-Mueller rage. McGahn reportedly spoke to prosecutors for 30 hours during at least three voluntary interviews. He was cited 157 times in the report—more than any witness—and provided vivid examples of Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice, while presenting himself as an ethical actor, a circumstance that’s always been galling for the president. “Trump’s furious with Don,” a source close to the White House, said. According to the source, Trump wants his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to file a personal lawsuit against McGahn for making defamatory statements in the Mueller report. (“Trump never asked me to sue anyone,” Giuliani told me).

The Washington Post reports:

Experts say the White House may have already shot itself in the foot on this one.

President Trump told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa on Tuesday that the White House plans to try to block McGahn’s testimony, and aides confirmed they may invoke executive privilege. (Trump added Wednesday: “We’re fighting all the subpoenas.”) Philip Bump has a good explainer on how this process might play out — and how the White House’s true goal may be to delay McGahn’s testimony rather than to win in court and block it.

But the battle over McGahn and executive privilege could be different from others that are likely to follow, and that’s for one significant reason: The White House may have already given up its leverage.

The White House has already effectively waived its right to executive privilege twice when it comes to McGahn. The first time came when it authorized him to speak extensively to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — a decision that resulted in 30 hours of interviews and one that Trump has reportedly come to rue. And then it declined to assert executive privilege over redactions in the Mueller report ahead of the report’s release last week.

It didn’t have to, as Attorney General William P. Barr noted at the time.

“Because the White House voluntarily cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, significant portions of the report contain material over which the president could have asserted privilege. And he would have been well within his rights to do so,” Barr said. But he added that Trump confirmed he wouldn’t assert executive privilege “in the interests of transparency and full disclosure to the American people.”

Trump’s interest in transparency apparently has its limits, as we’re now finding out with his decision to fight McGahn’s further testimony to the Democratic-controlled House. But experts say the dual waivers of executive privilege severely complicate any further attempt to invoke it.

We’ll see. At this point he just wants to run out the clock. If McGahn’s many wingnut judges are loyal to Dear Leader, they could ensure that nothing happens until after the election. That’s what he’s counting on.

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“Russia if you’re listening … I could use a little help again”

Published by digby on April 24, 2019

“Russia if you’re listening … I could use a little help again”

by digby

Trump doesn’t want to talk about election interference. At all. Ever:

In the months before Kirstjen Nielsen was forced to resign, she tried to focus the White House on one of her highest priorities as homeland security secretary: preparing for new and different Russian forms of interference in the 2020 election.

President Trump’s chief of staff told her not to bring it up in front of the president.

Ms. Nielsen left the Department of Homeland Security early this month after a tumultuous 16-month tenure and tensions with the White House. Officials said she had become increasingly concerned about Russia’s continued activity in the United States during and after the 2018 midterm elections — ranging from its search for new techniques to divide Americans using social media, to experiments by hackers, to rerouting internet traffic and infiltrating power grids.

But in a meeting this year, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, made it clear that Mr. Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory. According to one senior administration official, Mr. Mulvaney said it “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.”

Even though the Department of Homeland Security has primary responsibility for civilian cyberdefense, Ms. Nielsen eventually gave up on her effort to organize a White House meeting of cabinet secretaries to coordinate a strategy to protect next year’s elections.

As a result, the issue did not gain the urgency or widespread attention that a president can command. And it meant that many Americans remain unaware of the latest versions of Russian interference.

The assumption that he is only worried about the legitimacy of his 2016 election is way too generous. He knows that 70,000 votes across three states meant he needed all the help he could get. Knowing Trump, I’d say the better assumption is that he doesn’t want to stop them from helping him in 2020.

It’s not just his ego. He has a criminal mind. He is totally corrupt and entirely without morals or ethics. And while he’s monumentally stupid, he has a strong feral survival instinct. He knows he has to win election by any means necessary or risk facing immediate legal problems.

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They just can’t quit her, Redux

Published by digby on April 24, 2019

They just can’t quit her, Redux

by digby

Rush:

Hillary Clinton is who tried to rig a presidential election, Martha. Hillary Clinton and her pals in the Obama Department of Justice and their pals in the FBI — they are the ones who colluded with the Russians. They are the ones that gave us this entirely bogus Steele dossier.

You want to talk about irony — for Hillary Clinton to be talking about impeaching Donald Trump. Hillary needs to be investigated, she needs to be indicted, and she needs to be in jail, and any of her co-conspirators in this whole sordid affair, which amounted to nothing more than a silent coup to overturn the election results of 2016. Hillary Clinton talking about Trump — you talk about sour grapes. This is a woman who has been rejected by the American people twice, rejected by her party in 2008, she had to rig the primaries against crazy Bernie in 2016 to get the nomination. She is the last person who ought to be listened to about what ought to happen to Donald Trump.

You’ll notice he’s referring to himself in the third person again.

Update: Some people seem to be taking this very seriously:

Trump supporter Dave Daubenmire this week drove hundreds of miles to stand outside Hillary Clinton’s house in Chappaqua, New York and filmed himself demanding that she be arrested.

A video posted by Right Wing Watch shows Daubenmire, who hails from Ohio, standing outside the Clintons’ residence while calling for the former secretary of state to be locked up for assorted purported criminal activities.

“This is one of the greatest crime scenes in American history right here!” Daubenmire exclaimed at the start of the video. “I’m sure we’re on cameras, I’m sure the FBI’s probably been following me all day, but here’s what I think, folks: What would it be like if we had a thousand people out here, petitioning the government to do its job and come and arrest Hillary Clinton!”

Daubenmire then explained to viewers that he drove eight hours to the Clintons’ house to inspire people to take to the streets and “demonstrate that we are against this ungodly, secret government” that is supposedly persecuting Christians in the United States.

“Let President Donald Trump know that we’re not going to put up with this!” he encouraged his followers.

Watch the video below.

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