Month: April 2019

The rich men fall in line. Of course.

by digby

“It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it” — Donald Trump

Sure he’s a criminal. But he’s their criminal…

Deep-pocketed Republicans who snubbed Donald Trump in 2016 are going all in for him in 2020, throwing their weight behind a newly created fundraising drive that’s expected to dump tens of millions into his reelection coffers.

The effort involves scores of high-powered businessmen, lobbyists and former ambassadors who raised big money for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — and who are now preparing to tap their expansive networks for Trump after rebuffing his first presidential bid.

The project, which is closely modeled after the famed Pioneers network that helped to fuel Bush’s 2000 campaign, is slated to be formally unveiled on May 7, when well-connected Republican fundraisers from around the country descend on Washington for a closed-door event with Trump 2020 aides. Under the plan, which was described by more than a half-dozen party officials, high-performing bundlers who collect at least $25,000 for Trump Victory, a joint Trump 2020-Republican National Committee fundraising vehicle, will earn rewards like invitations to campaign-sponsored retreats, briefings and dinners.

Party officials have been reaching out to top fundraisers in recent weeks and wooing them with the prospect of joining “raiser clubs,” with names like 45 Club, Trump Train and Builders Club.

The push illustrates how Trump, who once took a sledgehammer to rivals for their supposed fealty to big donors, has come to rely on a GOP establishment he once repudiated. And it’s a sign of just how closely the lean, ragtag operation that stunned the political world in 2016 now resembles a traditional presidential campaign. Yet it also underscores how the elite Republican money class, which waged an aggressive, but ultimately unsuccessful effort to stop Trump in the 2016 election, has come to accept and accommodate a president it once scorned.

Roy Bailey, a prominent Dallas-based fundraiser who is helping to spearhead the Trump Victory program, said around 150 people had so far signed on — some of whom had been fervently opposed to Trump in 2016. “There were still a lot of people who were trying to lick their wounds and hadn’t quite gotten over the fact that he had whipped everybody. They were slow to come on board,” said Bailey, who recently left his post as finance chair for a pro-Trump super PAC to take on the new role.

“I’ve had a couple of people that in 2016, they just weren’t on board with candidate Trump at all and they said, ‘Look, Roy, he has won me over. I’m all in,’” he added.

Advising the Trump team in its effort to win over traditional givers is Jack Oliver, a stalwart of the Republican Party establishment who helped lead fundraising for the presidential bids of George W. Bush and his brother, Jeb. Oliver’s involvement, senior Republicans say, is partly intended to send a signal to the traditional GOP donor set that the campaign is eager for their support.

“I think you’ll have a significant number of Bush and Romney veterans that were on the sidelines or didn’t get overly involved in 2016 but will be involved in the 2020 campaign,” said Oliver, an architect of the Pioneers program who became known as “Bush’s brigadier of bucks.” Oliver himself sat out the 2016 general election.

The campaign is aggressively wooing those who backed other candidates in 2016. Among those signing on is Geoff Verhoff, a lobbyist at the Washington firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld who bundled more than $1 million for Marco Rubio.

Verhoff, who sat out the remainder of the 2016 presidential race after Rubio dropped out, predicted that Republican fundraisers across the spectrum would mobilize for the president because they were happy with his agenda. And he pointed to another motivating factor: fear of a Democratic 2020 field that includes liberal figures like Bernie Sanders.

“All you have to do is look at what the other side is gearing up for and this is a pretty easy decision for a lot of people,” said Verhoff. “From a policy standpoint, there’s virtually nothing they disagree with, then layer on top of that the choice that the other side is presenting to the country and it’s a no-brainer.”

Trump aides are especially keen to make inroads with Jeb Bush’s massive funding network — even though the former Florida governor pointedly declined to endorse Trump in 2016 and said last month that “someone should run” against the president in 2020 “because Republicans ought to be given a choice.” A pro-Bush super PAC raised over $120 million during the 2016 race, but many of its donors never came around to the eventual nominee.

A thaw, however, appears to be underway. Anthony Gioia, who served as George W. Bush’s ambassador to Malta and sat on the sidelines after donating to Jeb Bush and Rubio in the 2016 race, is expected to fundraise for Trump. So, too, is Rick Hohlt, a veteran Washington lobbyist and Bush family benefactor who has fundraised for Republicans going back to the 1980 presidential race.

“I think people are totally impressed by how the campaign is being set up, efficient and focused like a business,” said Hohlt, who later on became a Trump 2016 donor, adding that the Trump team was identifying bundlers “at all kinds of levels.”

Not everyone is getting behind the effort. Some establishment donors are turned off by a chaos-ridden White House and a smashmouth president they see as demolishing norms. Others contend that with Trump developing a formidable small-dollar machine that has already raked in $30 million this year, there is little need for a traditional bundling program.

And to others, the typical rewards associated with bundling big dollars for a president — including appointments to posh ambassadorships and ceremonial committees — are less appealing in an unconventional administration where access works differently. Some fundraisers who’ve been contacted say they have little to gain by joining the effort.

Yet winning over mainstream givers — including some former strident Trump critics — has emerged as a priority for the campaign. Vice President Mike Pence has been wooing an array of well-heeled former Trump critics in recent weeks. During a gathering of major givers at the iconic Pebble Beach golf course last month, the vice president lavished praise on hedge fund manager Paul Singer and huddled privately with investment banker Warren Stephens, both of whom donated millions to a super PAC devoted to stopping Trump from winning the Republican nomination in 2016.

And from his perch at party headquarters, Todd Ricketts, the Republican National Committee finance chairman, has been burning up the phones of major fundraisers who bankrolled an array of 2016 candidates.

“I’m really hoping to make sure we get every person that was a Rubio or Bush supporter in ’16 or Cruz and so on and make sure that they’re working for the president and even going back to a lot of the Romney people from 2012,” said Ricketts. “It’s in that same pool.”

The behind-the scenes bundler recruitment effort has been aggressive ahead of the May 7 rollout. Late last month, party officials invited would-be fundraisers to a New York City briefing featuring Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel and White House chief economist Larry Kudlow.

Those in charge of the president’s reelection are carefully looking for indications that once-chilly establishment givers are warming up to Trump. On Wednesday, RNC Co-Chairman Tommy Hicks Jr., whose father purchased the Texas Rangers from an ownership team that included George W. Bush, attended a fundraiser in his native Dallas that was filled with longtime supporters of the former president.

“I saw,” said Hicks, “a lot of familiar faces.”

No doubt Trump is very excited. He’ll be skimming a nice taste for himself. He always does.

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Dis-Barr the hack

by digby

This piece by Paul Rosenzweig at Lawfare is devastating for William Barr. He isn’t just a bad lawyer. He’s a dangerous authoritarian apparatchik:

Consider the affirmative dismay with which lawyers are likely to view the actions of Attorney General Bill Barr. Even leaving aside the atmospherics of his recent performances (for example, the almost palpable disdain with which he treated the press at his press conference and the almost cloying way in which he defended Trump’s actions as the product of “frustration and anger”), Barr’s actions over the past month have left any reasonable observer with a number of questions about the quality of his legal performance.

To recall, Barr has gone on record twice in his handling of the release of the Mueller report—first in his letter to Congress in late March and then in his prepared remarks last week at the press conference releasing the report. It seems fair to hold Barr to account for the contents of these two prepared expositions in a way that it might, for example, be unfair to ask him to account for things he might have said in the spur of the moment. So here are a few questions that seem worth asking and that Congress might consider when Barr next appears before it to testify:

First, why prepare a summary letter at all? The executive summaries prepared by the special counsel’s office are now public. And, as the New York Times has demonstrated, the excerpts of the report contained in Barr’s original summary letter are at best a favorable spin on the report and at worst a rather transparent effort to mislead the public in advance of the report’s release. Why engage in that sort of charade when ready-written summaries created by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team were available for release? Well, Barr has said that he was concerned that the report might contain grand jury material, noting that every page of the report was marked as having possibly contained such information. And some Justice Department officials reiterated that to the New York Times, saying “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.”

It’s now clear that this wasn’t, strictly speaking, completely true. To be sure, the report did have a blanket warning on the top of every page that it might contain grand jury material, and the two executive summaries to Volumes I and II did have some material relating to ongoing matters under investigation. But the report released last week after thorough review contained absolutely no redactions whatsoever in the Mueller summaries for grand jury material or classified information. So, again, the question for Barr is simple: Why not release the summaries themselves? And, relatedly, why edit the summaries in ways designed to mislead? Why have unnamed “officials” falsely claim to the Times that the summaries required redaction for grand jury or classified reasons when, as it turns out, they did not? Is that just poor lawyering or something …. different?

Second, why let the president’s private attorneys see the Mueller report before everyone else? Barr has explained that he let the White House attorneys see the document for review of possible executive privilege claims and that at least makes some sense in the context of the existing legal structure. But why allow Rudy Giuliani, Jay Sekulow and other private attorneys spend ten hours with the report before its public release? In his prepared remarks, Barr explained, “the president’s personal counsel requested and were given the opportunity to read a final version of the redacted report before it was publicly released. That request was consistent with the practice followed under the Ethics in Government Act, which permitted individuals named in a report prepared by an independent counsel the opportunity to read the report before publication.”

That seems to be a remarkably strange justification. The provisions of the Ethics in Government Act relating to independent counsels lapsed in 1999, almost 20 years ago. That law provided a statutory right for individuals named in a report by an independent counsel to review the portion related to them and comment on it. In the normal course of statutory interpretation, the fact that Congress chose not to renew a statutory right of this sort would provide a strong inference that the right no longer exists. Why and how is it that Barr could rely on practices from a now-defunct statute to justify his actions? And why was that right afforded only to President Trump’s attorneys and not to all the other individuals who were named in the report, as compliance with the expired act would seem to require? Why, contrary to the practice of the independent counsel act that he extolled, did Barr provide Trump’s lawyers (apparently) with access to the entire report, when the prior rule had been to provide a named individual only with access to the portions of the report that name him or her directly? Is all that just poor lawyering or something … different?

Third, a process question about Barr’s actions with respect to the obstruction investigation: Mueller declined to offer a prosecutive judgment about the president’s obstructive conduct. (I’ve already expressed my disappointment with how the special counsel handled the question of criminal culpability in the obstruction portion of his investigation.) His justification was that doing so was unfair in a context where indictment was prohibited by binding departmental policy. From this, the attorney general concluded that the special counsel “le[ft] it to the attorney general to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitut[ed] a crime.” With that premise, Barr then went on to conclude that no crime had occurred.

But, of course, the special counsel’s report did no such thing. Mueller’s decision to reach no judgment on criminality might be an implicit invitation to the attorney general to make that judgment for him. But it also might be (and, indeed, more fairly should be) read to suggest that no such judgment is appropriate for any departmental employee or executive branch official. To put it more clearly, the Mueller report is replete with references to Congress’s impeachment power (at least 20 that I have counted) and can, in that regard, be read as an invitation to the Congress to consider whether the president’s conduct constitutes impeachable behavior. And it even has an explicit call out to future prosecutors to withhold judgment as to criminality and render a final determination after President Trump leaves office. But nowhere in the report (at least not that I have found yet) is there a similar call for the attorney general to make a contemporaneous judgment today as to how the matter ought to have been resolved.

Given that background, why did Barr decide to make a judgment when the exact same policy considerations that Mueller perceived as precluding his actions were applicable to the attorney general? Is the attorney general not bound by the same departmental policy as the special counsel? Or does Barr read the policy as applying only to subordinate Justice Department lawyers and not to the attorney general? Perhaps Barr views the prohibition on judgment as a one-way ratchet, applicable only if the judgment is condemnatory and not (as his was) when it is exculpatory? If so, how would that distinction be justified as a matter of law? (And does that not mean, by inference, that the special counsel reached the opposite conclusion?) Is this just poor lawyering or something … different?

Fourth, Barr has said that “the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation.” It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but one might ask how he squares that conclusion with the special counsel’s own conclusion that Trump’s refusal to testify was not justified and that his written answers were inadequate. Is that just poor lawyering or something … different?

***

I could go on. One could ask, for example, what standard of proof Barr used in determining that the evidence did not support an obstruction charge? Or what the basis was for his decision to reject the “substantial evidence” of obstruction found by the special counsel on a number of occasions? One could ask for legal support for the proposition that, as Barr suggested during his prepared remarks, being frustrated and angry at the existence of an investigation is evidence of a lack of corrupt motive. Likewise, what legal support is there to suggest that unsuccessful efforts to obstruct are not criminal, or that the absence of an underlying crime means that obstruction can’t be proven? (For those following along, none of these are what the law actually says.)

In short, like many, I was willing to give Attorney General Barr the benefit of the doubt when he was appointed. His long history of service to America suggested a fidelity to the rule of law and a belief in the value of the Department of Justice that would have been a welcome counterweight to the president’s own approach to law. Now, having watched Barr’s response to the Mueller report, much of the benefit of that doubt has dissipated. The attorney general has many questions to answer.

The congress needs to get him up there stat and ask them to his face.

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He can’t even do the simplest part of the job

by digby

This is pathetic:

The Easter bunny claps as Trump commemorates Easter by …. [checks notes] …. bragging about "our military being completely rebuilt."

"It was very depleted, as you know," Trump tells his audience of kids. "All with great product. The best product in the world." pic.twitter.com/VEveD7B90p— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 22, 2019

Remember this from that Boy Scout Jamboree?

4. Trump told the Boy Scouts a long, rambling story about a businessman who became very wealthy and bought a yacht pic.twitter.com/BzQZmPuI5L— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 25, 2017

“You’re boy scouts but you know life, you know life …”

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If Congress fails to keep the heat on this guy, who knows how far he’ll go?

by digby

Here’s video of Trump telling reporters, “Nobody disobeys my orders.” pic.twitter.com/wtOcKT6xDL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 22, 2019

He’s deluded as usual. But I suspect he’ll at least try to make sure they follow his orders now — at least until he is distracted by something.

CNN reports on Trump’s growing temper tantrum:

By the time President Donald Trump had passed through the prime rib buffet at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday to sit for dinner with family and a top aide, the damning picture Robert Mueller’s report painted of his presidency had become clear.

Instead of the “total exoneration” Trump had proclaimed earlier, the report portrayed the President as deceitful and paranoid, encouraging his aides to withhold the truth and cross ethical lines in an attempt to thwart a probe into Russia’s interference in US elections — his “Achilles heel,” according to one forthcoming adviser.

Perhaps more angering to a leader who detests weakness — but doesn’t necessarily mind an amoral reputation — were the number of underlings shown ignoring his commands, privately scoffing at the “crazy sh**” he was requesting and working around him to avoid self-implication.

Now, those close to him say Trump is newly furious at the people — most of whom no longer work for him — whose extensive interviews with the special counsel’s office created the epic depiction of an unscrupulous and chaotic White House. And he’s seeking assurances from those who remain that his orders are being treated like those of a president, and not like suggestions from an intemperate but misguided supervisor.

“Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad),” Trump tweeted on Friday morning as he waited out a rainstorm in Florida before proceeding to his golf course for a round with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Some current and former officials who accurately predicted that details in the Mueller report would be embarrassing for the White House are now questioning the legal strategy to fully cooperate with the Mueller investigation.

One official who sat down with the special counsel noted that they did so at the behest of the former White House legal team, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, who provided a wealth of documents and encouraged senior officials to be interviewed. It was because of these interviews with people closest to the President that Mueller and his team were able to get a cinematic look at the deceit and trickery taking place in the West Wing.

While these people are critical, the full cooperation was a strategy to make it hard for Mueller to push for an interview given all the information he was given. It was a strategy that worked, even if there is some political embarrassment.

The President was aware ahead of its public release what was contained in the Mueller report. Attorney General Bill Barr told reporters Thursday that both the White House counsel and Trump’s personal legal team were given an opportunity to read the redacted version in the previous days.

But Trump grew angry as he watched cable news coverage because, sources familiar with the matter said, a theme was emerging that vexed him: a portrait of a dishonest president who is regularly managed, restrained or ignored by his staff.

It was a sharp turn away from his earlier statements, which welcomed the report’s findings on collusion and falsely claimed total exoneration. Hours before his Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump insisted to a crowd on the tarmac in Florida the dark days of Mueller’s special counsel investigation had ended.

“Game over, folks,” he said over the sounds of a busy airport. “Now, it’s back to work.”

It’s hard to tell, however, what Trump intends to head back to. Mueller’s probe and Trump’s constant focus on it have been the backdrop for all but a few months of the presidency, often diminishing whatever policy efforts have been orchestrated by officials or Republican lawmakers. The report depicts a President who for two years has been largely consumed by the Russia investigation, intent on short-circuiting it but repeatedly stymied in his efforts by aides.

A senior administration official told CNN’s Jake Tapper that dynamic was “nothing surprising.”

“That the President makes absurd demands of his staff and administration officials — who are alarmed by them and reluctant to follow them — is not only unsurprising but has become the norm,” the official said.

Nevertheless, in the past Trump has resisted the idea that he is being controlled by those around him or that they are responsible for his successes. Sources familiar with how the West Wing operates said attempts to subvert the President’s demands have not ceased now that the Mueller investigation is over. There have been instances in recent weeks where aides have slow walked or ignored Trump’s directives, hoping he will forget he gave them.

What is clear is many of those who avoided carrying out Trump’s demands related to Mueller’s probe — often, it seemed, in a bid to protect themselves from criminal wrongdoing — are no longer employed by the White House. Instead, the aides who now surround the President appear less willing to write him off and more likely to encourage him to follow his gut.

Among those who have moved on: the White House counsel who refused Trump’s demand to fire Mueller, the chief of staff and senior adviser who anxiously tried to retrieve a resignation letter from the attorney general, the staff secretary who declined Trump’s order to gauge the loyalty of a Justice Department official, the attorney general who refused to un-recuse himself and the communications chief who seemed most expert in Trump’s whims.

Even Steve Bannon, once viewed as the ultimate advocate for following Trump’s instincts, is depicted in the report as a constraining force. In one instance, when the President tried to claim Mueller had a conflict of interest because of a membership dispute at a Trump golf club, Bannon wrote it off as “ridiculous and petty.” Trump and Bannon parted ways in the summer of 2017 and have not reconciled since.

Instead, the most prominent aides who do remain are depicted in the report as the most dishonest. Press secretary Sarah Sanders, who was out the office when the report was released, is shown repeatedly misleading the press, a fact she attempted to downplay in morning television interviews on Friday.
“(Trump) has never asked me to break the law,” she said on CBS. “When the President wants to do something and make a decision, he does it. He’s not somebody who sit around and ponders. I think you guys have seen that day in and day out. One minute you’re running stories saying the staff can’t control him and the next minute everyone’s saying thank God the staff could control him. You don’t get to have it both ways.”

Among those who Trump dined with in Florida on Thursday was Mick Mulvaney, the chief of staff who still fills the role in an acting capacity but who, according to officials, has done less than either of his two predecessors to restrain Trump in his hardline instincts.

Indeed, since Mulvaney’s tenure began at the start of the year, Trump has overseen the longest government shutdown in US history, a dramatic shakeup at the Department of Homeland Security, a sharp turn toward harsher policies on the border, a decision to ask a court to scrap the entire Affordable Care Act and a confusing dictate on North Korea sanctions that still has advisers scratching their heads. 

People familiar with Mulvaney’s style say those outcomes aren’t necessarily his doing, but rather the result of a President newly empowered to follow his impulses without the restrictions placed on him by previous aides. Sources say the President has also come to rely on his chief of staff less than he did during the reign of Reince Priebus or John Kelly, when he would often call his top aide nearly a dozen times a day. Mulvaney has told colleagues there are days he barely hears from the President.

In his report, Mueller describes both of Mulvaney’s predecessors — Priebus and Kelly — as working in at least some capacity to contain the damage of Trump’s behavior. Priebus is shown making an urgent (and vaguely comic) effort to recover a resignation letter from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that Trump had kept, believing it would amount to a “shock collar” on the Justice Department because it was not dated and aides feared Trump could employ it at his leisure.

Kelly told Mueller that when Trump wanted to meet with friends who encouraged his impulses, such as former campaign aide Corey Lewandowski, he tried to push them to the private residence “to create distance from the West Wing.”

Trump soured on Priebus and Kelly long before he summarily terminated each of their tenures. So, too, had Trump grown wary of former White House counsel Don McGahn, who sat for more than 30 hours of testimony with Mueller’s team. Trump grew irate again at his former aide late Thursday and into Friday.

In the report, Trump is described as having several tense encounters with McGahn during his White House tenure, including episodes when McGahn was prepared to resign rather than carry out Trump’s demands.

McGahn described Trump asking him to do “crazy sh**,” according to Priebus. Trump, meanwhile, deemed McGahn a “lying bastard” whose habit of taking contemporaneous notes raised suspicion. In an anecdote relayed in the report, Trump and McGahn went back-and-forth over the note-taking, which Trump insisted good lawyers — such as his onetime counsel Roy Cohn — never did.

Trump hadn’t backed off that view by Friday morning, when he made clear on Twitter his frustrations at the report.

“Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” the President wrote.

Trump is telling people he thinks the Democrats are making the same “mistake” the Republicans did in 1998 when they impeached Clinton.

First of all, Clinton was almost at the end of his second term. Some people felt they shouldn’t have bothered since he was definitely out in two years.

Second, it didn’t really hurt the Republicans. They kept the House and George W. Bush became president in 2000 when the ruthless GOP ensured that they would not be denied in the state of Florida.

Third, the impeachment charges were trivial and didn’t reach the level of a high crime or misdemeanor and everyone knew it. 

Finally, Clinton was already almost at 60% approval rating when they impeached him. He wasn’t starting underwater his approval rating rose simply because the Republicans were so ridiculous.

This is very different. There is ample evidence that Trump and his campaign welcomed and encouraged the Russian sabotage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign (remember, she won by 3 million votes) and then went to great elnths to subvert the rule of law to cover it up. He has abused his power repeatedly, he is corruptly making money while in office, he’s put incompetent people in important positions including family members and he embarrasses the nation on a daily basis with his childish temperament and obvious ignorance and incompetence.

This situation could not be more different than that which confronted the nation in 1998. Of course, Trump is likely to be acquitted by the enabling weasels in the Senate majority. No one expects otherwise, although there is always hope that at least a few Republicans will cross over. But the idea that there will be a backlash among the majority for doing it is unlikely in my opinion. This country is looking at a possible six more years of Trump (which is an exhausting prospect for even some of his vociferous defenders, I’d imagine) and he is already very unpopular. Impeachment hearings will not make him more popular in the country at large. His puerile behavior is predictable and stakes are much higher.

I think the risks are overstated. It may be that they fail to convict him. But at worst I don’t think it will change anything with the public. At best it will make the 2020 elections referendum on Trump much more starkly drawn. If Republicans are unwilling to do their duty, the country needs to know that.

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Public opinion and the Nixon impeachment

by digby

How the Watergate crisis eroded public support for Richard Nixon:

Nixon had won reelection in 1972 by a landslide and began his second term with a lofty 68% Gallup Poll approval rating in January 1973. But the Watergate scandal — which started with an effort to bug the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate Hotel and subsequent efforts to cover it up — quickly took a heavy toll on those ratings, especially when coupled with a ramp-up in public concerns about inflation. By April, a resounding 83% of the American public had heard or read about Watergate, as the president accepted the resignations of his top aides John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman. And in turn, Nixon’s approval ratings fell to 48%.

But that was just the beginning of the toll the scandal would take on the president that year. The televised Watergate hearings that began in May 1973, chaired by Senator Samuel Ervin, commanded a large national audience — 71% told Gallup they watched the hearings live. And as many as 21% reported watching 10 hours or more of the Ervin proceedings. Not too surprisingly, Nixon’s popularity took a severe hit. His ratings fell as low as 31%, in Gallup’s early August survey.

The public had changed its view of the scandal. A 53% majority came to the view that Watergate was a serious matter, not just politics, up from 31% who believed that before the hearings. Indeed, an overwhelming percentage of the public (71%) had come to see Nixon as culpable in the wrongdoing, at least to some extent. About four-in-ten (37%) thought he found out about the bugging and tried to cover it up; 29% went further in saying that he knew about the bugging beforehand, but did not plan it; and 8% went all the way, saying he planned it from beginning to end. Only 15% of Americans thought that the president had no prior knowledge and spoke up as soon as he learned of it.

Yet, despite the increasingly negative views of Nixon at that time, most Americans continued to reject the notion that Nixon should leave office, according to Gallup. Just 26% thought he should be impeached and forced to resign, while 61% did not.

A lot of key scandal events were to follow that year and into 1974, but public opinion about Watergate was slow to change further, despite the high drama of what was taking place. For example, October 1973 was a crucial month as the courts ruled that the president had to turn over his taped conversations to special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and subsequently Nixon ordered for the dismissal of Cox in what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The public reacted, but in a measured way. In November, Gallup showed the percentage of Americans thinking that the president should leave office jumping from 19% in June to 38%, but still, 51% did not support impeachment and an end to Nixon’s presidency.

In the spring of 1974, despite the indictment of top former White House aides, and Nixon’s release of what were seen as “heavily edited” transcripts of tapes of his aides plotting to get White House enemies, the public was still divided over what to do about the president. For example, by June, 44% in the Gallup Poll thought he should be removed from office, while 41% disagreed.

Only in early August, following the House Judiciary Committee’s recommendation in July that Nixon be impeached and the Supreme Court’s decision that he surrender his audio tapes, did a clear majority – 57% – come to the view that the president should be removed from office.

But once he was gone, the Americans were not quick to forgive and forget. In September, a 58% majority said Nixon should be tried for possible criminal charges. And they took the view that he should not be let off the hook easily, if found guilty. By a margin of 53% to 38%, the public thought that President Ford should not pardon Nixon, if he was found guilty.

The latter sentiment of course, would carry on, and be crucial to the outcome of the next presidential election. Ford did pardon Nixon in September, an act that was followed by a plummet of his own poll numbers, and later was seen as a factor in his loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election.

Trump’s average poll rating has been hovering at 40% for his entire presidency.

What this says is that the process matters. Once the hearings started, public opinion shifted. I don’t know if there is a lower floor for Trump’s approval rating, but support for impeachment has really not been tested. I would guess it will grow as hearings commence.

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Elite impunity has been 4 decades in the making. 

by digby

I don’t want to hear any more from progressives about holding elites accountable if they dither over Trump. He’s the world’s most powerful elite.

My Salon column this morning:

When President Obama took office in January of 2009, the country was still reeling from the trauma of a war begun on the basis of lies and obfuscation. We were deep in the throes of an epic recession caused by rampant greed and flagrant malfeasance on the part of the financial leaders of the country. Many of the people who voted the new president and a Democratic congressional majority into power expected there would be a reckoning for those responsible. Instead, Obama and Democratic leaders decided that it would be a mistake to “look in the rearview mirror” or “play the blame game,” and a full account of what had happened was left for history to sort out.

It’s true that the country was in terrible shape, losing 700,000 jobs a month with millions of home foreclosures and an imploding health care system. The war that should never have happened had killed hundreds of thousands and destabilized the Middle East with no end in sight. But taking accountability for what had happened off the table in the name of comity and “moving forward” had serious consequences. It deepened a cynicism about our government and our political system among the public that had been growing for decades, largely as a result of abuse of power and malfeasance going unchecked. And it set the table for Donald Trump and his lawless administration.

Presidents and other political leaders have always told lies, of course. They had even lied the country into wars for nationalist ambition and political gain before. They lied about their personal lives and they lied about their policies. Some of them perpetrated crimes and abuse of office. (We’ve had presidents who committed genocide and defended slavery too, although in its historical context those were normal facets of American life at the time.) But rank criminality was never considered OK. There had even been a major corruption scandal in the 1920s that led to a series of government reforms.

But something changed after Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974. American society had evolved and no longer accepted that its leaders should be allowed to abuse their power without being held to account. Much of the country was shocked by Nixon’s behavior, and just as disturbed to learn about the illegal and unethical actions of the various government institutions in the decades after World War II. The FBI had been an authoritarian nightmare under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA had staged or attempted assassinations and coups all over the planet. The military had lied repeatedly and comprehensively about the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, in which numerous war crimes had been committed.

As people read each new revelation in the newspapers and watched the Watergate scandal unfold on TV, they came to understand that the government had to be reined in, including the president. Although Nixon’s resignation and subsequent pardon were seen by many as an illustration of the system “working,” it really didn’t. Nixon suffered shame but despite the fact that Congress tried to reform our political system, it never happened. The next thing we knew, Ronald Reagan was in the White House and his crew was blatantly abusing executive power by selling weapons to Iran in spite of sanctions against that country and then using the money to fund a right-wing rebel army in Central America, all against the law and the will of Congress.

Once again, the political leadership was let off the hook. Reagan was excused because he didn’t know what his underlings were doing, and those underlings were pardoned by Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, before they saw the inside of a courtroom .

Seeking revenge, the Republicans went hard after Bill Clinton, relentlessly pursuing him for petty scandals before finally initiating the second impeachment in history for his idiotic lies about having an affair in the White House. A large majority of the American public believed the case was unwarranted and he survived. In retrospect, that impeachment once again worked in the Republicans’ favor, by trivializing the process and turning it into a crude partisan weapon that anyone with integrity would hesitate to deploy in the future.

At any rate, that has been the effect anyway. When the Democrats won back the House in 2006 under George W. Bush, there was a strong clamor for impeachment hearings, which was immediately shot down by the leadership. Bush was coming to the end of his second term; the thinking was that he would be gone soon in any case so there was no point. And as I mentioned earlier, Obama also didn’t push for accountability over the war, the Bush-era torture program or the financial crisis He didn’t pardon anyone but he might as well have.

Donald Trump is the natural consequence of this lack of accountability, mainly because the Republican Party learned four decades ago that there was little price to pay for pushing the boundaries. So they see no real downside to defending their president no matter how odious and unfit he is.

I hate to say it, but the Democrats have been accomplices. Throughout this anything-goes evolution in our political culture, they have played their own brand of politics. They accuse the Republicans of being craven and unethical for enabling Donald Trump, yet when faced with scathing bill of indictment in Robert Mueller’s report, they are openly calculating whether doing their duty will work to their advantage or not. They have become partners in this scheme that allows the Republicans to sink to ever greater depredations, and always seem to find a reason not to stop them.

We have reached a turning point in this ongoing crisis. If someone as obvious and inept as Trump can get away with all this, imagine what a competent authoritarian demagogue could do. Allowing Trump to just ride out his term and perhaps even win another one — which is entirely conceivable, I’m sorry to say — could be catastrophic. If Democrats refuse to take the risk of changing this dynamic once and for all, someone much smarter and stronger than Donald Trump is going to come along, very soon, and take advantage of the destruction of our political culture to fundamentally change our democracy in ways we will not be able to fix. At some point there will be no way to “right the ship” anymore. It will be sunk.

If Democrats don’t take a stand this time, it’s very likely they won’t get another chance.

A viral warning
by Tom Sullivan

Image from the Daily Mail.

It all sounds so familiar.

Carole Cadwalladr’s speech at the TED conference in Vancouver last week is a gut-twisting bit of video. The writer for the Observer broke news based on work with Cambridge Analytica (CA) whistleblower Christopher Wylie of how CA “used Facebook data to micro-target advertising at a tiny sliver of voters that helped sway the Brexit vote via the platform.”

Cadwalladr came to TED to directly confront “the Gods of Silicon Valley,” calling them out by name with them in the audience, for how their media platforms have broken liberal democracy. With the intense news focus last week on the Mueller Impeachment Referral, Cadwalladr’s talk took until Sunday to reach my news feed.

The day after the June 2016 Brexit vote, she visited Ebbw Vale in south Wales to see why the area had one of England’s highest “Leave” votes (62%). She found in the historic coal mining and steel district that despite multiple large investments in the area by the European Union, people told her the EU had done nothing for them. People said they “wanted to take back control” (a Leave slogan). In particular, she found hostility to immigrants and refugees in a place with one of the lowest immigration rates in the country.

What she discovered was people received alarmist disinformation from social media feeds specifically targeted to sets of profiled users. But those ads vanish as soon as they are shown, leaving no public clues as to who saw what ads. The campaign funded by dark-money sources represented illegal campaign expenditures under British law.

“In the last days before the Brexit vote, the official Vote Leave campaign laundered nearly three-quarters of a million pounds through another campaign entity that our electoral commission has ruled was illegal,” Cadwalladr told TED. This was only one of crimes under investigation, with no help from Facebook, she says with a quaver in her voice. Personal profiles of 87 million users “illicitly” harvested from Facebook provided the targeting data for these campaigns. She was told by one of the men shown above that the Brexit campaign was the Petri dish for Donald Trump’s campaign.

“In this massive, global, online experiment that we are all living through, we in Britain are the canary,” Cadwalladr cautions. “We are what happens in a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology. Our democracy is broken. Our laws don’t work anymore. And it’s not me saying this. It’s our Parliament [that] published a report saying this.” That is a report on which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg refused to cooperate.

The same people, the same companies and techniques, she warns, have contributed to a growing, worldwide wave of hate and fear. “My question to you: Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all over the world?”

Myanmar is one example Cadwalladr mentions. She did not reference the live-streamed murders in New Zealand.

Citing “false news reports” online, Sri Lanka temporarily blocked social media sites after terrorist attacks against churches on Sunday killed close to 300 and injured at least 500.

Cadwalladr writes at the Guardian:

Though a member of the TED team told me, before the session had even ended, that Facebook had raised a serious challenge to the talk to claim “factual inaccuracies” and she warned me that they had been obliged to send them my script. What factual inaccuracies, we both wondered. “Let’s see what they come back with in the morning,” she said. Spoiler: they never did.

Over the years, I have spent a minimum of time on Facebook (because of work schedules, mainly). Serious discussions there are all but pointless, as they are on Twitter (which can be useful for following breaking news). But what I witnessed during the 2016 presidential campaign amounted to the Fox-ification of communities of friends I thought smart enough to see through some of the obvious disinformation and propaganda being spread. They were not.

The Mueller Impeachment Referral details Russian involvement in such actions against Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump. See “U.S. Operations Through Facebook,” Pg. 24, Pt. I.

Decades of oligarchic economic policies and official lies have sown distrust among voters for which we ourselves all share blame. Nationalist fears and race hatred existed here and elsewhere long before social media. But these platforms have provided new tools the worst among us (with the means to do it) use to exploit those fears for their own undemocratic and often vile ends. If voters believe they lack control over their lives, control they have lost to those who schemed to take it while promising to return it, they have reason to. #Resist that.

Another strongman to love

by digby

I don’t know what to think about this. It seems very strange. I mean, why would Trump even care about Libya or follow the story of what’s happening there in the midst of all his current drama? Who’s whispering in his ear?

The New York Times reports:

President Trump on Friday abruptly reversed American policy toward Libya, issuing a statement publicly endorsing an aspiring strongman in his battle to depose the United Nations-backed government.

The would-be strongman, Khalifa Hifter, launched a surprise attack on the Libyan capital, Tripoli, more than two weeks ago. Relief agencies said Thursday that more than 200 people had been killed in the battle, and in recent days Mr. Hifter’s forces have started shelling civilian neighborhoods.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement a few days after Mr. Hifter’s militia began its attack that “the administration at the highest levels” had made clear that “we oppose the military offensive” and “urge the immediate halt to these military operations.” Most Western governments and the United Nations have also condemned the attack and demanded a retreat.

Mr. Trump, however, told Mr. Hifter almost the opposite, the White House said Friday.
[…]
Analysts said Mr. Trump’s endorsement would embolden Mr. Hifter and hamper United Nations efforts to call for a cease-fire. It could also increase the likelihood that his regional sponsors like Egypt or the United Arab Emirates might intervene on his behalf, as each has in the past in Libya.

The policy reversal came as a surprise in part because Mr. Hifter’s forces also appear to be losing ground. His promises of a quick victory have proved false, and his forces appear outmaneuvered by those aligned against them. Most analysts say that he has little hope of exerting his authority over all of Libya any time soon, so his continued campaign may only prolong the country’s instability.

In the meantime, the battle for Tripoli has now diverted the attention of most of the Libyan militias that had been engaged in combating the fighters of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, said Frederic Wehrey, an expert on Libya at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“It is nuts,” Mr. Wehrey said of Mr. Trump’s statement. “Even judging by the hard-nosed American goals of stabilizing the flow of oil and combating terrorism, this is completely shocking.”

Mr. Trump’s endorsement is the clearest evidence yet of his preference for authoritarianism as the best response to the problems of the Middle East, a sharp departure from the professions of support for democracy by previous American presidents of both parties.

Although this is not the first time Mr. Trump has praised an Arab strongman, his expression of support for Mr. Hifter appears to be the first time that Mr. Trump has embraced an aspiring authoritarian who is not yet in power and may never get there.

A former general under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and also a former C.I.A. client, Mr. Hifter had been living in exile in the United States but returned to Libya during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. He first declared his intention to seize power in 2014, when Libya’s nascent transitional government was struggling to establish its authority over freewheeling militias around the country.

Mr. Hifter vowed to rid Libya of Islamists of all kinds, and he quickly attracted support from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. All three had aligned themselves in a regionwide campaign to crush the Muslim Brotherhood-style political movements that had appeared poised to ride Arab Spring elections to power.

Mr. Hifter has never shown a willingness to accept any civilian authority. But “he fits to a T the kind of leader Trump likes to support,” said Andrew Miller, deputy director for policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy.

I get that he likes strongmen. But I would bet money someone manipulated him into doing this.  Who?

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Will the Mueller Report make a difference?

by digby

I think impeachment of the corrupt, lying, ignoramus in the White House is imperative because to do otherwise pretty much says that the US system has irretrievably broken down and we are about to experience a period of instability like nothing any of us have seen before. At some point, you have to stand up.

But if you want to look at it through the prism of the horserace and electoral practicalities, Ron Brownstein examines the possible effect of the Mueller report and subsequent hearings on the Republican coalition. It may surprise you:

Beyond all the revelations about Russian entanglements and possible obstruction of justice, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report crystallizes two cardinal rules about governance in Donald Trump’s Washington. One is that Trump will shatter any boundaries of law, morality, or custom in his exercise of presidential power. The second is that Republicans—not only in Congress, but now also in the executive branch—will not restrain any of his excesses. The same holds true for both unwritten rules: They constitute a defining gamble for the GOP in future elections.

Starting with Attorney General William Barr’s staggeringly misleading press conference Thursday about the report, and extending through the blithe dismissal from congressional Republicans of its revelations, the release was yet another demonstration that there may be literally nothing Trump can do that would cause Republicans to break from him. Mueller’s report cataloged dozens of behaviors from Trump and his advisers—from sharing internal campaign polling data and strategy with a suspected agent of a foreign power to repeatedly lying to the public to systematically seeking to thwart investigations—that would have inspired volcanic eruptions of outrage from congressional Republicans and the conservative-media infrastructure if perpetrated by a Democratic president.

Instead, the dominant impulse among leading Republicans and conservatives that it’s time to move on was interrupted only by those who say the party should now investigate the investigators who launched the Russia inquiry. Whether by conviction or convenience, the GOP has now almost completely accepted an implicit trade-off: It will tolerate and even defend all of Trump’s most malignant behavior—from his assaults on the rule of law to his open appeals to white racial resentments to his fraying of bonds with historic international allies—in return for the leverage he provides to extend core conservative goals, such as cutting taxes, spending, and regulation and appointing conservative judges.

The electoral bet embodied in this choice is to bind the party’s fate tightly to Trump’s. His tumultuous presidency has accelerated and deepened three political trends that predated him. One is to solidify the Republican hold on what I’ve called the “coalition of restoration”: older, blue-collar, and evangelical whites. The second is to alienate the most ardent elements of the Democratic coalition: young people and minorities. The third is to weaken the Republican position with college-educated, white-collar white voters, particularly in the suburbs surrounding major metropolitan areas.

The Mueller findings—particularly around Trump’s systematic efforts to block the inquiry itself—and the Republican reaction may exert the most influence on that third group. A principal reason Trump’s approval rating is lower than might be expected, given the strength of the economy, is that many of those college-educated white voters who are thriving economically view him as personally unfit for the presidency in terms of judgment, temperament, and morals. In the midterm elections last year, they expressed that unease by moving in unprecedented numbers for Democratic congressional candidates and many statewide Democratic candidates, dashing the hope of Republican strategists who thought they would differentiate between their party and the president.

Mueller’s report aims directly at the anxieties these voters express about Trump and his Republican defenders. Many of these college-educated whites are traditionally center-right voters who may agree with key aspects of Trump’s agenda, such as his success in cutting taxes. But the lying, belligerence, scheming, and disregard for the law that Mueller cataloged in Trump’s effort to block his inquiry speak directly to the greatest doubts these voters have expressed about the president. The report validates the concerns of anyone who feared how Trump would wield presidential power—with a solipsistic elevation of his personal interest over any other concern, and with an utter disregard for limits of law, much less morality. (Mueller may have produced the most damning portrait of a leader exercising power since Shakespeare’s Richard III.)

The response to the report, in turn, validates the fears of those concerned that a Republican Congress will never meaningfully restrain those instincts. Barr’s servile press conference on Thursday morning obliterated the last hope, from earlier in Trump’s term, that senior “wise men” in the executive branch would restrain him in any way either. The resistance by former White House Counsel Don McGahn to some of Trump’s most egregious demands—particularly to fire Mueller—was a crucial step toward the completion of this report. It’s hard to imagine Trump’s current staff and Cabinet of loyalists and acting appointees resisting him so firmly on any front. Indeed, his acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, has defined his tenure by refusing to try.

The implications of these dynamics extend far beyond the Mueller inquiry itself. They are also apparent in the ongoing purge of the Department of Homeland Security, which is largely the result of resistance there to hard-line White House immigration proposals. They are evident in Trump’s effort to further erode the independence of the Federal Reserve Board by nominating such openly partisan and dubiously qualified individuals as Herman Cain and Stephen Moore. And these dynamics explain the Republican acceptance of Trump’s ever more openly xenophobic and racist language, such as insisting that “our country is full,” as he looks to stir white racial anxieties in advance of 2020.

The Mueller report may not dislodge significant elements of Trump’s electoral coalition, some of whom thrill to his behavior and others who accept it in the same implicit bargain as do Republicans in Congress. But it seems highly likely to reinforce the doubts of the nearly 55 percent of Americans who expressed unease, if not outright revulsion, about him as president through their votes for other candidates in the 2016 election and for Democrats in the 2018 House races.

In 2016, many of Trump’s voters, uncertain of him but desiring change and dubious of Hillary Clinton, consciously took a flier: According to exit polls, about one-fifth of his supporters said they doubted that he had the experience to succeed as president, and about one-fourth said they doubted that he had the temperament. (Those numbers were even higher among ambivalent college-educated white voters.) Especially after the brutal bill of particulars that Mueller identified about Trump’s behavior, those voters now face a reckoning on their choice. No member of Congress, no potential executive-branch appointee, and, above all, no voter can claim any illusions about what a Trump second term might look like, especially if enabled by a Congress fully controlled again by Republicans.

Mueller sent many signals in his report that, given his own legal constraints, he expected Congress to assume responsibility for imposing accountability for Trump’s behavior. But his report also shows the limits of relying solely on courts and prosecutors to uphold the rule of law, or to defend basic standards of morality, in government. After Mueller’s detailed catalog of Trump’s unacceptable, if not indictable, behavior, that responsibility more clearly than ever rests with voters.

Many of the suburban women who sent Democrats to the House last November find Trump to be appalling:

Nearly 50 percent of the electorate is suburban, which this year was evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — at 49 percent each — according to the National Election Poll, the exit poll of almost 19,000 respondents often cited by the national media. For the last two decades, suburban voters have leaned slightly Republican, as was the case in 2016 when Donald Trump outpolled Hillary Clinton by four percentage points. In contrast, urban voters supported Democrats by a 33-point margin in this year’s midterms, while Republicans carried rural areas by 14 points.
[…]
One of the biggest shifts in suburban voting patterns involves married women. In 2016, for the first time since exit polling began in 1980, married women slightly supported the Democratic presidential candidate, 49 to 47 percent. That shift became more pronounced this year with married women supporting Democrats by 54 percent to 44 percent. “Trump’s temperament and demeanor has exacerbated the movement of married women towards the Democrats,” said Bowman.

In 2018 there was also a pronounced education gap, as white college-educated women supported Democrats by a whopping 20 points, 59 percent to 39 percent, whereas white college-educated men supported Republicans, though by a much narrower margin, 51 percent to 47 percent. Republicans overwhelmingly captured white non-college-educated men (+34) and women (+14).

Just something to keep in mind. A vast majority of women, including a large majority of the white-college educated women quite a few of whom used to vote Republican find Trump to be appalling. Last November they voted for the Democrats to do something about it.

According to the polling and the talking heads on TV, most of the American people don’t care about any of this and the only thing that matters to them are “pocketbook” and “kitchen table” issues. If that’s true then the constitution and our concept of civic responsibility are gone already and all any president has to do is provide bread and circuses and they can do anything they want. It probably won’t work out very well for people of color and women in the long run to have authoritarian oligarchs in charge (it never does) but we’ll see how well it goes.

I guess I’m naive to think the majority of Americans still care about the competence of their leaders and the integrity of their government. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I’m pretty sure all those people who marched in January 2017 haven’t changed their minds …

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What about Helsinki?

by digby

As one would have expected, Emptywheel is doing a thorough deep dive into the Mueller report and in this post she looks at the central question (to my mind) of whether Trump was compromised by Russia. And that’s for a reason. As she explains:

The Mueller Report does not include the investigation’s counterintelligence analysis. It says that explicitly here (see also this Ben Wittes report, though I think he gets a few things wrong).

From its inception, the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission. FBI personnel who assisted the Office established procedures to identify and convey such information to the FBI. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division met with the Office regularly for that purpose for most of the Office’s tenure. For more than the past year, the FBI also embedded personnel at the Office who did not work on the Special Counsel’s investigation, but whose purpose was to review the results of the investigation and to send-in writing-summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices. Those communications and other correspondence between the Office and the FBI contain information derived from the investigation, not all of which is contained in this Volume. This Volume is a summary. It contains, in the Office’s judgment, that information necessary to account for the Special Counsel’s prosecution and declination decisions and to describe the investigation’s main factual results. [my emphasis]

These FBI Agents were only co-located for part of Mueller’s tenure, perhaps around the same time as the IRA indictment? And this description does not include the three NSD prosecutors described as detailees, Heather Alpino, Ryan Dickey, and Jessica Romero, as distinct from prosecutors originally assigned to Mueller.

Plus, we know there was always a counterintelligence focus to this investigation; all the initial subjects of it (Manafort, Page, Papadopoulos, and Flynn) were counterintelligence concerns. Other Trump associates got added in October 2017, but even there, the investigation into Michael Cohen started as a FARA investigation and Gates and probably others were brought in along with Manafort’s counterintelligence concerns. Then there’s Trump (who must have been brought in for obstruction, but I don’t think the report says how).

But the most significant thing that doesn’t show up in this report is whether Trump was undercutting the investigation as a favor to Russia, reportedly one of the concerns Rod Rosenstein had when he first hired Mueller. This report does not explicitly treat that concern, at all (to significant detriment to one area of its analysis, as I’ll show in a follow-up post).

That’s most evident in the way the report deals with Vladimir Putin in the post-inauguration period. The report itself invokes Putin at least 163 times, often describing the many different efforts to set up a meeting between Putin and Trump. But when Trump actually started meeting with top Russian officials — and Putin specifically — the report gets quiet.

Anyway, she analyzes what’s there and what isn’t in detail and concludes with this:

Trump’s admission that he spoke to Putin about adoptions in the same interview where he prepared the ground to fire Sessions and insisted that everyone would take a meeting with foreigners offering dirt on your opponent would seem important to the discussion of whether in attempting to fire Sessions, Trump was obstructing not a criminal investigation into his own conduct, but a counterintelligence investigation into his own ties with Putin.

But the report not only doesn’t consider it, the report doesn’t mention it.

Nor does the report discuss some of the other bizarre Trump interactions with Putin, most of all the Helsinki meeting that took place in the wake of the release of the GRU indictment, leading Trump to yet again very publicly deny Russia’s role in the attack, that time in the presence of Putin himself.

Now, there may be very good constitutional reasons why the analysis of Trump’s weird relationship with Putin as President is not part of this report. The President is empowered with fairly unlimited authority to conduct foreign policy and to declassify information, which would cover these instances.

Plus, if Mueller conducted this analysis, you wouldn’t want to share that publicly so the Russians could read it.

But it must be noted that the report doesn’t answer what a lot of people think it does: whether Trump has been compromised by Russia, leading him to pursue policies damaging to US interests. Let me very clear: I don’t think Trump is a puppet being managed by Vladimir Putin. But contrary to a great number of claims that this report puts those concerns to rest, the report does the opposite. With the limited exception of the suggestion of a tie between firing Comey and the meeting with Lavrov, the report doesn’t even mention the key incidents that would be the subject of such analysis.

If anything, new details released in this report provide even further reason to think Trump obstructed the Russian investigation to halt the counterintelligence analysis of his ties with Russia. But the report itself doesn’t ever explicitly consider whether that’s why Trump obstructed this investigation.

I continue to think the Moscow Tower deal played heavily into this. Trump is a pathological liar but his lies about having no business in Russia had to be weighing on his mind as this investigation unfolded.

And yes, there are years and years of financial dealings with nefarious character which Mueller did not address in the report.

Helsinki, the denials of interference and all the kowtowing remain, to my mind, the most damning of his behaviors in all of this. Even he is not so dumb that he didn’t know it made him look guilty of all the things of which he was being accused. And yet he couldn’t even bring himself to pretend to be upset about the interference. There’s a reason for that and we still don’t know what it is.

The most logical conclusion is that he was compromised, or believed he was compromised, and that is an issue Mueller doesn’t address in Volume I and Volume II of his report.

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