Month: May 2019

Lordy, it’s good there are notes

by digby

The House needs to call Annie Donaldson as well as McGahn. Trump will fight it but the public needs to know that there were many witnesses to his crimes and they are being prevented from appearing.

The notes, scribbled rapidly on a legal pad, captured the fear inside the White House when President Trump raged over the Russia investigation and decreed he was firing the FBI director who led it: “Is this the beginning of the end?”

The angst-filled entry is part of a shorthand diary that chronicled the chaotic days in Trump’s West Wing, a trove that the special counsel report cited more than 65 times as part of the evidence that the president sought to blunt a criminal investigation bearing down on him.

The public airing of the notes — which document then-White House counsel Donald McGahn’s contemporaneous account of events and his fear that the president was engaged in legally risky conduct — has infuriated Trump.

“Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” Trump tweeted a day after the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.

The scribe keeping track of the president’s actions was Annie Donaldson, McGahn’s chief of staff, a loyal and low-profile conservative lawyer who figures in the Mueller report as one of the most important narrators of internal White House turmoil.

Her daily habit of documenting conversations and meetings provided the special counsel’s office with its version of the Nixon White House tapes: a running account of the president’s actions, albeit in sentence fragments and concise descriptions.

Among the episodes memorialized in Donaldson’s notes and memos: the president’s outrage when FBI Director James B. Comey confirmed the existence of the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump’s efforts to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from overseeing the probe and his push to get Mueller disqualified and removed as the special counsel.

The Harvard Law School graduate’s unflinching words — “Just in the middle of another Russia Fiasco,” she wrote on March 2, 2017 — have cast the die-hard Republican in an unfamiliar role: as a truth teller heralded by Trump’s foes for providing what they view as proof he is unfit for office.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) has already signaled that he intends to subpoena Donaldson as a critical witness.

Donaldson — who lives in Montgomery, Ala., where her husband recently got a job as a federal prosecutor — did not respond to requests for comment. She left the White House in December, both proud of her service and also somewhat stung by her experience in Washington, friends said.

Those close to Donaldson fear she will be thrust in the middle of the building war between congressional Democrats and the White House. Some privately worry she could become a target of the president, despite having worked hard to help implement his agenda.

That was her mistake. Anyone who took a job with Trump had to have known that he was a vengeful, incompetent, boob and a dishonest conman. It was obvious.

As McGahn’s chief of staff, Donaldson was charged with managing 30 to 40 lawyers in the counsel’s office, getting White House policies legally vetted, keeping judicial nominations on track and working with McGahn on Trump’s top priorities.

Along the way, she did what virtually all lawyers consider a necessity: kept a record of decisions, disputes, and tasks left to do. Nearly every day, when McGahn emerged from the Oval Office or other West Wing meetings, she would take notes as he recalled significant discussions with the president and his team, according to people familiar with her role.

In the case of Nixon, the discovery of his White House taping system provided unquestionable proof of his role in a coverup of his campaign’s illegal spying on opponents, precipitating his resignation in 1974.

In Trump’s case, Donaldson’s notes depict McGahn and others as worried that the president could be accused of criminal obstruction — and as seeking to protect him from his impulses.

In an entry on March 21, 2017, Donaldson recounts how Trump told McGahn he was furious with the testimony that Comey gave to Congress about the Russia probe the day before, sounding as if he might fire him on the spot. The president felt betrayed that Comey had failed to do as Trump had asked: to tell the public that he was not personally under investigation.

“beside himself,” she wrote of the president. “getting hotter and hotter, get rid?”

McGahn was so concerned that Comey’s firing was imminent that the counsel’s office drafted a memo analyzing the president’s legal authority to do so, according to the report.

McGahn’s lawyer William Burck declined to comment.

That day, Trump repeatedly pressured McGahn to get the Justice Department to intervene, Donaldson later told investigators. McGahn then called Assistant Attorney General Dana Boente asking whether officials could “correct the misperception that the President was under investigation,” the report said.

At one point, McGahn warned the president that some of the actions he took — such as asking Comey to let go of his investigation of Flynn — could make him vulnerable to accusations of obstruction of justice. “biggest exposure . . . other contacts . . . calls . . . ask re: Flynn,” Donaldson wrote that day.

White House aides who know Donaldson said they are confident her notes are an accurate account of events in Trump’s White House.

She’s upset that this accurate record of the president’s criminal behavior is available for all to see.

“I doubt she had any notion that these notes would ever end up in anyone’s hands, let alone Mueller’s,” said one former White House official, who requested anonymity to describe internal dynamics.

White House advisers expect records of their confidential advice to the president to stay private, probably for decades, until they are released for historical archives.

Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama, said Donaldson’s notes bring the unprecedented nature of the Trump presidency into immediate focus.

“It is impossible to imagine that these extensive notes were taken for any reason other than to document questionable presidential conduct and the counsel’s office response,” Bauer said. “It speaks volumes to the extraordinary challenges facing lawyers in this White House, and it raises the question: If this is what is necessary for lawyers to do their job, then how is it a job the lawyers should agree to do?”

Exactly. I would imagine that the real issue for former advisers like Donaldson is that this calls into question their own integrity.

Why didn’t they quit?

As McGahn drank from a fire hose of meetings, deregulation debates and legal disputes, Donaldson was known for her careful tracking of small details.

She met McGahn each morning with a to-do list she wanted him to tackle, and she gave similar lists to deputy counsels and associate lawyers.

White House aides praised her ability to get the often prickly factions within the White House to respond to her requests. She sought to make sure McGahn was included in meetings in which some Trump advisers tried to avoid the lawyer’s input. She displayed a quiet confidence, often speaking toward the end of a meeting rather than first, and made her points slowly and precisely.

“She has a true desire to get things done,” said her friend and former boss Katie Biber, who worked with Donaldson on the 2008 Mitt Romney presidential campaign. “She’s not trying to get credit.”

“Don may have been the White House counsel, but Annie is the glue that held this all together,” she added.

Why did she do that? well…

At the White House, Donaldson played a significant role in helping push forward Trump’s judicial nominations; a record 30 were seated on federal appellate courts in his first two years, double the number of any previous administration.

“Annie is going to go down in history as a real unsung hero of the judicial nominations process,” Biber said.

She was there to help the Federalist Society get ‘er done. And they did.

Trump reacted angrily when he learned from a news report in February 2018 that McGahn kept a written record of their encounters, according to Mueller’s report.

“What about these notes? Why do you take notes?” Trump asked McGahn during a tense Oval Office confrontation. “Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” (McGahn told investigators Trump was referring to Donaldson’s notes, which the president thought of as McGahn’s.)

McGahn responded to the president that he keeps notes because he is a “real lawyer” and explained that notes create a record and are not a bad thing, according to the report.

Trump replied: “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.”

In the end, the president’s desire for the investigation to come to a close ultimately led to the release of Donaldson’s precise description of events. In an effort to speed up Mueller’s review, then-White House lawyer Ty Cobb embraced a strategy of turning over all the administration’s records to Mueller.

McGahn privately warned that the approach would force him to divulge highly sensitive and privileged communications, and increase the chances that they would become public. His forecast proved true.

The Democrats have to start being more creative than calling Barr a chicken which is just stupid because Barr and all of his ilk have no shame, so it’s just a waste of time.

If these people are kept from going public, maybe they could get George Clooney and Meryl Streep to read the notes aloud in a public hearing. The press would be happy to cover it …

Getting a full readout of these notes, in public, one way or the other has to be done.

.

Campaign industrial complex
by Tom Sullivan

Aerial view of National Mall, Washington, D.C. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons [Public domain].

Most of what people think they know about party politics they pick up from watching the presidential contest every four years. First, because it’s the only time they are paying close attention. Second, because the news coverage is inescapable. But it leaves a false impression of how parties work day to day.

Men (it always seems to be men) call the Democratic office here every presidential cycle to ask about their favorite primary candidates. They want to know when [your candidate here] is coming to town. Explain you don’t know, and they get an attitude. You’ve confirmed Democrats are as much a waste of their time as they already believed. The voices suggest Jimbo Jones from “The Simpsons.”

“Well, this is the Democratic Party, isn’t it?”

Yes, but (I do not reply) I’m not the one who called the guy at the motor pool with his hands in a Humvee transmission to ask for the base commander’s itinerary. Callers’ grasp of force structure is a tad fuzzy.

Let’s examine another aspect of party operations not so obvious at a remove.

Forty-two (or more) college chapters of Young Democrats announced a boycott in March of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC, the campaign arm of the House Democratic caucus) to protest a policy of blacklisting consultants, pollsters, and strategists who work with candidates to primary Democratic incumbents (even in safe districts). Roll Call reports, “[T]he new policy moves millions of expenditures by the DCCC off the table for firms that work with candidates who challenge Democratic incumbents.”

Bookmark that: millions.

Affiliates like the DCCC (and its Senate counterpart) are party-adjacent. The DCCC (to my knowledge) has no rules-based role in the party organization, but its financial and branding clout may determine who you can vote for on your fall ballot. Their official mission is to elect and reelect House Democrats. Reporting describes the blacklist controversy as a conflict between the party’s progressive wing and a more conservative party establishment. But it is also about the money fueling the Beltway’s campaign industrial complex.

A few freshmen may not fully realize that in winning office they have joined an exclusive and expensive club. There are annual fees ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Euphemistically called “dues,” they are fundraising targets the leadership expects Members of Congress (MOCs) to raise and contribute to the House caucus’ DCCC election war chest.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told the New Haven Independent in 2013, “The one question you have to ask when you’re deciding if you want to run for the United States House or the United State Senate is: Are you willing to become a telemarketer for 24 months?” MOCs are expected to spend as much as four hours per day on the phone “dialing for dollars.” In this instance, it’s true: both sides do it.

To win DCCC support as an aspiring congressional candidate, Ryan Grim and Lee Fang found, one may first have to pass the Rolodex test:

In order to establish whether a person is worthy of official backing, DCCC operatives will “rolodex” a candidate, according to a source familiar with the procedure. On the most basic level, it involves candidates being asked to pull out their smartphones, scroll through their contacts lists, and add up the amount of money their contacts could raise or contribute to their campaigns. If the candidates’ contacts aren’t good for at least $250,000, or in some cases much more, they fail the test, and party support goes elsewhere.

Source: Open Secrets

There is logic behind this. (Chart above.) Candidates who raise the most money tend to win, and winning is not cheap. I checked the cost for Democrats to flip some congressional seats in 2018 (no particular order, via Open Secrets):

1. Jennifer Wexton spent $6 million to flip a seat in VA.
2. Jared Golden spent $5.5 million in ME.
3. Lucy McBath spent $2.5 million in GA.
4. Harley Rouda spent $8 million to turn out Dana Rohrabacher in CA.
5. Abigail Spanberger spent $7 million to unseat Dave Brat in VA.
6. Sharice Davids spent $4.7 million to win in KS.
7. Jason Crow spent $5.6 million to win in CO.
8. Dean Phillips spent $6.1 million to win in MN.
9. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell spent $4.6 million to win in FL.
10. Colin Allred spent $5.9 million to win in TX.
11. Ann Kirkpatrick spent $4.5 million to win in AZ.
12. Abby Finkenauer spent $4.6 million to win in IA.
13. Ben McAdams spent $3.4 million to win in UT.
14. Torres Small spent $4.6 million to win in NM.
15. Sean Casten spent $6.1 million to win in IL.
16. Antonio Delgado spent $9.1 million to win in NY.
17. Lizzie Fletcher spent $6.1 million to win in TX.
18. Lauren Underwood spent $4.7 million to win in IL.

Average spending from above: $5.5 million to flip a seat. Fundraising skills are a necessity.

Getting back to the DCCC blacklist, each MOC represents a revenue stream for the Beltway’s campaign industrial complex. (Similar ecosystems exist at the state level.)

Money has no political philosophy. But organizations substantially dependent on MOC fundraising not only for campaign field work, but for office rents and staff salaries and benefits have strong instincts for self-preservation. DCCC funding comes with strings attached: If you take their money, they insist you spend it with a pre-approved, in-complex network of consultants, many former colleagues. The caucus’ campaign arms react badly when colleagues go rogue and primary a revenue stream.

If a challenger wins, then loses the general election, the DCCC (or its Senate counterpart) loses a revenue stream. If MOCs have to spend down their campaign war chests to fend off primary challengers, they may throw less into the DCCC’s kitty. If the DCCC does not use its considerable leverage and MOC-raised money to fend off primary challenges, its MOCs will have less incentive to pay their dues. Hence, the blacklist.

Sure, a challenger might win the primary, the general election, and become a prodigious fundraiser in office, but an incumbent is the caucus’ a bird in the hand. Political philosophy and what voters want are secondary. Beside contributions, the party rank and file have no influence over these organizations other than electing new MOCs. But MOCs come and go. On both sides of the aisle, the campaign industrial complex abides.

This is the establishment, more so than the Democratic National Committee, local and state parties. Not people, but a system.

Is this system tilted towards centrists? The Hill reports that DCCC spokesman Cole Leiter argues his group “spent a total of nearly $26 million to elect candidates who would later join the Congressional Progressive Caucus.” If progressives are good fundraisers, the DCCC will protect them from primary challenges as well. That’s the system.

When we speak of getting money out of politics, we tend to think first of the corrupting influences of dark money, special-interest money, and the lobbying revolving door for former politicians and Hill staff. The insane, raw costs of modern campaigns leave party caucuses at the state and federal levels in a perpetual, financial arms race. The dues culture that evolved to fuel that competition not only takes away from public service, it spawned a system that sustains itself hand in glove with a fraternity-like network of former staffers who move from public service into the private campaign industry and back.

I wrote of the idealistic, budding political careerists that enter that system:

They begin as Young Democrats and interns. They cannot wait to attend political functions and rub elbows with high-profile elected officials. They angle for selfies with the “poohbahs,” as one friend put it, and can’t wait to get the pictures up on Facebook to show family and friends just how connected they are. Perhaps they graduate to a legislative assistant position for some state representative or senator. They transition to employment with another one. Or perhaps, even to a permanent position with a committee in the legislature or Congress.

Or perhaps even a job with one of the caucus’ campaign arms or a consultant shop. Once politics becomes your source of income, how you practice it changes, especially in a company town. Perhaps not for all, but for many it is a go along to get along culture.

The system is not exclusive to either major party nor is it exclusive to Washington. Charlotte-based Red Dome Group billed 2018 NC-9 Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris over $400,000 for, among other things, paying McCrae Dowless, the contractor indicted for absentee-by-mail ballot fraud.

In analyzing how Republicans outside the president’s circle lost their souls to Donald Trump, Max Boot notes what keeps them in line is “fear of the professional consequences” of crossing him. “Fear of economic extinction is a powerful inducement” for viewing him in the best possible light. In the case of Red Dome, the money was a powerful inducement for not looking too closely at the activities of McCrae Dowless.

Fear of professional consequences and economic extinction is the weapon the DCCC’s blacklist deploys to keep its stable of consultants from going rogue and bucking the system that funds them all.

Reform campaign finance. Provide public campaign financing. The campaign industrial complex that turns politicians into telemarketers may not wither, but it may weaken and allow democracy to breathe more freely.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

The Topiary Cat by surrealist artist Richard Saunders

What Would Convince Florida School Boards To End Guns In Schools Programs? 

By Spocko

Florida lawmakers voted to arm teachers. What can convince school boards that guns in schools fail to protect and add danger every day they are present?

On Wednesday the Florida House voted to arm teachers. This despite massive opposition from Parkland student activists, teacher’s unions and parents. However, each school district must still vote on whether or not to implement the program.

Despite droves of residents who protesting the Armed Teacher Program, Brevard County School Board was one of 25 counties that implemented it last year.

Since this effort to convince lawmakers of the dangers of armed teachers didn’t work, EVERY school board needs to see failures of guns by ANYONE in schools anywhere. There are numerous failures listed below which can be sent to school boards.

Because these stories are only reported locally, most people have never heard of them. If these stories don’t get to the right people in school boards they might think that guns in schools programs are working just fine. They. Are. Not.

During the Florida House Education Committee hearing one representative asked for evidence of the danger of arming teachers. If I was there I could have provided him this list of cases the Gifford’s Organization put together of mishandled guns in schools. Now this info should go to every school board member.

1) Every Incident of Mishandled Guns in Schools 

Since there are other states that and are deciding if they should go down this dangerous road, here is a list from my friends at the Safe Tennessee Project:

2) A Few Recent Examples of Why School Employees Carrying Guns in Schools is a Bad Idea

In addition to showing the gun fail cases of teachers and school employees, I think it is important to ALSO show school boards all the times that School Resource Officers, cops and armed security guards in schools screw up. Because this is the math: More People With Guns Equals More Gun Accidents.

Last year Connie Rooke, who is an educator and gun owner with a background in military policing, talked about gun safety. She pointed out that trained professionals fail with guns. Here she a video of her talking to the Bevard Country School board last year.

Rooke provided this list to her school board:

3) Research Sampling Firearms Incidents By Police, Teachers Or Staff On School Campuses.

Here Connie talks about the danger of guns in a school environment. 

Last year I watched multiple groups go to school boards to convince them to vote against the armed teacher program. In many cases school boards rejected the program.Sadly 25 out of 74 school districts voted to arm administrative staff and non-classroom teachers. There are currently 743 armed school staff employed in Florida.

During the Florida hearings I saw Education Committee members claim that other states have armed teacher programs and “they don’t have problems.” I’ve heard legislators claim that “If there were problems, we would have heard about them.” This is a classic dodge. If someone is right there to point out the problems they pivot to downplaying gun negligence cases as rare or minor. “Nobody was injured so…” If the problems are serious, they claim THEIR armed people are better trained and “It won’t happen here.”

But problems DO happen. For example, here are two school shootings that happened in the last two weeks.

April 30 Pasco County Florida:

School resource officer accidentally discharges gun in middle school cafeteria

April 18, Dallas County Texas:

Mesquite officer accidentally fired a gun in Horn High School, police say

Luckily, no one was injured in either school shooting.  You will note the media headlines: “accidentally discharges gun” and “accidentally fired a gun.” My gun owner friend reminded me that unless the gun malfunctioned, the correct phrase should be “negligently discharged a gun.” But you rarely see that phrase used by the police or the school district spokesperson.

When failures by trained professionals happen parents and teachers need to go to the school boards and say, “Posting Armed Individuals in our schools is dangerous. They are also ineffective. We need to end the program.”

At that point the people arguing to continue to keep guns in schools, hoping for a future successful stopping of a school shooter, will be up against an actual failure of an armed individual in the school. Schools boards need to hear these cases.

Bottom Line: Armed Individuals in Schools Fail to Protect

“the answer to a key question — How effectively can someone with a gun protect a school from someone else with a gun? — is almost always missing from the discussion.” Scarred by school shootings, By John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich, Washington Post, March 25, 2018

In that article they point out that the odds are 200 to 1 that the next shooter will NOT be stopped by an armed guard, SRO or armed teacher. (Link ) In the most recent shooting at the University of North Carolina Charlotte the shooter was stopped by a student, Riley Howell, who tackled him.
Riley Howell, University of North Carolina Charlotte, tackled a school shooter

Why do people cling to the idea the good guy shooting the bad guy must be an option in the goal to protect students and staff? Partly this is because of the gun lobby narrative that guns are the answer. Partly because of unrealistic expectations created by movies, TV and video games.

The evidence shows that most shootings are over in seconds and couldn’t be stopped even if someone was right there with a gun.

It is important to focus on the daily real danger of guns in schools. Each gun fail is an educational opportunity to remind people of why guns in schools are a bad idea. These individual stories need to be brought up to school board members by the community over and over again, because after a shooting makes the national news the drive by the uninformed public for more guns starts again.

The legislators in Florida pushed the final decision to school boards. I’ve seen that school boards can be as uneducated as legislators. There are multiple methods that can be used to educate them. If groups that do not want guns in schools don’t convince them to not to implement programs that allow guns in schools, groups that want guns in schools will win.

Currently there are groups of sheriffs going around talking to school boards about their great armed teachers programs. They have fancy simulation machines. It has become a profit center for them:  Florida sheriffs spend millions on school guardians

School boards need to know that armed police and armed teachers are dangerous and ineffective in stopping school shooters.

There is a 1 in 614 million chance of a mass shooting at a school but a 1 in 8,000 chance of a gun accident. School boards need to understand what those regular gun failures will cost them, not only in injuries or loss of life, but in the environment they are creating by having armed individuals in their school every day.

Erik Prince has his dirty hands in every ugly GOP project


by digby

He’s even training the likes of con-artist James O’Keefe:

Blackwater founder Erik Prince arranged for political activist James O’Keefe’s conservative group Project Veritas to receive more than one round of “training in intelligence and elicitation techniques,” The Intercept reports. In 2016, the self-styled “guerrilla journalist” group reportedly got lessons from a retired military intelligence operative. The training lasted several weeks and ended with the operative, Euripides Rubio Jr., reportedly quitting because the group “wasn’t capable of learning.” In 2017, Prince next set Project Veritas up with a former British MI6 officer in hopes of turning the organization into “domestic spies,” according to report. At the time, O’Keefe posted social-media photos of the event at Prince’s Wyoming ranch, claiming he was training in “spying and self-defense” and planned to turn Project Veritas into “the next great intelligence agency.”

I’ll have more on that Intercept story over the weekend. Click over and read it if you have time. It’s something else. This guy is a truly malevolent force in this world.  Scary stuff.

The new DOJ Obama-Biden investigation has a wide scope

by digby

Barr is launching official DOJ investigations into his own agencies and Democrats:

Attorney General William Barr has begun to fill in details on his controversial pledge to investigate whether the FBI and Justice Department engaged in improper “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016.

In a contentious hearing this week on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Democrats accused Barr of sounding like President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. But some Republicans encouraged him to lay out the contours of the nascent surveillance probe that he made clear is among his top priorities.

Barr told the Senate Judiciary panel that he has assembled a team to determine whether there was any improper “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016, including whether intelligence collection began earlier than previously known and how many confidential informants the FBI used. He also suggested his focus was on senior leaders at the FBI and Justice Department at the time.

“To the extent there was overreach, what we have to be concerned about is a few people at the top getting it into their heads that they know better than the American people,” Barr said.

His review also will examine whether a dossier that included salacious accusations against Trump was fabricated by the Russian government to dupe U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI, Barr told the Senate panel on Wednesday.

“We now know that he was being falsely accused,” Barr said of Trump. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”

Mueller’s report didn’t say there were false accusations against Trump. It said the evidence of cooperation between the campaign and Russia “was not sufficient to support criminal charges.” Investigators were unable to get a complete picture of the activities of some relevant people, the special counsel found.

Although Barr’s review has only begun, it’s helping to fuel a narrative long embraced by Trump and some of his Republican supporters: that the Russia investigation was politically motivated and concocted from false allegations in order to spy on Trump’s campaign and ultimately undermine his presidency.

Barr’s review could get a boost after a report by the New York Times on Thursday that the FBI sent a trained investigator to London in 2016 to pose as a research assistant and probe Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos over possible campaign links to Russia.

A big shout-out to the New York Times for putting these right-wing hit job stories on the front page. It’s the second day in a row — yesterday they had the bogus Giuliani Ukraine smear of Hunter Biden. I’m sure Barr’s DOJ will be feeding them many more juicy morsels in the future.

Trump’s re-election campaign quickly seized on that report as evidence that the FBI did spy on the Trump campaign. “As President Trump has said, it is high time to investigate the investigators,” Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

Senator John Cornyn told Barr, “It appears to me that the Obama administration, Justice Department and FBI decided to place their bets on Hillary Clinton and focus their efforts” on investigating the Trump campaign.

It fell to Republican Senator John Kennedy to point out that the FBI was also investigating Trump’s 2016 opponent during the campaign.

“There were two investigations here,” he said. “One was an investigation of Donald Trump. There was another investigation of Hillary Clinton. I’d like to know how that one started, too.”

Depending on what Barr finds, his review of the Russia probe could give Trump ammunition to defend himself in continuing congressional inquiries — and in a potential impeachment for obstructing justice. Barr told senators that Trump’s actions can’t be seen as obstruction if he was exercising his constitutional authority as president to put an end to an illegitimate investigation.

Barr’s efforts follow two years of work by a group of House Republicans who have been conducting dozens of interviews regarding the FBI’s and Justice Department’s conduct in the early stages of investigation of Trump and his campaign.

Representative Mark Meadows, a Trump ally and the top Republican on the House subcommittee on government operations, and Devin Nunes, the Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, have made criminal referrals to the Justice Department in recent weeks based on their findings.

Meadows said Thursday that Barr’s “willingness to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation is the first step in putting the questionable practices of the past behind us.” and that Barr’s “tenacity is sure to be rewarded.”

The FBI opened an investigation in July 2016 into whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign were coordinating with the Russian government in its interference activities, according to a redacted version of Mueller’s final report.

The FBI was prompted to open the investigation after learning that Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign adviser, was told the Russian government could assist the campaign by releasing information damaging to Trump’s opponent, Clinton, the report said.

Barr said he wants to know if that is all true.

The review is examining what went into the decision by FBI officials to open a counterintelligence investigation in the first place, and whether any U.S. agencies engaged in investigative activities before the probe was started, Barr said.

Barr said he’s working with FBI Director Christopher Wray “to reconstruct exactly what went down.” He said he has “people in the department helping me review the activities over the summer of 2016.”

Notably, Barr said his aides will be “working very closely” with the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.

Horowitz is conducting his own investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation and whether there were abuses when the FBI obtained a secret warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 to spy on another foreign policy adviser to the campaign, Carter Page.

Barr said he wants to know whether the only intelligence collection that occurred in 2016 was the use of a single confidential informant and the warrant to spy on Page.

“I’d like to find out whether that is, in fact, true,” Barr said. “It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it’s being represented.”

Barr didn’t clarify how he would work with Horowitz, whose office is by law a separate and independent entity within the Justice Department.

But he added: “I want to stay away from getting too deeply into the FISA issue because that’s currently under investigation” by the inspector general.

Barr said he wants to know if Page was under surveillance during his time working for the campaign, which was roughly from January 2016 to September 2016. He also wants to know if any other Trump campaign officials were under surveillance during that period.

Another area Barr is probing is when the Justice Department and the FBI knew that the Democratic Party was paying former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who put together the dossier of allegations against Trump.

Total wingnut fever-swamp bullshit. But now Barr and hand-picked Trump-loving DOJ henchmen will turn it into a real thing.

I don’t know how the Department of Justice recovers from this. Using it to defend this traitorous, ignoramus in the White House, by claiming nefarious “Deep State” activities pretty much declares reality itself to be dead. Orwellian doesn’t begin to describe it.

.

He just can’t quit him

by digby

It’s hard to believe that after everything that’s happened Trump thought this was a good idea, but he’s basically saying “fuck it, Vlad and I are doing what we want and you can’t stop us.”

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke Friday and both agreed “there was no collusion” between Moscow and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.

Sanders said that the two briefly discussed special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “essentially in the context of that it’s over and there was no collusion.” She added that she was “pretty sure both leaders were very well aware of (the Mueller report’s finding) long before this call took place” because it was “something we’ve said for the better part of two and a half years.”

When asked if they also discussed election meddling by Russia that Mueller detailed in his report, she said that the administration is committed to securing American elections and blasted the Obama administration for not taking action in 2016.

“This administration, unlike the previous one, takes election meddling seriously,” she said.

Trump later confirmed the call in a Friday tweet in which called the accusation of collusion the “Russian Hoax.”

Obviously, he didn’t mention the election interference. He basically said, “Vlad we got away with it. All systems are go for 2020.”

.

Did they hijack the plane?

by digby

A number of things Bill Barr said in his testimony has led to the suspicion that he shut down the Mueller investigation. His weird insistence that if you can’t charge you can’t investigate (meaning the only thing you can do is clear a president since they can’t be charged) along with his comment that if you decide to just lay out the evidence “it’s time to pull up” certainly hint at that possibility.

Emptywheel notes that there’s a good chance Rosenstein was pressing to do that even before Barr came on board:

Bill Barr’s admission the other day that he and Rod Rosenstein started talking about how to deny that Trump obstructed justice on March 5, long before even getting the Mueller Report, has raised real questions about whether the two men pushed Mueller to finish his investigation (even though the Mystery Appellant and Andrew Miller subpoenas were still pending).

But I’ve started wondering whether Rosenstein — the guy who promised Trump he’d “land the plane” while he was trying to keep his job — hasn’t been pressuring Mueller to finish up even longer than that.

At the beginning of Manafort’s breach hearing, Andrew Weissmann described how this plea deal was different from most normal plea deals.

There were two points that I wanted to make to the Court. There are a number of subparts to them.

But, the first point has to do with sort of the context in which we operated at the time that we entered into the agreement. As the Court will recall, the agreement was entered into just shortly before the trial was to commence before this Court, and it was after three proffer sessions. And then, of course, there were many debriefings after that. And a couple things about that timing that are relevant.

One, at the end of the third proffer session, before entering into the agreement, we had made clear to the defense that we were willing to go forward. But, that given the limited opportunity, and yet the need to make a decision because of the eminent [sic] trial, we wanted to make clear to the defense that, of course, we were going in with good faith.

But we could not say at that point that we either could say the defendant was being truthful or that the defendant was going to be able to meet the substantial assistance prong. In other words, two parts of the agreement.

Of course, I think everyone was hopeful that all of that would be met. But we wanted to make it clear to the defense that they weren’t being misled in any way as to what we were thinking.

And the second component of that is, I think, something unusual — there were two factors that were unusual in this case compared to, I think, the cases that all of us at this table have had in the past. One was, there’s enormous interest in what I will call — for lack of a better term — the intelligence that could be gathered from having a cooperating witness in this particular investigation. And that would account for the Government agreeing to have Mr. Manafort cooperate, even though it was after a trial. Because that’s certainly an — not — not — it’s not that that never happens, but it’s more atypical.

By the same token, there was an unusual factor — the second unusual factor, which was [redacted] the normal motives and incentives that are built into a cooperation agreement.

To sum up, it was unusual because:

• They didn’t do all the vetting they would normally do before entering into a plea deal,
• There was a big push to avoid the September 2018 trial
• They entered a plea deal when they weren’t sure about Manafort’s reliability in part to get intelligence, not prosecutorial information
• Another factor, which is redacted, which by context is likely to be Trump’s floating of a pardon

In other words, there was great pressure to enter into this plea deal that led them not to do the vetting they would normally have.

There’s more at the link.

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to learn that Barr shut down Mueller, would they?

.

Get ready. The DOJ is loaded for Barr


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

It is an article of faith among people who regularly tune in to Fox News’ evening lineup that the single greatest scandal in American history is the framing of Donald Trump by “dirty cops” at the FBI and the Department of Justice in order to destroy his presidency. In this telling of current events, it all started as a cover-up of the nefarious crimes committed by Hillary Clinton. When she didn’t win the election, they hatched the Russia investigation in order to remove Trump by other means. He is an innocent man who was wrongly accused at the hands of the Clinton-loving “deep state” cabal, and he’s heroically battling back their assault even as he works his impressively large fingers to the bone making America great again.

As Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina opened the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing about the Mueller report on Wednesday morning, he channeled that alternate reality with a rambling statement about Hillary Clinton, saying that he planned to get to the bottom of this email situation once and for all. There’s no need to go into the details (if you want them, Philip Bump of the Washington Post helpfully laid them all out) but here’s a taste of Graham’s rhetoric:

Lindsey Graham: whatabout Hillary’s emails? pic.twitter.com/2a9wGIJdQJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2019

Other Republicans on the panel also spoke at length about the email scandal, encouraging Attorney General Bill Barr to follow up with an investigation into Clinton’s alleged crimes as well as all the Obama-era officials they say set up the president. As Graham’s home state newspaper put it:

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Monday laid out his next steps for dealing with the aftermath of Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

First up: Launch an investigation into whether Hillary Clinton, Trump’s former Democratic challenger, got help from President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice. … Graham predicted his GOP colleagues would be “enthusiastic” about the direction in which he planned to take his committee.

I’ve believed that the Republicans would have to take this up officially for some time. The Fox News base of the party demands that Clinton and her “deep state” cult be stopped. Also, Graham is running for re-election in 2020.

But until now, I hadn’t thought the Department of Justice would get involved in this ridiculous con job. Sure, they’ve fired some top people, but it sounds as though they may now be considering a more thorough purge. And it looks like the attorney general is all too happy to help.

In his testimony on Wednesday, Barr made quite a spectacle of himself. He lied about many things, of course. He denigrated special counsel Robert Mueller, clearly miffed that he had failed to clear the president of all wrongdoing, as Barr seems to believe he was required to do. You see, Barr has a strange theory that if you follow the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel policy that a president can’t be indicted then the next step is to conclude that a president can’t be investigated either. He said, “I think that if [Mueller] felt that he shouldn’t go down the path of making a traditional prosecutive decision, then he shouldn’t have investigated. That was the time to pull up.” In other words, any investigation must clear the president or not be undertaken at all.

We now know that Mueller was unhappy with Barr’s famous four-page letter supposedly summarizing the report’s “conclusions” and complained that his findings were being misinterpreted as a result. CNN reported yesterday that White House special counsel Emmet Flood complained to Barr about Mueller’s report the day after it was released, saying it was “political” and legally deficient. It would appear that the cold war between Robert Mueller and the White House has now turned hot.

This is not all that surprising considering the stakes. Mueller must have known that writing his report the way he wrote it would anger the president and his allies. The interregnum between Barr’s letter and the release of the actual report may have helped convince the Fox News crowd that Mueller’s conclusion was indeed “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Total Exoneration,” but Mueller knew that’s not what it said and that people would eventually figure it out. I doubt he anticipated, however, that his longtime friend Bill Barr would so eagerly take up arms against him. For the White House to call Mueller “political” in light of Barr’s behavior takes chutzpah.

In what was perhaps the most dramatic moment of Barr’s appearance before the Senate committee, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., asked Barr whether anyone in the White House had asked him to open an investigation of anyone. Clearly taken aback, Barr stuttered and stammered, asking her to repeat the question, obviously desperate to buy time to figure out an answer.

WATCH: @SenKamalaHarris: “Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?”

Attorney General William Barr: “I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest.’ … They have not asked me to open an investigation…” pic.twitter.com/Cq1LeQ42u9

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) May 1, 2019

They don’t have to ask. Trump has said publicly that he wants the “evil people” who investigated him to be investigated. He’s tweeted dozens of times that “Crooked Hillary” should be in jail. Fox News reported this just last week:

President Trump told Fox News’ “Hannity” in a wide-ranging interview Thursday night that Attorney General Bill Barr is handling the “incredible” and “big” new revelations that Ukrainian actors apparently leaked damaging information about then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

As the New York Times has reported, this is actually a right-wing hit job orchestrated by Rudy Giuliani and aimed at Joe Biden, whose son Hunter has been working with Ukrainians. This sort of thing is par for the course with Republicans, of course. (Recall the bogus Uranium One and Clinton Foundation stories, orchestrated by Steve Bannon, with which major newspapers smeared Clinton during the 2016 campaign.) But this time it may be different.

Lindsey Graham will undoubtedly take his investigation wherever Trump needs it to go. He will almost certainly “follow up” on this Ukrainian angle. What’s more concerning is the fact that Barr appears ready to put the Justice Department to work to help the Trump campaign, which is exactly what the right-wing fever swamp accuses the FBI of doing for Clinton.

But then, self-awareness isn’t exactly Barr’s strong suit. In what was perhaps his most fatuous comment of his testimony on Wednesday, he proclaimed, “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon” — this as he defended the man whose ecstatic followers’ favorite refrain is “Lock her up!”

.

Meanwhile, in your bowels …
by Tom Sullivan

The worst thing the sitting president’s new Roy Cohn did this week, Catherine Rampell believes, was neither dissembling in a Senate hearing room nor refusing to appear before a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Attorney General William Barr asked a federal appeals court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. In toto. For millions of Americans.

Why an administration dismissive of law would bother striking this one down is almost, but not quite a puzzle. Like Loki going to war with the Avengers in New York, Donald J. Trump, another man who would be king wants to be seen destroying it.

Rampell explains:

If the Trump administration prevails, everything in the law would be wiped out. And I do mean everything: the protections for people with preexisting conditions, Medicaid expansion, income-based individual-market subsidies, provisions allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, requirements that insurance cover minimum essential benefits such as prescriptions and preventive care, and so on.

The Party of Trump’s historic losses last November were a product of its enmity for Obamacare. But no matter. No matter that the proposed rationale for striking down the law is rejected by conservative and legal scholars opposed to Obamacare. No matter that Trump’s “party of health care” shows no flicker of interest in crafting a replacement. No matter that there seems no political advantage in destroying access to health care for millions. Such delicious revenge.

Meanwhile, half of Americans still receive health coverage though employer-based plans. The four in 10 people with those plans are in high-deductible policies that still make actually accessing care unaffordable, Rampell adds. Half of such households reported delaying getting care or filling prescriptions because of cost in the last 12 months. Obamacare expanded coverage but did too little to make it more affordable.

But it is something to build on:

For instance, the latest version of a plan known as the Medicare for America Act — introduced Wednesday by Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) — would create an expansive public insurance option to compete with the employer-sponsored system. The public option would cap premiums and out-of-pocket costs and have no deductibles. The bill would allow employer-sponsored plans to continue, as long as they covered a minimum average share of enrollees’ health expenses.

Inevitably, there are also refundable tax credit proposals that offer nothing to people who pay no taxes, have no savings, and live paycheck-to-minimum-wage-paycheck even if some manage to log enough hours weekly to receive an employer-based plan. Democrats have proposed those too.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a point in trying to keep her caucus focused on more than Trump’s autocratic fantasies. Trump wants to be seen destroying Obamacare. Yet, being seen after the fight is won is preferable to being seen fighting and losing. So long as Democrats wage public battle against his minions, they may not notice he has been mucking around in their bowels while they are distracted.

Republicans regularly amp up their base with the fiction that Democrats are coming for their guns. Democrats may want to take a lesson. Republicans really are coming for their health care. Democrats are working to save it.