Month: July 2019

What about those wacko GOP conspiracy-mongers?

by digby

Jonathan Bernstein spares a moment to acknowledge the apparent big winners in yesterday’s hearing:

Some things are so obvious that no one even bothers to mention them. So I want to be clear: House Republicans embarrassed themselves Wednesday at former special counsel Robert Mueller’s hearings.

There’s nothing wrong with politicians defending a president of the same party during a scandal. It’s their job, in fact, to point out where evidence is weak, conclusions assume too much, or stories have holes in them. Nor is it a problem when they try to place a scandal in context if (as is often the case) a media frenzy or overeager out-party has exaggerated the importance of some instance of wrongdoing. Many Republicans played that role during Watergate, and while they were burned by a president who couldn’t be trusted, historians have been relatively kind to them.

That’s not what happened Wednesday. Instead of reading carefully into the evidence and finding contradictions or loose ends, House Republicans largely busied themselves with conspiracy theories. It wasn’t Donald Trump and his campaign who welcomed and benefited from Russian interference in the 2016 election; it was Hillary Clinton! Never mind what U.S. intelligence agencies and Senate investigators have concluded. Never mind that this reality-denying line of inquiry left lawmakers defending Wikileaks and even, seemingly, the Russian agents indicted by Mueller.

For these Republicans, it’s still supposedly inexplicable that the FBI started investigating in the first place. In their stated conception of things, only partisanship and hatred of the president could explain such an otherwise odd decision to look into the rich web of shady contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians. And yet those partisan and hateful investigators didn’t leak anything about the probe when it would’ve put Trump’s election in jeopardy; didn’t indict or recommend impeachment of the president; and didn’t rush to testify to Congress about any of it.

Meanwhile, with the notable exception of Texas Representative Will Hurd, Republicans showed no interest at all in the national-security implications of Russia’s interference. And remember, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is still blocking bipartisan legislation to strengthen U.S. defenses against future attacks.

These are the same Republicans, after all, who spent years looking into conspiracy theories about the deaths of Americans in Benghazi in 2012 without ever attending to the real security vulnerabilities that contributed to them. It was far more important to feed the Republican marketplace with loony ideas about how President Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) actively welcomed the disaster than to figure out what had actually gone wrong or what to do about it.

A lot of people (myself included) have been critical of Democratic strategy in pursuing the Trump investigation, or critical of how Mueller acted. But let’s not forget that Republicans, too, have a choice, and in this case they’ve chosen to act irresponsibly. In doing so, they’re continuing to harm the republic.

Indeed:

After former special counsel Robert Mueller warned during congressional testimony of future election interference, Senate Republicans blocked 2 election security bills and a cybersecurity measure on Wednesday, The Hill reports.

Mueller testified earlier that “many more countries are developing capabilities to replicate” what the Russians did in 2016. “They are doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign,” he said. Per New York Magazine, there’s concern that if the law’s not updated, it could leave the U.S. open to further interference.

Democrats sought consent to pass 2 bills that would require campaigns to alert the FBI and Federal Election Commission about foreign offers of assistance and another on legislation that would let the Senate sergeant-at-arms offer voluntary cyber assistance for personal devices and accounts of senators and staff, The Hill notes.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) blocked all of the bills, without stating if she made the motion by herself or on behalf of her party, per New York Magazine.

What they’re saying: The magazine reports that Senate Intelligence Committee vice-chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) said as he condemned Sen. Hyde-Smith’s motion, “Mueller’s testimony should serve as a warning to every member of this body about what could happen in 2020, literally in our next elections.”

According to CNN, the GOP says that Congress has already responded to election security needs for the upcoming election. Republicans have warned of attempts to “federalize” elections, The Hill notes.

"Have we established a new normal from this past campaign [will] apply to future campaigns, aware that a hostile foreign power is influencing election, [have] no duty to report that to the FBI or other authorities?"
"I hope this is not the new normal. But I fear it is." pic.twitter.com/dbTK9rFLNH— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) July 24, 2019

Trump may be a barbaric ignoramus with a 40% approval rating but with no indictment, no impeachment and no fair elections he’s sitting pretty. MAGA.

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Who is the snottiest ass in the Trump White House? 

by digby

Hands down:

I am first and foremost who I will always be, which is a daughter, a mother. And, of course, I feel great empathy and compassion for folks who, as some of these headlines suggest, may be feeble or not understanding some of the questions — asking them to be repeated, clearly not conversant with the facts and with his own report.

That’s Kellyanne Conway, of course.

I feel sorry for her children and her parents. She’s an evil, evil bitch.

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QOTD: Brian Stelter

by digby

#bothsides
#oy

He made up for it in his newsletter:

Either you reject the lies, or you accept the lies.

Of all the divides in American life today, this is the divide I keep thinking about. President Trump and his allies lie with reckless abandon. They make dishonest politicians from the past look like amateurs. When they get called out, they lie about the lying. Trump did this on Wednesday after Robert Mueller contradicted several of the president’s fictions about the Mueller Report. When PBS “NewsHour” correspondent Yamiche Alcindor pointed this out to him, citing Mueller’s own words, Trump denied it and insulted Alcindor.

I’m often told that people are “numb” to Trump’s noise and nonsense. But let’s examine this for a minute:

Why is there not more outrage?

Some people, primarily fans of Trump, excuse or rationalize the lies for various reasons. Other people simply cannot. So much of the anti-Trump outrage from progressives and anti-Trump conservatives and columnists and pundits boils down to “He’s deceiving you. He’s lying to your face. Don’t you care?”

And the press is right smack dab in the middle of this because advocating for facts gets you labeled “fake news.” Which is, again, another lie.

Old-fashioned tenets of the news business fade away in this fog of disinformation. For example: “What the president says is news.” I still think that’s true, but when he’s telling you not to believe your own eyes and ears, is it really news?

Uhm, no, not without context.

Rationales for the lies

“Lying to the public used to hurt presidents,” Allen wrote. Well it HAS hurt Trump too — he’s never been able to crack 50% in reliable approval rating polls, and about two thirds of voters describe him as dishonest, which means even some of his supporters know that he’s deceitful, and they accept it.

What are the explanations and excuses for the Pinocchios? I’ve heard many:

— Some Trump supporters say he is speaking to a “larger truth,” even though he’s not getting the smaller facts right. Example: When he tells stories about illegal voting, he’s calling attention to a threat they perceive to be real and looking out for their votes.

— Other Trump supporters openly accept his personality flaws, and sometimes tepidly criticize his worst impulses, in exchange for long-sought-after policy achievements.

— Some backers also say “all politicians lie,” ignoring the fact that Trump’s lies are in a league of their own.

— They also excuse some of his deception as trolling, you know, “owning the libs.”

— And there are two powerful words that make it a lot easier to look the other way: “We’re winning.”

— Academics typically note that the conservative media machine doesn’t do a lot of fact-checking, preferring to promote even the president’s most unhinged statements.

— Influential members of the pro-Trump media dismiss fact-checking as liberal propaganda, further insulating the base.

— Hardcore members of “the resistance” like to say Trump fans are members of a cult.

(Yes, his following is very cultlike. In their eyes he literally can do no wrong. What else can you call it?)

“Motivated reasoning”

I asked political scientist and Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan about this. “We often struggle to tell why people believe stuff,” he told me candidly. “There’s a lot of research on ‘motivated reasoning’ including my work that finds people apply less scrutiny to information that affirms their priors and more scrutiny to information that contradicts them. Other theories are that people affirm things they know to be false at least to some extent to express their political feelings / affiliations or that doing so is a way to signal your loyalty to a leader.”

Thus, a profoundly important probe into a Russian attack on the U.S. election becomes a “hoax” because the leader says so…

Does the brain adapt?

I also called up Tali Sharot, the director of the Affective Brain Lab and the author of “The Influential Mind.” Along with several colleagues, she looked at how people adapt to lying over time. “When they lie, they have a negative emotional arousal in the mind,” she said, akin to self-punishment. But emotion “really adapts quite quickly.” The more people lie, the less they feel that emotional reaction.

Sharot wonders: As a person lies more egregiously, do the people around them adapt, too? “It kind of becomes a norm,” she suspects. When I brought up Trump, she said, “I think many people get used to the lying and they no longer see it as negative as they did a few years ago.”

Trumpworld even lies about the lies!

This exchange happened outside the W.H. on Tuesday:

Reporter: “The President said that he had been asked by Indian Prime Minister Modi to mediate between India and Pakistan. India says that is not even close to truth. Did the president just make that up, sir?”

Larry Kudlow: “No, the President doesn’t make anything up. That’s a very rude question, in my opinion. I am going to stay out of that. It is outside of my lane.”

The lying should be front and center

Reject the lies or accept the lies. That’s the divide. But there IS a third option: Report. Document all of the deception. That’s what journalists like Daniel Dale, now of CNN, do. He wrote about one of Trump’s falsehoods on Wednesday evening.

But Dale is still the exception. Most media outlets still aren’t putting the lying front and center most of the time. Many news outlets are still wary of using the word. And I get it — not everything is a lie — but many of the president’s tweets and quotes can fairly be described as misleading, manipulative or illogical even when not completely fact-free. A growing number of White House correspondents, broadcasters and columnists are forthright about that. But there’s still a reluctance in some newsrooms to tell that truth. (Look at the recent debate over whether to label his racist tweets racist.) The result: The bar is set far lower for Trump than for other political leaders.

I think the bar is set lower for Trump in every respect. He’s a narcissistic, ignoramus, pathological liar. And yet the consensus is that there’s nothing anyone can do about him. Everyone knows what he is but it’s just too risky to really take him on so … oh well.

The consensus from yesterday is that Mueller didn’t put on a Robert DeNiro-level performance in the hearings, so all the incriminating information in the reports is just going in the trash.

Never mind.

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Protectors of their own kind
by Tom Sullivan

Concern for security is core to the conservative/Republican brand. At least it was until Wednesday when former special counsel Robert Mueller testified before two House committees about his investigation into Russian hacking of the 2016 presidential election.

The “daddy party” is one of the colloquialisms defining the nation’s major conservative party. (As opposed to the “mommy party,” the Democrats.) Cognitive scientist George Lakoff famously detailed the parameters of the psychology underlying the world views defining both in “Moral Politics” (1996).

Republicans take a strict father’s view of the world, Lakoff explained. The strict father views the world as a dangerous place. He protects his children, disciplines them harshly, and teaches them self-reliance to instill the tools they need to survive a world with dangers around every corner. The strict father believes in a natural hierarchy with himself (naturally) at its apex.

Psychologists find the personality type may have roots in biology. A 2008 study found conservatives tend to possess a heightened startle response and to favor “defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War.” The more subjects exhibited a heightened response to threats, the more they advocated “policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.”

A more recent study found neural responses to repulsive images predicted with 95 percent accuracy whether a subject was liberal or conservative. “At a deep, symbolic level, some researchers speculate, disgust may be bound up with ideas about ‘them’ versus ‘us,’ about whom we instinctively trust and don’t trust,” wrote Kathleen McAuliffe in The Atlantic.

What does threat sensitivity have to do with Robert Mueller’s testimony Wednesday? Mueller’s investigation concluded that Russia criminally interfered with the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump win it. Trump’s campaign welcomed the help and likely committed crimes in doing so. Business Insider summarized:

• Former special counsel Robert Mueller warned that Russia and other nations are likely to attempt to interfere in the 2020 election as Russia did in 2016 in a Wednesday congressional hearing.
• Mueller’s team investigated Russian meddling in the 2016 election and identified two separate Russian efforts: hacking of the Democratic National Committee, and an elaborate online disinformation campaign
• Mueller agreed with Rep. Will Hurd that groups like the Russia’s Internet Research Agency “pose a significant threat to the United States,” and warned that there are “many more countries developing the capability to replicate what the Russians have done.”
• The former special counsel added: “It wasn’t a single attempt. They’re doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

And Republicans? Huggers of the flag, defenders of the border, champions of national defense, guardians all that is holy … jumpers at things that go bump in the night? They are blocking election security legislation in the U.S. Senate. Democrats attacked Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump Tuesday for sitting on their hands:

“The only people that are stopping these kinds of common-sense measures from becoming law of the land are … leader McConnell and President Trump,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, said during a Capitol Hill press conference.

While Republicans and Democrats alike have attempted to pass a variety of legislation to improve election security over the past two years in response to Russian interference, McConnell has repeatedly stood in the way of the bills and argued against the need for a greater federal role to protect voting.

“The alarm bells are going off, the lights are flashing and Mitch McConnell is blithely sleepwalking through it all,” said Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), chair of the House Democracy Reform Task Force. McConnell again blocked movement on the bill last night.

For the most part Wednesday, McConnell’s House colleagues ignored Mueller’s warnings, choosing instead to attack the messenger for calling into question the acting president’s election. They dismissed warnings of a foreign threat to the republic as a partisan effort to smear Donald Trump.

Trump is their protector, their strict father. They will dismiss his many failings to remain in his good graces and under the umbrella of what they perceive as protection. Some will kill for him.

Trump’s coziness with foreign autocrats and his party’s focus on cutting off the flow of migrants/refugees — children and families — across the Mexico border suggests something else. Members of the “daddy party” are not interested in defending the country or its ideals, but themselves and those they perceive as part of their in-group. Despite the red, white, and blue bunting, it is an in-group no longer defined by national borders, shared values or political ideology. They are bound together by fear. Fear of those not part of their in-group, be they brown, poor or not conservative.

Fear, like politics, creates strange bedfellows. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. So one must ask, does America’s conservative party now consider foreign adversaries hostile to the U.S. part of their in-group?

The OLC confessions

by digby

These were the important moments of the morning Judiciary Committee hearing:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller told Congress on Wednesday that he did not exonerate President Trump and that he could, in fact, be indicted after he leaves office.

In a curt exchange with Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck, the former special counsel said the Justice Department’s legal rules don’t shield Trump from criminal charges after he’s out of the White House.

“Could you charge the president with a crime after he left office?” Buck asked.

“Yes,” Mueller replied.

“You believe that he committed–you could charge the president of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office?” Buck asked.

“Yes,” Mueller replied.

Committee Democrats, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, nodded excitedly through the exchange—the closest Mueller came to explaining the significance of his refusal to exonerate the president in his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction by the White House. It followed a similar, shorter exchange earlier with the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler.

And this:

.@RepKenBuck: Was there sufficient evidence to convict president of Trump or anyone else of obstruction of justice?

MUELLER: We did not make that calculation.

BUCK: Why not?

M: Because of the OLC opinion that states the president can’t be charged with a crime. pic.twitter.com/EkOaj0EfGK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2019

And this:

LIEU (D-CA): The reason, again, that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of the OLC opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?

MUELLER: That is correct.

Politico:

Former special counsel Robert Mueller pushed back against President Donald Trump’s characterizations of his 22-month investigation, telling lawmakers on Wednesday that he did not evaluate “collusion” with the Russian government, and confirming that his report did not conclude that there was “no obstruction” of the probe. 

“The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed,” Mueller told the House Judiciary Committee, adding that Trump could theoretically be indicted after he leaves office.

Those conclusions are the basis for impeachment.

All the rest of the commentary is amateur theatre criticism.

Update:

Rep. Demings: "Lies by Trump campaign officials and administration officials impeded your investigation."

Mueller: "I would generally agree with that."https://t.co/m9KGQtGMJ7 pic.twitter.com/Q5FA8KJWjh— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 24, 2019

Nothing to see here…

by digby

TRUMP: "Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

(Article 2 does not in fact empower the president to do whatever they want.) pic.twitter.com/qIFP1AbHw6— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2019

He said that to a bunch of cheering teenagers wearing MAGA hats.

President Donald Trump was candid about the unlimited power he believes he has during a speech at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit on Tuesday.

After reasserting that investigations into Russia’s election meddling found “no collusion,” Trump claimed, “Then I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.”

“But, I don’t even talk about that,” he added, “because they did a report and there was no obstruction.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller, who led the nearly two-year long probe into Russian interference efforts, did not in fact absolve Trump of claims of “collusion,” as the term has no solid legal definition. Instead, Mueller sought to determine whether there had been criminal coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. In the end, the special counsel did not have sufficient evidence to prove such coordination occurred, but laid out the numerous ties between the two sides, as well as at least 10 instances of possible obstruction by Trump.

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Biden’s in a fight for the 2020 Democratic presidential
nomination — against himself

Trump has repeatedly downplayed Mueller’s findings, contained in his 400-plus page report made public in April, suggesting the report both exonerates him and is part of a partisan smear campaign.

Trump frequently references Article II of the Constitution, but his comments on Tuesday were some of his boldest yet.

Aaron Rupar
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Trump’s blatant lies about tariffs get a big round of applause from his Turning Point USA audience

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Aaron Rupar
✔
@atrupar
TRUMP: “Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

(Article 2 does not in fact empower the president to do whatever they want.)

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In recent months, the president has ramped up his rhetoric on the topic, signaling both his misunderstanding of the executive powers outlined in the Constitution as well as his intent to abuse them. Tuesday’s remarks were just the latest example.

Last month, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, the president defended his right to fire Robert Mueller if he wanted to. “Article II allows me to do whatever I want,” he explained. “Article II would have allowed me to fire him.”

Just two weeks ago, when speaking to reporters, Trump reiterated that there was “no obstruction,” insisting falsely that an investigation cannot be obstructed if it turns out there was “no crime” committed.

“Also, take a look at one other thing,” he said. “It’s a thing called Article II. Nobody ever mentions Article II. It gives me all of these rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We don’t even talk about Article II.”

Article II has not changed while Trump has been president. The suggestion that it gives him new “rights” that are different from the constraints placed on past presidents has no merit. But it does appear to be an indication that he intends to exercise more power than past presidents, perhaps undeterred by the other two branches that might try to check and balance that power.

All things considered, Article II is not very substantial. The first section merely outlines how the president is elected and compensated. The second section enumerates some of the president’s basic powers, such as serving as Commander in Chief, granting reprieves and pardons, making treaties, appointing ambassadors and judges, and filling vacancies when Congress is in recess. Section 3 adds that the president will provide to Congress the State of the Union, that they can convene the House and Senate “on extraordinary Occasions,” and that he shall execute the laws and commission officers.

The last section briefly adds that the president can be impeached.

That’s it. There’s not much there, certainly nothing that substantiates firing people or obstructing justice as he claims, let alone allowing Trump to do whatever he wants.

The rest of Trump’s speech Tuesday was chock full of extremism. He reiterated his attacks on several congresswomen of color and lied about voter fraud to claim that the elections in California and other states were “rigged” thanks to undocumented immigrants.

The president also threatened to act against Democrats because they somehow haven’t treated Republicans “fairly,” and enjoyed a laugh when someone suggested he’d be “President for life!”

“That’s what they’re afraid of, you know,” he said.

I think most people assume he’s just trolling. But honestly, he’s so dumb I think he actually believes Article II gives him dictatorial powers. So who knows?

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To McFly or not to McFly?
by Tom Sullivan

Robert Mueller finally appears on Capitol Hill this morning to answer questions about is report on Russia and Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice. No one should expect a Democratic impeachment inquiry out of it. Brian Beutler writes at Crooked Media, “Naturally, conflict-averse moderates want no part of such a confrontation, and so Democratic leaders have done everything in their power to stave it off.”

Pundits regularly chalk up the divide in the Democratic Party to an ideological split between progressives and moderates. Alternatively, between an activist wing and a “corporate” one institutionalized to Washington and lobbyist money. Referencing some tweets by Matt Stoller, I described it as a cultural difference between those with enough tenure to have become conflict averse after years of abuse by more aggressive Republicans (and conservative media) and those new enough not to have absorbed the lesson of going along to get along. But that makes it also a generational divide, as Ryan Grim described, between Democrats with a kind of Vietnam syndrome left over from the 1980s and those born later who never contracted it.

Beutler adds to the anthropological study his observation that progressives itch for a fight while more “don’t make Daddy angry” Democrats see ruffling as few feathers as possible as the more reliable path to retaining power:

But because Democratic candidates in battleground districts campaigned almost exclusively on inoffensive kitchen-table issues like protecting people with pre-existing medical conditions, the lesson the party took from the midterms is that correlation equals causation—that the only way to beat Trump in Republican precincts is to be as milquetoast as possible, and to take no position on any of Trump’s outrages apart from his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Perilous times demand taking risks. Timorous Democrats invite disaster. From December 2016 post:

After confiding my concerns about Democrats playing it safe in the age of Trump, my friend summed up the situation in a single, powerful metaphor: “The Ring has to go to Mordor. It won’t help to carry it back to The Shire.”

Jamelle Bouie responds to Beutler via Twitter:

it is incredible, and very on-brand, that the democratic lesson from 2018 was not that the public was energized against the president and wanted to cast a vote against him, but that if you hide in your shell and say health care every other sentence, you won’t get hurt too badly.— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 23, 2019

Beutler asks, “Should Democrats be afraid or proud of fighting as hard as they can to help as many people as possible? They have spent their first six months in power testing the theory that they can do the most good from a defensive crouch, and it’s gotten them nowhere”

Jeepers, I don’t know. Which George McFly do you pump your fist for?

Trump’s fans and enemies

by digby

The new NPR-Marist poll:

And then there are the conservative evangelicals:

I confess that I’m a little surprised by the age breakdown. He is getting his highest approvals from Gen-X, not the boomers or the silents.

And do note that women really hate his guts, across the board. Even only 51% of non-college educated white women like him now.

His support seems to be mostly from white, male, Gen-X, evangelicals.

What a weird coalition.

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The political gameplan

by digby

Let’s hope the showboating congresspeople are listening to their staff:

Knowing that the public itself is likely anticipating a Mueller bombshell, advisers working for the committees have tried to dampen down expectations that one will be delivered, telling lawmakers over the last several weeks that Mueller is unlikely to engage in questioning that touches on subjects outside the scope of the report. Each Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee has been through one-on-one sessions with committee staff, Lieu told The Daily Beast. The sessions are designed to keep the party on script so that they can spotlight five specific instances of possible obstruction of justice laid out in Mueller’s report.

On Tuesday, Judiciary Democrats are set to stage a mock Mueller hearing behind closed doors to further solidify that game plan. A request for comment as to who was playing the role of Mueller was not returned.

“I think this is an opportunity,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), a Judiciary Committee member, told The Daily Beast, “and we want to do it in a very organized way so that the story, the narrative, of a president who attempted repeatedly to undermine, stop, prevent the investigation from continuing and committed acts of obstruction of justice, that the American people at the end of the hearing have a full understanding of the very serious findings of the special counsel.”

“I think this is an opportunity, and we want to do it in a very organized way so that the story, the narrative, of a president who attempted repeatedly to undermine, stop, prevent the investigation from continuing and committed acts of obstruction of justice, that the American people at the end of the hearing have a full understanding of the very serious findings of the special counsel.”

Democratic aides, meanwhile, say they’ve been working with lawyers to study Mueller’s testimony style. He doesn’t speak in long sentences, those aides said, and he rarely expands on his answers. One Democrat put it this way when asked about preparation: “Questioning Mueller is a science. And unless you know your subject, and all the intricacies of how it works, you’re not going to ace the test.”

Acing that test, the theory goes, might spark the public to put more pressure on Democratic lawmakers to open an impeachment inquiry into Trump. The timing, at least, lines up well. Just two days after Mueller’s hearing, House members will return home for the five-week August recess, which usually means lots of constituent meetings and town halls. If members get an earful in their districts, said Cicilline, it “may encourage some people to come back and support the notion of beginning an impeachment inquiry.”

Currently, 90 House Democrats—almost 40 percent of the conference—openly back an impeachment inquiry. It’s widely expected on Capitol Hill that Mueller’s testimony will push a number of lawmakers off the fence and swell the ranks of the pro-impeachment caucus.

If they do this right, it could be a game changer.

But let’s not forget about the Republicans who are going to do everything they can to turn this into an epic shitshow.

*By the way, Lindsey Graham is going to hold his own hearings into the George Papadapoulos FISA scandal. Never say they don’t care about oversight.

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Only the very best people

by digby

Lick his boots eagerly enough and you too could be consulted (and perhaps put in charge of)  the globe’s most powerful intelligence agencies:

President Donald Trump recently spoke to top House Intelligence Republican Devin Nunes about replacements for the country’s intelligence chief — the latest sign that Dan Coats’ tenure may be short-lived.

Nunes, who grabbed national attention with his controversial allegations of Obama administration surveillance abuses, met with Trump and other senior White House officials last week to discuss who could take over for Coats at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, according to three people familiar with the get-together.

Coats has run ODNI since early in the Trump administration, but his job security is the subject of constant speculation, especially after he gave public testimony on North Korea, Iran and Syria that diverged from Trump’s prior comments on the issues. The ODNI chief oversees the government’s intelligence agencies, coordinates the country’s global information-gathering operation and frequently briefs the president on threats each morning.

The meeting between Trump and Nunes has only fueled more chatter about Coats’ departure. The pace of Trump’s discussions with allies about potential replacements has ramped up in recent weeks, the people said.

Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who served as national security adviser John Bolton’s chief of staff, has been discussed as a possible ODNI replacement. Fleitz left his White House post in October 2018 to serve as president and CEO of the Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank that has been sharply critical of “radical Islam.”

This is supposed to be a non-partisan job. Oh well.

Why not? He put Jared in charge of middle east peace. Ivanka is acting as his top diplomat at meetings with world leaders.

I think Diamond and Silk would be an excellent UN Ambassador tag team, don’t you?

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