Month: September 2019

Some smart Wall Streeters don’t want to kill the Golden Goose

by digby

They see the value in letting everyone share in the eggs:

Jhoana Ocampo has worked in finance for 14 years. There, she is surrounded by people who fret about what could happen to their industry should Elizabeth Warren win the presidency and implement the tough regulatory policies that are so closely associated with her candidacy. And yet, Ocampo has given $400 to the Massachusetts Democrat and plans to max out to her presidential campaign, saying that Warren’s policies resonate with her more than most.

“I’m just a firm believer that we all prosper when the middle class prospers,” Ocampo, who didn’t want her employer to be named and stressed she doesn’t speak on their behalf, told The Daily Beast. “Some people just don’t have the time; frankly they might not even care to really understand what she’s talking about. It could be perceived as being extreme until you look at what the plans really say. I might work in the financial services industry but I don’t have too many friends who have $50 million in the bank.”

Ocampo has also gone to fundraisers for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. But in Warren, she said, she saw something critically different. She’s “a very consistent advocate for the middle class,” she explained. “It was very important to me as I see that disappearing.”

Ocampo is part of what is so far a tiny, tiny minority of Warren donors in the financial industry. The senator, who has built a career warning about and legislating against the excesses of financial institutions—including crafting a consumer financial protection bureau to carry on that very mission—has reported receiving donations from only about 30 employees at the world’s top 20 investment banks.

It is a small crew composed of everyone from IT workers to risk managers at small firms and larger outfits. It’s also one that isn’t quite yet comfortable trumpeting its politics. Ocampo, for starters, would only talk on the condition that her place of employment not be listed. Others declined to be named at all or declined to comment given their public-facing roles in various financial institutions.
[…]
One contributor, who shared information on the condition of anonymity, had worked in the financial industry for 20 years and had given to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in his first campaign for the presidency in 2015. This time though, he has given $500 to Warren, motivated by one major reason.

“She came out first of anybody for impeachment. I think that was the number one thing,” this individual said referring to Warren’s push for the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings after reading Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

At the heart of Warren’s appeal among this small sect of finance industry types is a larger disgust with the current White House occupant. Many Wall Street denizens continue to support President Trump, who has slashed taxes and regulations in ways that have been highly favorable to their industry. But he is not entirely beloved. The aforementioned donor said that politics comes up often at work because of “orange Jesus,” a reference to President Trump.

“You cannot escape it because there’s so much shit in the news on a daily basis that it has to come up at least once a day,” this donor said. Though the donor had given to Warren, he said he would be supportive of any Democratic nominee and surmised that former Vice President Joe Biden would not end up winning the nomination, despite his early lead in the polls. No one else with whom this person directly works has openly supported another Democratic candidate so far but the donor joked that he was waiting to get turned into human resources for the amount of time Trump comes up with some coworkers who back the president.

These people are in the minority to be sure. But they are the smart ones. The “let them eat cake” attitude of Wall Street, the selfish, short-term thinking and total lack of big-picture understanding of our society and culture shows them to be fools, just as they were back in 2008 when their world came crashing down. They should be backing Warren’s reforms. It’s in their interest to redistribute wealth to make a stable society.

Our society is anything but stable and it’s getting worse every day. Backing this grotesquely divisive imbecile is a terrible mistake. They will not escape the ramifications of that any more than the rest of us will.

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QOTD: Pompeo

“Foreign corruption inducing treason was the core impeachable offense in the eyes of the authors of the Constitution”

by digby

This bit of history relayed by David Frum is unfortunately very relevant today:

On the 20th of July 1787, Gouverneur Morris rose inside the stiflingly hot Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, to explain why he had changed his mind and now favored including a power of impeachment in the constitutional text.

Until that point, he and others had feared that an impeachment power would leave the president too dependent on Congress. He had thought that the prospect of reelection defeat would offer a sufficient control on presidential wrongdoing.

But the arguments of other delegates had convinced him—and particularly an example from then-recent British history. A century earlier, Great Britain had been ruled by a king named Charles II. King Charles was the son of Charles I, the king whose head was cut off during the English Civil War. Restored to the throne, Charles II learned to tiptoe carefully around his dangerous subjects. But there was a problem: Charles wanted more money than Parliament willingly offered him. His solution? He reached out to an old friend and patron: the king of France, Louis XIV.

Louis had sheltered Charles during exile. He knew that Charles had converted to Catholicism—a secret that could have cost Charles his throne and possibly his life if his own people had known it. Louis had no parliament of his own to worry about. He paid Charles an annual subsidy to cover Charles’s fiscal shortfall. In return, he asked Charles to hand over a British base on French soil—and to stay neutral in the war Louis was about to launch against the Protestant Netherlands.

These treasons would emerge into daylight after the overthrow of Charles’s brother and the Stuart dynasty in 1688. For the men of 1787, these events of the century before their own felt as vivid and central as the civil-rights era of the mid-20th century seems to us nearing the middle of the 21st.

So Gouverneur Morris said, according to notes taken by James Madison:

He was now sensible of the necessity of impeachments, if the Executive was to continue for any time in office. Our Executive was not like a Magistrate having a life interest, much less like one having an hereditary interest in his office. He may be bribed by a greater interest to betray his trust; and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay without being able to guard agst it by displacing him. One would think the King of England well secured agst bribery. He has as it were a fee simple in the whole Kingdom. Yet Charles II was bribed by Louis XIV. The Executive ought therefore to be impeachable for treachery; Corrupting his electors, and incapacity were other causes of impeachment. For the latter he should be punished not as a man, but as an officer, and punished only by degradation from his office. This Magistrate is not the King but the prime-Minister. The people are the King. When we make him amenable to Justice however we should take care to provide some mode that will not make him dependent on the Legislature.

Foreign corruption inducing treason was the core impeachable offense in the eyes of the authors of the Constitution.

Which is why a whistle-blower report filed with the inspector general for the intelligence community, reportedly concerning an improper “promise” by President Donald Trump to a foreign leader, has jolted Congress.

Earlier in the constitutional debates—back when he still opposed an impeachment provision—Morris argued that a corrupt or treasonable president “can do no criminal act without Coadjutors who may be punished.” Trump is surrounded by coadjutors, yet so far all are acting with impunity, joined now by the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who is withholding from Congress the apparently explosive information.

Trump has been engaged in improper contacts with foreign governments for years, and built deep business relationships with foreign nationals. Russian assistance helped elect him. Money from wealthy Russians reportedly helped keep his businesses alive from 2006 to 2016. Since 2016, more and more foreign money has flowed Trump’s way. Trump literally has a hotel open on Pennsylvania Avenue to accept payments—there’s a big carpet in front, his name on the door, nothing even remotely clandestine about the flow of corruption. That corruption seeks returns. Again and again, Trump has acted in ways that align with the interests of foreign states, raising questions about his motives.

Exactly what was promised in this particular conversation, and to whom, America and the world wait to hear. Perhaps there exists a reasonable explanation for a conversation that the Trump administration is trying hard to keep from public view. But the basic grammar of all Trump scandals has been visible from the beginning: many secrets, no mysteries.

Trump finally tweeted about this asking if anyone thinks he’s dumb enough to speak inappropriately on the phone to foreign leaders. The question answers itself. And it is possible that whever it was that Trump promised was something he thought was totaly appropriate — like giving out the names of spies in Russia, for instance. I could easily see it. He thought Putin’s idea to create a joint cyber-security force was terrific.

He’s a dotard. So it’s thoroughly possible that he’s just too dumb to know that he was selling out the country. There is no dotard exception to the impeachment clause. Indeed, it may be more important to get rid of someone that stupid.

And yes, it’s equally possible that this was some kind of corrupt promise to a foreign leader. He is a criminal, after all.

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Trump IS a wartime president. Guess who the enemy is.

by digby

Ron Brownstein breaks down this fight between Trump and California over emissions rules. It’s going to court and who knows who will win? Republicans have been trying to hobble California for a long time because its economic clout is such that if it makes rules companies often adopt them for the whole country because it doesn’t make financial sense to do otherwise. But Trump’s visit to California this time has been even more horrific than usual. He’s basically saying we’re dirty filthy disgusting people and he’s going to clean things up by suing San Franciso for environmental crimes — even as he’s blocking environmental rules. (He’s been threatening to do this for some time.)

President Trump said late Wednesday that his administration would issue a notice of environmental violation against the city of San Francisco because of what he described as its homelessness problem. 

Traveling aboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington from a three-day trip to California and New Mexico, Mr. Trump told reporters that San Francisco was in “total violation” of environmental rules because of used needles that were ending up in the ocean. 

“They’re in total violation — we’re going to be giving them a notice very soon,” the president said, indicating that the city could be put on notice by the Environmental Protection Agency within a week that its homelessness problem was causing environmental damage. 

He said tremendous pollution was flowing into the ocean because of waste in storm sewers, and he specifically cited used needles. 

“They’re in serious violation,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “They have to clean it up. We can’t have our cities going to hell.” 

San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, called Mr. Trump’s comments “ridiculous.” 

“To be clear, San Francisco has a combined sewer system, one of the best and most effective in the country, that ensures that all debris that flow into storm drains are filtered out at the city’s wastewater treatment plants,” Ms. Breed said in a statement Wednesday night. “No debris flow out into the bay or the ocean.”

No, he doesn’t make any sense. And the fact that he’s doing this nonsense in the face of the climate crisis is outrageous.

But this is really just part of his American Carnage Reboot for 2020. As Brownstein writes:

However the courts resolve this fight, it’s clear that the latest confrontation between Trump and California is just one salvo in the widening conflict between Democratic states and the administration. As president, Trump has pursued a distinctive strategy toward deep-blue states: Rather than trying to persuade them, he’s been more likely to flog them as a symbol of failed policies that he uses to mobilize his base. In many respects, he’s governed as a wartime president, with blue states, rather than any foreign nation, as the enemy. And what’s clear is that Trump’s administration is growing more skilled at finding new ways to launch offensives against the states that he views as his adversaries.

“Now they have figured out, in effect, the dials of the combination lock to try to do some of this, in ways that are breathtaking and have enormous implications for the future,” said Kettl, the author of the forthcoming book The Divided States of America. “If you start looking at the implications of the Affordable Care Act regulations, Medicaid regulations—you have your hands on the jugular of state budgets. There are things about unemployment insurance and food stamps, there is much you can do with highway and bridges … There is an enormous universe of things that really, really matter to state and local governments in terms of their budgets.”

By sending out an early-morning tweet, Trump may have wanted to personally claim credit for confronting California over fuel economy. But more and more, the war between blue states and the administration may be fought far from the headlines, Kettl told me. Trump’s team, he said, has learned that by taking control of relatively obscure budgetary and regulatory decisions that don’t usually reach the front pages, “you can grab them by the throat and inflict real pain without it ever having to reach the level of a presidential tweet.”

It’s sad that the constitution didn’t anticipate a president and his henchmen abusing power like this.

Oh well.

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What did he promise and to whom?

by digby

We’ve been talking about this high-level Intelligence Community whistleblower over the past couple of days and last night the Washington Post added some detail. Josh Marshall did a nice rundown of where this whole thing is at the moment:

For days we’ve been hearing about the standoff between Chairman Adam Schiff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence over a whistleblower complaint. Josh Kovensky walked us through some of the details this afternoon. Now The Washington Post has escalated the story dramatically by reporting that the complaint is about President Trump himself and centers on a “promise” he made to a foreign leader. The complaint was filed on August 12th. So this is all quite recent.

There’s a lot of discussion and context in the Post article. But that’s the central reported detail. It’s not clear who the foreign leader was or what was promised or really anything else. The additional key detail is this: the complaint from the unidentified whistleblower was submitted to Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson. He determined that the complaint was credible and troubling enough to be a matter of “urgent concern”, a legal standard that requires reporting the matter to Congress.

Obviously, anyone in the government can file a whistleblower complaint. They can be frivolous or nonsensical. But the Inspector General determined it was serious and of a pressing nature. Atkinson was nominated to the position by President Trump in 2018 but he appears to be a career government lawyer. He worked at DOJ for 15 years prior to his nomination.

The decision to withhold the information from Congress was made by acting DNI Joseph Maguire, who’s in that position after the dismissal of Dan Coats. But the Post suggests that it’s not actually Maguire’s choice. The Department of Justice told him to withhold the information from Congress.

Here is the key passage from the Post …

Defenders of Maguire disputed that he is subverting legal requirements to protect Trump, saying that he is trapped in a legitimate legal predicament and that he has made his displeasure clear to officials at the Justice Department and White House. 

After fielding the complaint on Aug. 12, Atkinson submitted it to Maguire two weeks later. By law, Maguire is required to transmit such complaints to Congress within seven days. But in this case, he refrained from doing so after turning for legal guidance to officials at the Justice Department. 

In a sign of Atkinson’s discomfort with this situation, the inspector general informed the House and Senate intelligence committees of the existence of the whistleblower complaint — without revealing its substance — in early September.

So it appears that in the guise of legal guidance the DOJ instructed Maguire not to share the complaint with Congress. Atkinson took matters into his own hands, informing Congress of the existence of a complaint while not sharing its substance, in deference to the DOJ’s legal guidance.

Bill Barr runs the Justice Department. He protects Donald Trump. Period. So the DOJ’s role here is little mystery. It is worth noting here that this is a case in which there are legitimate constitutional issues. When it comes to classified information, the whole system is a bureaucratic system to operationalize judgments which are nominally the President’s. That’s why the President can actually declassify information by the very act of sharing them. It was his decision to make them secrets in the first place. He’s just changing his mind. Those who believe in maximal presidential power think the President’s authority is basically unconstrained dealing with foreign leaders. Bill Barr is one of those people. And he also wants to protect Trump from the rule of law. So Barr’s jurisprudence and personal corruption point in the same direction.

One final point. The Post article is sourced to “two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.” That’s odd. This only happened about a month ago. Former officials shouldn’t really know anything about this unless somehow they were in the loop and retired like last week or something. That’s not totally implausible as people seem to be being pushed out of the ODNI in the wake of Coats’ departure. But it sounds (and this is just speculation based on news experience) that this information is being pushed out into the public realm using ex-officials as intermediaries. In other words, people on the inside think something is wrong and they’re using go-betweens with high-level clearances to get the information public. Again, this last point is speculation. But I think it’s a logical surmise.

This all sounds logical to me. Of course, this could add up to nothing. But the machinations we can see do not lead to that conclusion.

Various online sleuths have pointed out this odd interaction from last summer which may, or may not, be the conversation in question:

Apropos of nothing, this July 31 Trump-Putin phone call, which Trump initiated ostensibly to offer assistance for wildfires in Siberia, has never made sense to me. Also, California was burning at the time, and Trump barely lifted a finger. https://t.co/tuGU1jDia7

— Ned Price (@nedprice) September 19, 2019

One final datapoint: @RepAdamSchiff stated publicly that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was very pointedly NOT able to say the matter wasn’t an issue under investigation by the House Intel Committee. Trump-Russia is very much an issue of active inquiry.

— Ned Price (@nedprice) September 19, 2019

Maybe this is nothing. But the facts we know so far certainly are suspicious. Very suspicious.

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“He got away with it until he didn’t.”
by Tom Sullivan

After hours wasted giving speech-questions Corey Lewandowski threw back in their faces Tuesday, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee finally brought in a pro. Barry H. Berke, a private attorney working for Democrats, systematically penetrated Lewandowski’s smug-thug armor. In the end, Berke got the former Donald Trump campaign manager to admit he lies to the press and, by extension, to America news consumers. “I have no obligation to be honest to the media,” Lewandowski said, prompting gasps from observers in the hearing room.

It wasn’t the comeuppance one might have wished for, but might be enough to render stillborn Lewandowski’s New Hampshire Senate run. Imagine the billboards, radio spots, and television ads.

Seeing Lewandowski’s former boss brought low will require tactics more unorthodox than Berke’s. Minds more clever and/or ruthless than mine might be required. Trump, after all, was tutored by Roy Kohn in the fine art of inflicting pain and getting even. He’s demonstrated a complete disdain for proper procedure, norms of governance, and the rule of law. “Getting away with it” is how Trump has lived his whole life.

But even Roy Cohn finally crashed and burned. Michael Kruse discusses that in the context of a Cohn documentary from producer-director Matt Tyrnauer:

It’s the past quarter or so, though, of Tyrnauer’s film that is perhaps most salient at this stage of Trump’s first term. It deals with the less discussed but arguably much more trenchant lesson of Cohn’s life—not his decades of dark-arts untouchability but his brutal comeuppance. Cohn did not, in the end, elude the consequences of his actions. He could not, it turned out, get away with everything forever. He was a braggart of a tax cheat, and the Internal Revenue Service closed in; he was an incorrigibly unethical attorney, and he finally was disbarred; and only six weeks after that professional disgrace, six months shy of 60 years old, Cohn was dead of AIDS.

Now, less than 14 months out from next year’s election, with Trump facing historic legal and political peril, it’s getting harder and harder not to wonder what he might or might not have gleaned from watching Cohn’s wretched unraveling. Trump is beset by 29 federal, state, local and congressional investigations. Poll after poll shows he’s broadly disliked. He could win reelection, obviously, but it’s true, too, that he’s an unusually endangered incumbent. Trump, to be sure, is not weakened by physical sickness, and he has not been pursued by prosecutors and other committed antagonists for nearly as long as Cohn was. And as powerful as Cohn was perceived to be at his peak, he was never, it almost goes without saying, the most powerful man in the world. Even so, the question looms: Will Cohn’s most accomplished and attentive mentee ultimately suffer a similar fate?

The fate of the republic may depend on it.

“He got away with it,” Tyrnauer said of Cohn, “until he didn’t.”

The acting president learned well from Roy Cohn who was, attorney Arthur Liman wrote, “famous among lawyers for winning cases by delays, evasions, and lies.” That has a familiar ring to it. Trump picked up a few things. Democrats might want to take their cues instead from James T. Kirk.

Update: As I was just saying. Trump sues Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance over attempt to get tax returns

This one’s for the OG bloggers …

by digby

I don’t know if anyone else will enjoy this but I’m sure the likes of Atrios, Kos, Aravosis, Amato, Madrak etc, will take some pride in it:

John Lott, the NRA's favorite pro-gun "researcher," just got confronted in a congressional hearing for using a fake online persona, "Mary Rosh", to praise his own work. Lott threw his family under the bus, then had a meltdown as he ran out of time to speak. pic.twitter.com/hz4KNV7y2x— Timothy Johnson (@timothywjohnson) September 18, 2019

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So boys can have their toys

Just watch it:

This is just the saddest — and infuriating — thing. What the hell is wrong with this country?

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More power grab

by digby

They will literally stop at nothing:

The Trump administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to give the president more control over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that regulates mortgages and credit cards.

Asking the court to take up a pending appeal, administration lawyers said the Constitution requires that the president be allowed to fire the agency’s director for any reason. The 2010 law that set up the CFPB says the director can be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The administration’s position increases the chances the court will take up the issue in the nine-month term that starts in October. A ruling would come by June, only months before the 2020 presidential election.

The filing was a response to an appeal filed by a Seila Law, a California law firm being investigated by the CFPB over its sales pitches to indebted consumers. The firm is trying to derail the investigation by arguing that the CFPB was set up in violation of the constitutional separation of powers.

In a brief filed Tuesday, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco agreed with the law firm that the CFPB’s structure is unconstitutional. But Francisco said the court should leave the bureau intact, and his brief left open the possibility that the CFPB could continue to press the investigation.

Francisco said the constitutional issue “has broad implications for the president’s ability to supervise the executive branch.“

This power grab is a huge problem whether Trump wins or loses in 2020.

And not incidentally, this was Elizabeth Warren’s baby. This is another case of the Department of Justice putting its thumb on the scale for Donald Trump.

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An Act of War?

by digby

Oh my:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Iran on Wednesday of having carried out an “act of war” with aerial strikes on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia last weekend, and he said the United States was working to build a coalition to deter further attacks.

Mr. Pompeo’s words were the strongest so far from any American official regarding the attack on Saturday in Saudi Arabia, which severely impaired production at the leading oil exporter and raised fears that tensions between Iran and the United States could escalate into a new war.

Despite Mr. Pompeo’s statement, President Trump pushed back against another American military entanglement in the Middle East, speaking only of unspecified new sanctions on Iran.

Asked about a possible American attack on Iran, Mr. Trump told reporters in Los Angeles: “There are many options. There’s the ultimate option and there are options a lot less than that.”

In Saudi Arabia, military officials displayed what they described as physical evidence that Iran had been responsible for the attack, but did not specify how they intended to respond or what they expected from their American allies.

The Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been fighting a Saudi-led coalition for more than four years, have said they were responsible for the attack. Iran, a strong ally of the Houthis, has denied any responsibility. American and Saudi officials have said the Houthis had neither the sophistication nor the weapons to have carried it out.

“This was an Iranian attack,” Mr. Pompeo said. “We were blessed there were no Americans killed in this attack, but anytime you have an act of war of this nature, there’s always a risk that could happen.”

Nobody knows what he’s really talking about. He says he’s in a “very powerful position” whatever that means.

But this is the heart of the problem. The chickens are coming home to roost. Having a pathological liar and incompetent boob for a president has a price.

For a president with a loose relationship with the facts and poisonous relationships with allies, the attack on the Saudi oil fields poses a challenge: how to prove the administration’s case that Iran was behind the strike and rally the world to respond.

President Trump must now confront that problem as he struggles with one of the most critical national security decisions of his presidency. Over the next few days or weeks, he will almost certainly face the reality that much of the world — angry at his tweets, tirades, untruths and accusations — could be disinclined to believe the arguments advanced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others that Iran bears responsibility for the attack.

If Mr. Trump tries to gather a coalition to impose diplomatic penalties, tighten sanctions to further choke off Iranian oil exports or retaliate with a military or cyberstrike, he may discover that, like President George W. Bush heading into Iraq 16 years ago, he is largely alone.

Already, intelligence officials are hinting, in background conversations, that the evidence implicating Iran is just too delicate to make public. One theory gaining support among American officials is that the cruise missile and drone attack was launched from southwest Iran or in the waters nearby.

But the evidence gathered so far, one official said, “isn’t a slam-dunk,” deliberately using the phrase that George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director in 2003, came to regret when he employed it to argue, incorrectly it turned out, that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction.

After the bitter Iraq experience, it would be hard for any American president to persuade the country and its allies to take his word that it is time to risk another war in the Middle East, barring incontrovertible evidence that could be made public. For Mr. Trump, it could be an especially tough sell.

“Painfully, the word of the president will be suspect,” Wendy R. Sherman, who negotiated the details of the Iran deal for the Obama administration, said on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump’s “hyperbole and outright fabrications through a daily tweet diet,” she said, has left him with “little credibility with Congress, allies and partners, let alone the American people.”

“All will be challenged to accept a Trump assessment of what occurred in the attack on Saudi oil facilities,” she added.
[…]
Even if American and other experts who are now in Saudi Arabia to conduct a forensic study conclude that Iran built the drones or cruise missiles, they may have a hard time establishing — especially for the public — where the weapons were launched from, or who shot them toward the Saudi oil fields.

“A military response on the sovereign territory of Iran is a very serious matter,” Mr. Tillerson cautioned. “And not one that anyone should take with less than fully conclusive information.”

Pentagon officials appear to agree. That is why the options now being discussed include alternatives like retaliating against Iranian facilities outside of Iranian territory and conducting cyberstrikes. If the latter option were chosen, it would be akin to the cyberoperations that blew up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges a decade ago and the move to wipe out military databases several months ago, after the shooting down of an American drone by Iran.

The Saudis seem to sense the credibility problem.

Even they have not yet publicly followed Mr. Pompeo in accusing Iran of responsibility. In a statement on Monday, the Saudi government urged an international investigation, led by the United Nations, to determine responsibility.

That move, unusual for a country that disdains the United Nations almost as much as the Trump administration does, seemed an acknowledgment that the world would not take Mr. Trump’s word, nor that of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Over the past year, the crown prince has encountered credibility problems of his own. He has repeatedly denied that he sent or had knowledge of the Saudi team that killed the Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. The evidence suggests otherwise.

For Mr. Trump, the suspicions about any American assessment of responsibility will be colored by another problem: European officials blame him, as much as the Iranians, for creating the circumstances that led to the attack.

In their telling, it was Mr. Trump’s decision, soon after he fired Mr. Tillerson, to abandon the 2015 nuclear deal that set in motion the events that culminated in the crippling of the two Saudi oil fields.

For the past 18 months, Mr. Trump has been steadily reimposing sanctions on Iran. At first, the Iranians largely ignored those steps and remained part of the four-year-old agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear ability in return for lifting most sanctions on the country.

But as the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign took its toll, Iranian officials began breaking out of the accord’s limits — arguing they would not be bound by an agreement Mr. Trump had abandoned — and seizing oil tankers.

The European argument is that Mr. Trump has unnecessarily provoked the Iranians. That is why France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is leading an effort to undermine the American sanctions by issuing a $15 billion line of credit to Iran, in hopes of getting them back in compliance with the deal to which France was a partner.
[…]
The next few days will be critical. Michael J. Morell, the former deputy director of the C.I.A., who briefed Mr. Bush on Sept. 11, 2001, said Mr. Trump will face a difficult trade-off.

After he gets the intelligence agency’s “best assessment on who was behind the attack,” Mr. Morell said, Mr. Trump “must then balance the need to protect sources and methods with the need to inform Congress and the American people about why he takes or doesn’t take any action.”

“The credibility of the United States matters every single day,” he added. “And when it is eroded in the eyes of our allies over time, it then ultimately makes moments like this even more difficult.”

Pompeo is an Iran hawk and could easily be maneuvering Trump into a war. His NSC adviser is also a hawk. So are most of the Republicans in congress. Wars tend to be good for incumbent president, at least in the bginning.

All the stars are aligned although Trump is the wild card who could pull back. But we just don’t know. And that’s scary.

David Leonhardt laid out the best and worse case scenarios for a possible Trump strategy:

The motivation for the attack still isn’t clear. One possibility is that hard-liners within Iran ordered or encouraged it, out of a desire to scuttle the upcoming negotiations, as The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib explained. The hard-liners may have feared that Iran’s government was going to offer concessions — which would be a sign that Trump’s strategy might be working.

Another possibility, though, is that the Iranian government ordered it because it views Trump as a weak negotiator who is afraid of war. By escalating the situation, Iran may be betting that Trump will back down, as David Kirkpatrick and Farnaz Fassihi of The Times wrote. In that case, the combination of Trump’s tough sanctions and his generally chaotic foreign policy may have pushed the Middle East closer to war.

No Lindsey, it was a sign of strength that some people just don’t understand! https://t.co/EU8AvfH7j9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2019

We’ll see in the next few days.

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