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Month: October 2019

Pompeo and circumstances

Pompeo and circumstances

by digby

They cut off his comment that the reporter was acting like she represents the Democratic National Committee.

It’s really not a good thing when you appoint a nasty hardcore partisan bitch to be the nation’s number one diplomat. And in that exchange, he sounded like a very nasty partisan bitch. That’s who he is.

Here he is railing against the Obama administration for “failing to cooperate” with the House.

Just 10 years ago this guy was an “entrepreneur” in Kansas working on a failed energy project with Koch money. In 2010 he became a wingnut Tea Party House member then CIA director and Secretary of State. He’s moving fast in GOP politics but that is obviously not a difficult task (look at who’s in the White House.) But as those videos demonstrate, he is just another wingnut.

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I told you so — that letter was all Trump, all the way

I told you so — that letter was all Trump, all the way

by digby


I wrote this on Thursday:

[T]his is a very strange “legal” document, reminiscent of the amateurish James Comey “firing” memo that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein produced for President Trump. It sounds exactly the way the president would sound if he could write in semi-intelligible language. The whole thing is basically a Donald Trump rally rant without the nasty nicknames.

Toldja:

On Tuesday, the Office of the White House Counsel delivered an eight-page letter to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejecting the very legitimacy of the impeachment inquiry threatening this presidency.

The letter was notable not for the conclusion it reached—few suspected that the administration was going to cooperate with House Democrats—but for the broadsides and rhetorical flourishes it featured. That’s because this letter wasn’t fully written by lawyers.

It was crafted, in large part, by President Donald Trump himself.

According to two people familiar with the process, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone had multiple meetings with President Trump in the days leading up to the issuance of the letter. During those meetings with Cipollone, the president would get especially animated when names such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee leading the probe into the whistleblower complaint, came up. The sources said that Trump enthusiastically suggested adding various jabs at Democratic lawmakers and would request that their “unfair” treatment of him be incorporated into the letter.

The result was what Bob Bauer, who served as President Obama’s White House counsel, called a “remarkable” and “extraordinarily political document.”

Trump had also privately consulted on the letter with Rudy Giuliani, his notably pugnacious personal lawyer who is at the center of the Ukraine and Biden-related scandal engulfing the administration. Trump talked to Giuliani about how he and the White House should proceed in fighting back and challenging the legitimacy of the impeachment probe, one of the sources noted. Reached for comment on Thursday evening, the former New York mayor and Trump confidant repeatedly declined to confirm or deny this.

“President Trump took the unprecedented step of providing the public transparency by declassifying and releasing the record of his call with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. The record clearly established that the call was completely appropriate and that there is no basis for your inquiry,” the Cipollone-signed, grievance-riddled letter reads. “The fact that there was nothing wrong with the call was also powerfully confirmed by Chairman Schiff’s decision to create a false version of the call and read it to the American people at a congressional hearing, without disclosing that he was simply making it all up.”

A White House spokesperson did not provide comment for this story.

That Trump has leaned so heavily on his own intuition in crafting the legal response to his impeachment crisis has come as no surprise to those who know him. The president has—however misguidedly—long thought of himself as more keen and cunning than his advisers. And from his rise in real estate and reality TV through his ascendance to the presidency he has shuddered at those individuals who have sought to curb his impulses, even when they’ve argued that those impulses bend the limits of the law.

And yet, Trump’s current go-with-your-gut approach stands out to many as a uniquely risky gamble. When his White House was navigating Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into 2016 election-meddling, the president early on leaned on two grey-bearded attorneys—Ty Cobb and John Dowd—and Don McGahn, a White House counsel with deep connections in Republican circles. Beyond that, he brought in Emmet Flood, a Washington, D.C., attorney well-steeped in special and independent counsel investigations, having lived through one himself.

Those lawyers are now gone. And Trump seems inclined to do little to buff up the ranks. The one person that is reportedly being added to his legal team is a former member of Congress, Trey Gowdy, who, the president says, can’t even start until January because of ethics laws.

The saddest part of this is that, as I noted in that Salon piece, I saw a bunch of Village pundits run with this “fairness” argument even though it was clearly hatched from Donald Trump’s addled brain. Nobody whines and snivels about “fairness” more than Trump and nobody should take that argument from this White House as anything more than one of Trump’s primal tweets.

Cipollone destroyed his reputation, and probably his legal career, with that letter. He signed it not Trump. And it will go down as one of the most notorious documents in American history. His family must be so proud.

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The dumbest line at a Trump rally

The dumbest line at a Trump rally

by digby

There are hundreds of them. But I think this one takes the cake:

Note how his cult followers cheer and laugh. No matter how stupid he is they love it.

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Kevin we hardly knew ye

Kevin we hardly knew ye

by digby

Last night, another DHS Secretary bit the dust:

Kevin McAleenan will step down as acting Homeland Security secretary after serving a six-month tenure that often frustrated top officials in the Trump administration, including the president himself.

McAleenan’s departure comes amid a rolling leadership shake-up at the department as President Donald Trump looks to make good on his 2016 campaign pledge to crack down on immigration as he faces a tough bid for a second term in office.
[…]
In recent days, McAleenan gave an unusually blunt interview to the Washington Post in which he said he was frustrated by other immigration appointees and wasn’t able to keep the department from being used for a partisan immigration agenda.
[…]
Six other top department officials have resigned or been pushed out since April, including former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. With McAleenan’s exit, Trump will have cycled through four DHS chiefs in less than three years. Many of the department‘s senior leadership positions remain vacant or filled by acting officials.

“Today’s ouster of the acting secretary further highlights that President Trump continues to decimate the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security. “This will only add to the chaos for a Department where there are chronically too many leadership vacancies and positions held by unconfirmed, ‘acting’ officials.

That’s unlikely to change:

Next in line to become acting secretary is David Pekoske, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, who has also been serving as acting deputy secretary at DHS. But acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hardliner new to the administration who has direct access to Trump, appears to be the leading candidate to replace him, according to several people familiar with the situation. Cuccinelli, however, would have a tough time getting confirmed even in the Republican-led Senate.

“The choice is clear, he must elevate Ken Cuccinelli,” said RJ Hauman, government relations director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors immigration restrictions

The law specifically states that any “acting” DHS has to come up through specific ranks that have been confirmed by the Senate. But there is talk that the Trump administration is going to use their newfound monarchal powers to ignore that law and install their racist favorite Ken “the cooch” Cucinelli.

So we’ll see. Whatever happens, McAleenan’s concerns about the department being used for partisan purposes are unlikely to be addressed. Donald Trump is using every department of the government, including the DOJ, the State Department and the Pentagon for his partisan political purposes.

The New Yorker has a deeper look at McAleenan’s tenure. It’s not good even if it’s slightly better than Cucinelli’s would be:

But if McAleenan passed as a moderate steward of D.H.S. in the context of Trump’s Washington—a policy wonk and diplomat, who was data-driven and cautious—by almost any other standard, his tenure was marked by aggressive measures that have wreaked havoc on the lives of migrants. During the past six months, McAleenan has presided over two elaborate new policies designed to enlist foreign governments in the effort to take pressure off of the U.S. asylum system. The first, called the Migrant Protection Protocols (M.P.P.), came into existence while McAleenan was the head of C.B.P. It has since forced some fifty thousand Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their legal claims move through the backlogged U.S. immigration courts. Initially, the program was designed to handle the influx of Central Americans, but late this spring, under McAleenan’s leadership, D.H.S. broadened M.P.P. to include asylum seekers from any Spanish-speaking country in Latin America. McAleenan has defended M.P.P. as a necessary stopgap to allow asylum seekers access to U.S. immigration courts, while keeping them off American soil. In practice, however, hundreds of asylum seekers have been brutalized while stranded in notoriously dangerous Mexican border cities, and thousands of others, out of fear for their safety, have abandoned their asylum claims altogether.

Over the summer, I spoke to a twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan named Deysi, whose asylum claim was promising even by the strictest legal definitions of the term. A lesbian who’d been raped and assaulted repeatedly in her home town, in southern Guatemala, she travelled to El Paso to seek relief at a port of entry, and was eventually returned to Juárez, under M.P.P., on the same day that McAleenan took over at D.H.S. She slept in a park because the city’s shelters were full. “I knew I had a court date,” she said in a subsequent affidavit. “But I had no paper with the date, the time, and what I need to do to get to court.” By the end of May, she’d missed her court appearance and run out of money. At that point, she tried crossing the border between points of entry and was arrested by Border Patrol agents. Since she’d missed her previous court hearing, she now had an order of removal. When we spoke, Deysi was back in Guatemala, desperate to leave but too scared to set out again for the U.S.

The other defining feature of McAleenan’s tenure has been a series of accords known as safe-third-country agreements, which, since July, D.H.S. has signed with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Each of these deals will bar migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they have first passed through one of these three Central American countries. Currently, more than ninety per cent of migrants apprehended at the U.S. border are fleeing these countries. They are far from “safe” for migrants, and none of them has a fully functioning asylum system.

The agreements are designed to send a message to the region’s asylum seekers that if they travel north, the U.S. will no longer be their ultimate destination, a senior D.H.S. official told me. It’s an unconventional version of a familiar argument: deterring migrants from travelling to the U.S. has been the through line of U.S. border policy for decades, linking Republican and Democratic Administrations. McAleenan, for his part, has insisted that there are other upsides to the agreements. They will open the door to tens of millions of dollars in aid to build up asylum infrastructure in Central America; in exchange for regional coöperation, the U.S. will increase the number of temporary work visas available to migrants as well. But ending asylum at the southern border requires rejecting the legitimacy of thousands of future claims. “Every person I’ve ever met at C.B.P. fundamentally believes that ninety-nine per cent of asylum claims are what a smuggler convinced people to say,” one Administration official told me, referring to the Secretary’s background. “McAleenan is comfortable with effectively ending asylum because he thinks a lot of these claims are fraudulent.”

McAleenan has defended the implementation of M.P.P., and the continued “metering” of asylum seekers at official ports of entry, by pointing out that no one else has yet managed to offer a holistic solution to the Central American exodus while preserving the key tenets of U.S. asylum law. But his initiatives have come with an irreparable human cost. “Again and again, under his leadership, the Department of Homeland Security has evaded U.S. asylum laws and policies designed to protect men, women, and children from persecution and comply with this country’s treaty commitments,” Eleanor Acer, of Human Rights First, told me. “Instead of a system that assesses whether people meet the requirements of U.S. refugee protection, the U.S. now has a system designed to evade U.S. refugee law, block as many as possible from asylum in our country, and terrify others into abandoning their requests for protection.”

One of McAleenan’s few regrets was his initial support for the zero-tolerance policy that gave rise to family separation. He co-wrote the memo recommending the policy to Nielsen, in the spring of 2018. He described his original rationale, in an interview he gave to the Washington Post. “How can we let these smugglers victimize these desperate families,” he said. “How can we let this flow continue to grow.” Family separation was supposed to have a deterrent effect. It didn’t work, and instead tortured thousands of families in the process. “When you see the impact in the six-week period on two thousand and five hundred or so families and understand the emotional pain for those children, it’s not worth it,” McAleenan would later say. “It’s the one part of this whole thing that I couldn’t ever be part of again.”

But he took the job anyway and enacted a bunch of equally inhumane policies that mostly hurt people on the other side of the border with which Americans don’t have to dirty their lily-white hands.

The article says that he believed that Trump’s elections showed how dangerous having a liberal immigration policy was to the nation, so was one of those “adults in the room” who thought he could mitigate Trump’s obscene extremism while appeasing the anti-immigrant  bigots who were making the issue a mountain out of a molehill in order to express their racism.  (He didn’t put it that way but that’s clearly the calculation.)

This whole department needs to be rethought from the ground up.

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I’m sure Rudy has that pardon all wrapped up. But this isn’t going to be pretty.

I’m sure Rudy has that pardon all wrapped up. But this isn’t going to be pretty.

by digby

Eh… that’s not such a great defense, is it? Trump’s obviously getting an earful from everyone he talks to. (But I would guess Trump is a teensy bit worried about all the things he and Rudy have cooked up together … can he trust this looney old weirdo?)

For weeks, prominent Republican advisers have been privately imploring President Donald Trump to sideline Rudy Giuliani after a barrage of inconsistent, combative and occasionally cringe-inducing media interviews, according to three people familiar with the conversations.

And that was before the arrest of two foreign-born businessmen who reportedly helped Giuliani try to discredit former Vice President Joe Biden, the leading Democrat to take on Trump in next year’s election. Several reports have indicated Giuliani himself may be caught up in the probe.

Yet Trump remains linked to Giuliani, who was initially hired to help fend of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigators, but who now may have pulled the president into another investigation — one that might lead to impeachment. While the president has long appreciated Giuliani’s pugnacious and never-back-down attitude, Trump allies fear Giuliani will damage Trump with his long-winded monologues and free-wheeling accusations.

The constant sniping from staff could ultimately force Trump to dump his long-valued fixer, as he has done with former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and countless other ousted officials, like ex-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“Rudy Giuliani needs to stop talking,” said a former campaign official who remains close to Trump’s team.

Giuliani has been Trump’s attack dog since he was hired as an unpaid personal attorney April 2018. But the president’s personal lawyer has now found himself at the center of an unfolding controversy over the president’s attempts to get the Ukrainian president to open an investigation into Biden and his son, Hunter.

To numerous Trump advisers, though, the appearances have hurt more than they’ve helped the president.

“Rudy right now needs to focus on himself and not Ukraine,” said an outside Trump adviser.

For now, Trump is sticking with Giuliani, or “My Rudy,” as Giuliani said the president sometimes calls him. “Nothing has changed on that,” said Giuliani’s own attorney, Jon Sale. Trump plans to keep using Giuliani on everything but Ukraine matters because they know he’s a witness if this goes to impeachment, according to a source familiar with the legal team’s strategy.

Trump said late Friday he didn’t know if Giuliani was still his attorney. “I haven’t spoken to Rudy,” he said. “I spoke to him yesterday, briefly. He’s a very good attorney and he has been my attorney.”

That’s good for Trump, Giuliani argued.

“I’m not a puppy — I know what I’m doing,” he said. If he didn’t represent Trump, Giuliani added, “they would let him be a punching bag.”

In a text on Saturday morning, Giuliani replied to the two most pressing questions he’s facing. “No knowledge of any probe. Still President’s counsel in same way as before…no change,” he wrote.
[…]
At least one Republican suggested Giuliani would not leave even if Trump wanted him to. Either way, Giuliani is not going away, given his central role in the budding Ukraine controversy.

Giuliani fed Trump the information that largely led the president in a phone call to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The former New York mayor had spent months trying to make contact with Ukrainian officials to collect evidence and convince them that they should be looking at Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian gas company and Joe Biden’s Obama-era efforts to have a Ukrainian prosecutor removed over corruption concerns. There is no public evidence that either Joe or Hunter Biden broke any laws.

House Democrats launched their impeachment inquiry after Trump’s request was revealed, spurring Giuliani to blanket the airwaves with his bulldog defenses of the president. Democrats have also subpoenaed Giuliani for documents and testimony related to his Ukraine activities, setting off a battle that’s likely to drag on for weeks.

Don Goldberg, who helped respond to congressional investigations in the Clinton White House, said Giuliani shouldn’t be helping Trump when he’s facing his own problems.

“It’s so messed up,” he said. “You’d think a president would want to have competent counsel if you’re talking about fighting for your political life. We’re so far not seeing that with the caliber he’s been using.”

Trump has t be losing some sleep over this. He can pardon Rudy. And Rudy may not even mind. He’s all about being famous, notorious even, and if he’s the guy who Trump pardoned and he spends the rest of his days on TV putting on a show, that’s probably fine with him.

But Trump cannot control him — he drinks and he has a very big mouth.

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Mercenary-in-Chief by @BloggersRUs

Mercenary-in-Chief
by Tom Sullivan


Russian Wagner Group mercenaries on the ground in the Central African Republic.

The Friday night news dump hasn’t dropped as I write this, but this tidbit has:

As Digby posted Friday, the acting president announced he is sending 1,500 more troops to Saudi Arabia. The deployment is a response to a request by Gen. Frank McKenzie of U.S. Central Command in the aftermath of a September attack on Saudi oil installations. CNN adds that move:

… follows a Thursday tweet from Trump decrying US involvement in the Middle East, in which he said that “going into the Middle East is the worst decision ever made!” He added that “we are slowly and carefully bringing our great soldiers & military home.”

That is unless someone there (with whom the president has substantial investments) is willing to pay us, Trump boasted Friday.

POTUS declared on the White House lawn the U.S. military is for rent. Mercenaries. Hired guns. Soldiers of fortune. No different from Blackwater>Xe Services>Academi contractors, just less well-paid. Trump considers them either props to show off to the strongmen of the world — to the Vladimir Putins and Kim Jong-uns — or else as commercial assets he can leverage. This will come as a shock to career military officers who have dedicated themselves to serving their country at risk to their lives.


U.S. mercenaries in Iraq.

Former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified before Congress Friday morning at risk to her career and paycheck how she perceives her 30-plus years of service to her country:

I have proudly promoted and served American interests as the representative of the American people and six different presidents over the last three decades. Throughout that time, I—like my colleagues at the State Department—have always believed that we enjoyed a sacred trust with our government.

We make a difference every day on issues that matter to the American people—whether it is war and peace, trade and investment, or simply helping with a lost passport. We repeatedly uproot our lives, and we frequently put ourselves in harm’s way to serve this nation. And we do that willingly, because we believe in America and its special role in the world. We also believe that,
in return, our government will have our backs and protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests.

That basic understanding no longer holds true.

Believe in America? Special role in the world? Where’s the winning in that, asks Trump? Where’s the profit?

Yovanovitch represents what is best about America. We need more like her not fewer. I’ve known a few Foreign Service Officers. They serve their country and the needs of U.S. nationals around the world from Afghanistan to Austria. They are the faces of U.S. policy that endure even as pictures of presidents on their office walls change every few years. Like career military officers, they perceive their work as a vocation that serves the greater good. And like teachers, they don’t go into public service to make money.

The concept is incomprehensible to a pitiless, damaged man who considers people who put their country’s interests before their own losers. That Donald J. Trump holds the lives and careers of such faithful Americans in his short-fingered hands is an atrocity, as is his corrupt administration.

Shep out. Fascism in.

Shep out. Fascism in.

by digby

John Amato has it right:

Just 2 days after Donald Trump’s Personal Attorney General, Bill Barr, met with Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch, Shep Smith stepped down from his position at Fox News. Apparently this was a closely-held secret, if Neil Cavuto’s reaction is any indication.

A visibly shaken Neil Cavuto sat silent at the opening of his show before confessing his shock. “A better newsman you will not find,” he declared. And then he went on to apologize for his demeanor, reiterating that he was shell-shocked. Apparently he wasn’t alone.

Shep Smith has been one of the few journalists to actually try to deliver real news to FOX. He tried to explain the Trump/Ukraine story. He talked truth about the Trump trade wars. He reported on Volker’s testimony. He fact-checked Donald Trump on a channel that is decidedly anti-fact. He even shone light on the Trump administrations abuse of migrant children. 

FOX News is already allergic to facts and truth. They are not a news channel. They are a propaganda channel. Shep Smith is one of a handful of people willing to try to deliver real news. His loss is suspicious timing and undoubtedly related to Trump’s dissatisfaction with his coverage of the Trump administration.

Here’s Shep’s sign-off:

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Too shameless to care

Too shameless to care

by digby

It would be hypocrisy if Republicans had something we like to call shame.

They do not.

It’s fun for us to see becuse it validates our memory of what they used to say and makes it clear that they are simple liars. But if we think we can embarrass them or even make them slightly uncomfortable by demonstrating their rank inconsistency, I think we are fooling ourselves. If conservative evangelical Christian can worship this crude orange libertine without even wincing at his profound immorality, there is no chance that any Republican official will. They are shameless.

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Hey, those Kurds didn’t pay, Saudi Arabia did. Soooo…

Hey, those Kurds don’t pay, Saudi Arabia does. Soooo…

by digby

Trump pulled the troops back from the Turkish border so that his pal Erdogan could slaughter the Kurds. This was, apparently, so that he could get into some news ones:

The Pentagon will deploy about 1,500 extra troops to Saudi Arabia in answer to requests by the leading US military commander in the Middle East and, in part, because the US Navy is unable to send a relief aircraft carrier to deter potential Iranian aggression, multiple US officials tell CNN.

The move to bolster troops in the Middle East comes as President Donald Trump’s decision to pull back US military forces from northeastern Syria has prompted bipartisan criticism from lawmakers who say the President has given Turkey an opening to attack US Kurdish allies who helped in the fight against ISIS.
The Pentagon said Friday that the deployment to Saudi Arabia will include two fighter squadrons, one air expeditionary win, two Patriot batteries and one Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.

Of course his criteria is that whoever gets military support are those who pay him personally and buy a bunch of weaponry from US contractors. (In the case of Saudi Arabia, they’ve promised but haven’t actually signed the contract which proves that it’s really just about giving Trump a photo op.)He believes that national security depends upon who pays the most. He doesn’t understand why they might do that and hedoesn’t care.

Sadly, the Kurds don’t have the bank to pay for their defense and that means ISIS is probably going to make a big comeback.

Meanwhile:

A contingent of U.S. Special Forces has been caught up in Turkish shelling against U.S.-backed Kurdish positions in northern Syria, days after President Donald Trump told his Turkish counterpart he would withdraw U.S. troops from certain positions in the area.

Newsweek has learned through both an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence official and senior Pentagon official that Special Forces operating on Mashtenour hill in the majority-Kurdish city of Kobani fell under artillery fire from Turkish forces conducting their so-called “Operation Peace Spring” against Kurdish fighters backed by the U.S. but considered terrorist organizations by Turkey.

The senior Pentagon official said that Turkish forces should be aware of U.S. positions “down to the grid.” The official could not specify the exact number of personnel present, but indicated they were “small numbers below company level,” so somewhere between 15 and 100 troops.

Barbara Starr on CNN just reported that the Pentagon has a plan to withdraw all the troops from Syria if they are attacked by Turkey. I’ll bet Trump thinks that’s a terrific idea. He’s got bigger fish to fry now.

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