Month: October 2019

How To Respond to Armed Threats: Man who brandished gun at driver with Warren sticker charged with felony terroristic threat 

By Spocko

MOORHEAD, Minn. — A 27-year-old West Fargo, N.D., man is in jail after threatening a woman with a handgun because he took issue with her political bumper sticker, according to the Moorhead Police Department.  (Driver with Trump bumper sticker waved gun at driver with Warren bumper sticker)

Because the brandishing of the gun is illegal, something could be done about this kind of intimidation. Tracking these kind of threats can be hard, especially without evidence. I’m glad it was reported and verified. I’m especially pleased that the perpetrator, Joseph Schumacher, is facing charges of felony terroristic threats. He was also charged with having a loaded handgun inside a vehicle without a permit, a misdemeanor.

Threats and intimidation by men with guns are often downplayed or ignored, especially in domestic violence situations. But individuals and groups can take steps to change laws.

Open carrying guns at political events is a terrorist threat

In some states it is legal for a person to show up open-carrying a gun at a political rally. If asked why they are carrying their guns they will quote the state law and the second half of the 2nd Amendment.  They won’t acknowledge their true intent. They want to intimate people.

In Schumacher’s case, the police were able to connect his previous actions to his brandishing his gun which met the conditions for the charge. As the case moves forward we will see if the charge will hold up in court. But the point I want to make is that this same linking of actions can lead to felony charges for people carrying guns at political events.

This is not the actual bumper sticker in question.

Why is open carry legal? The NRA worked hard to change the laws in states to expand where guns can be carried and remove requirements for permits on who can carry. They built on the rural/urban divide in states with hunters to support open carry with their: “Ah shucks, we’re just fixin to go huntin’ lady, don’t get hysterical!” anecdotes.  I heard them more than once in town halls across the country.

 “When I was in high school kids had shotguns in the racks of their pickup trucks from hunting before school. Why should I be arrested for just going down to Walmart to buy ammo for duck hunting?” 

But the men showing up at political events with an AR-15 aren’t on their way to hunt ducks, and they know it.  Intimidation is the point.

The NRA wants to water-down the intimation factor of a physical presence of a person with a gun. Finally, following the Walmart mass shooting, some retail corporations somewhat addressed the bogus premise of open carry. (They SHOULD ban open carry and conceal carry in the store totally, but that’s another post.)

Threatening and Gaslighting For Dummies. by Donald Trump. Forward by convicted felon, Michael Cohen 

Threatening and intimidating others is big in the Trump era. Like Trump, many avoid acknowledging what they are actually doing to escape consequences. It’s a little game for them. We see it in the mob speak Trump and his cronies use.  But not everyone has 30 lawyers, his father’s fortune, an entire media outlet and the US Attorney General to cover for them.  People can be busted for their threats.

Here are suggestions on how to deal with people making threats with guns. Three steps, short term, medium term and long term.

Guys Dressed Like Magnum P.I. Open Carry Guns to Stalk Moms

A few months ago two guys in Hawaiian shirts followed a group in Missouri on a Moms Demand Action protest march across town. The marchers took photos of the guys and asked what should they do.

Some gunners wear cameo, but these guys want to be seen intimidating the group

Some people said, “Call the police!”  Great! That is one solution. What then?

Be prepared for the response! In my experience the people doing open carry know the law extremely well. They know not to “brandish” a gun. They expect to encounter people questioning them, especially the police. They often alert the police in advance that they are going to do this. They will video tape their interactions so that they can show how they are the victims being harassed for doing something perfectly legal. When police show up they will explain their perfectly legal stalking of the group while carrying their weapons.  Given those possible actions, what else can people do?

1) Bust them in real time by knowing the law.  For example, it’s often explicitly illegal to carry guns on school campuses or government court houses. Change the route of the walk, then have the police waiting for open carriers when they cross over the school or court campus line. (Be aware they follow all public pronouncements of events and infiltrate groups to obtain intel on actions and responses.)

2) Get photos of the people to identify them and the organization that they are part of  
Interestingly they will often offer up this info willingly. They believe their record is clear–but check them! Domestic violence cases aren’t always recorded correctly. A long time organizer friend said to go up to the men carrying the guns and ask, “Can I help you?”  Let them talk. Ask them questions.  RECORD EVERYTHING THEY SAY AND DO.

Privacy for me but not for thee
The NRA got laws passed that protect the identity of people with concealed carry permits, I understand the need for this in certain cases. But the people who want to intimidate using open carry might call for privacy because they want to maintain their power to intimidate anonymously. They will say it’s because they don’t want the “bad guys” to know they are carrying.  In their world everyone is a potential bad guy. 

You will note that I didn’t identity the exact location of these guys, beyond the state of Missouri. That’s because when open carriers are identified for their armed threats, they go after the people and families they can find to attack and intimidate them online and in person.  I don’t want to put anyone in the area at risk. (I’ve said before that National GVP groups should do this research and follow up on behalf of local groups.)

This is where we get back to Schumacher’s threat and charge. Correlation of the open carriers with their group is important, since often other members in the group do NOT have clean records. They have been know to harass individuals online. These members often openly make threats on Facebook within the group’s postings. These can show the intent of a person’s actions.

Not all members of groups threatening people online are smart enough to hide their online posts.
When police work to determine if someone is a “true threat” they look to see if the person has a history of threats, have the means, motive and are in the same physical location.
Hawaiian shirt guys might know all the rules for open carry, and still make threats online that cross the line.

Correlation can build a case to move people into the “true” threats category for a criminal case.  If it doesn’t rise to that level, it can build a case against the person and the group on their FB page. It can also lead to possible civil action in the future.

Threatening speech is not protected speech

Armed people want to control the narrative. They want to tell you it doesn’t matter what you say, they will have the last word. That’s not always the case.

There is also a qualitative difference when someone carrying a gun wants you to know they disagree with your political views.  The line an ‘armed society is a polite society” really means, “Be polite to me, or I will shoot you.”

The Guardian complied a list of recent cases of people who threatened political figures or others on behalf of Trump. Many have been convicted and are serving jail time. I’m glad their stories made the news because I want everyone to know that threatening speech is not protected by the 1st Amendment. You can do something when armed people threaten you over your political views.  

3) Change the laws in the community — Long Term Solution 
I’m a big proponent of figuring out how to make change at small levels, learn from the process and then scale them up.

Recently my friends in Nebraska got a law passed in Lincoln that mandated secure storage in vehicles. (Link 1011) This is a big deal. I want to acknowledge how important this action is.
People get depressed when they don’t see action on the national or state level. But as this case proves, change is possible.

The good news is that attitudes about the appropriateness of guns in public political debates are changing. The laws that reflect those attitudes can change too.

Wonder why Trump did it? Because he has major business in Turkey.

by digby

This is an incredible story. To think these assholes have the gall  to clutch their pearls about “corruption”  and “draining the swamp.”  It’s maddening:

President Donald Trump’s sudden decision to pull U.S. troops out of Northern Syria late Sunday night has drawn harsh rebukes from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, raised alarm bells among America’s allies across the globe and sent the Pentagon and the State Department scrambling to contain the fallout.

While the president has defended the decision as part of his longtime promise to end U.S. military involvement in the region, even his staunchest supporters at home warned that it has essentially given Turkey a green light for a major military offensive against the Kurdish minority there, a key U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State militant group and a longtime target of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The president has denied that the U.S. is abandoning the Kurds, tweeting on Tuesday that, “we may be in the process of leaving Syria, but in no way have we abandoned the Kurds, who are special people and wonderful fighters.”

A call Sunday between Trump and Erdogan, which NBC News reported was set up to ease Erdogan’s anger for not getting a one-on-one meeting with Trump at last month’s United Nations General Assembly gathering, was the latest chapter in a relationship that goes back to before the president’s election and marked yet another milestone Tuesday when Trump announced that he is inviting Erdogan to the White House in November.

Trump has appeared to side with Erdogan at times throughout his presidency. For example, when Republican senators sought to punish Turkey this summer for its purchase of a Russian missile defense system by pushing the president to impose congressionally mandated sanctions, Trump invited them to a White House meeting to ask for “flexibility” in dealing with the issue. Those sanctions have not been implemented.

And the fact that Trump made his decision to pull the U.S. troops out of Syria shortly after the phone call with Erdogan has raised alarm bells from policymakers, as well as government ethics watchdog groups who have long seen Trump’s extensive business interests as a potential area for conflicts of interest.

“It’s absolutely staggering” that Trump made a decision that “has put us on the brink of causing genocide in Syria,” said Wendy Sherman, an undersecretary at the State Department during the Obama administration. The decision underscores the “impulsiveness” and “the transactional, quid pro quo-ness of the president,” she said.

That “transactional” charge is based on the Trump family’s multitude of continuing business entities and interests, all separated from the president — at least on paper — by the trust that now controls them. But the president is the beneficiary of that trust and two of his children have roles in it.

“It always is a concern that those business ties, at the very least, color his judgment,” Sherman said, “and at the very worst are the reasons for his judgment.”

Trump and his family have long had business ties in and with Turkey, the most visible example being the Trump Towers Istanbul, which licenses the Trump name. The Trump Organization describes the buildings on its website as “a landmark in the historic city of Istanbul” and it is the organization’s first and only office and residential tower in Europe, with offices, apartments and upscale shops. The Washington Post has reported that the organization was paid up to $10 million to put the Trump name on the two buildings.

Erdogan attended the opening ceremony of the office and residential towers in 2012 and Ivanka Trump tweeted a message thanking him for attending, although a photo of Erdogan at the ribbon cutting has been removed from his Facebook page.

According to a review of Trump family social media posts, Ivanka Trump made business trips to Turkey in 2009, 2010 and 2012.

In 2015, Trump acknowledged having a potential “conflict” when it came to issues involving Turkey.

“I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump said in 2015. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two,” Trump said in an interview with Stephen Bannon, then chairman of Breitbart News.

A lawsuit filed by 29 senators and 186 House Democrats — one of three lawsuits that have alleged that Trump is in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses, which bar the president from receiving monetary or other benefits of value from foreign or U.S. state entities while in office — claims that Turkey has among the highest number of foreign business ventures in which Trump is at least a partial owner, with 119 listed. Others include China, with 115, and the Philippines, with 121.

Businesses linked to the Turkish government are also major patrons of the Trump Organization. Turkish officials have made 14 visits to Trump properties, more than any other country, according to an analysis performed for NBC News by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

Government watchdogs say those ties mixed with unpredictable policymaking are precisely why Trump’s business dealings have been so concerning, especially since the president has refused to divest from them or establish a blind trust.

Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration who has been a frequent Trump critic, says the lack of any buffer between the president and his business interests is both a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments clause as well as long-held presidential precedent.

“Now you’ve got his business interests at the negotiating table in addition to everything else,” Painter told NBC News.

He said Turkey “had a democracy that is flipping and going in the wrong direction.”

“Can you imagine if the Roosevelt family had business interests in Germany in the 1930s” before World War II? he asked. “It creates points of vulnerability, and that’s where we are.”

“You can’t have a president with business interests in hot spots all over the world,” Painter added. 

In the summer of 2016, Erdogan called for the removal of the Trump name from the buildings after Trump called for a ban on individuals from certain Muslim countries traveling to the United States.

Then, in November 2016, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, soon to be Trump’s first national security adviser, wrote an op-ed favorable to Erdogan, who has consolidated his power and locked up thousands of people after a failed 2016 military coup, including many who had nothing to do with it.

Flynn, who was paid $530,000 for consulting work in Turkey prior to the 2016 election, violated U.S. law in not registering with the U.S. government for the work until almost a month after he was fired as Trump’s national security adviser in February 2017.

Trump, at the time, said the U.S. shouldn’t criticize Erdogan for a crackdown that’s included taking over dozens of television and radio stations and arresting reporters, according to Human Rights Watch. He even told reporters he gave “great credit to him for turning it around.”

“It’s exactly why you don’t want the president to be in business,” said David Cay Johnston, who wrote a book, “It’s Even Worse Than You Think,” that examines Trump’s foreign conflicts of interest. “You don’t know whose water he’s carrying, except in Donald’s case, it’s always his own water.”

Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, did not respond to a request for comment.Mehmet Ali Yalcindag of the Dogan Media Group attends the DLD Nightcap on Jan. 28, 2009 in Davos, Switzerland.Alexander Hassenstein / Getty Images file

Ivanka Trump’s main business contact in Turkey has been Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, who is the son-in-law of Dogan Holding founder Aydin Dogan, the developer behind the Trump Towers in Istanbul.

Yalcindag considers himself a close friend of Trump and his family. After the Dogans invested $400 million in Trump Towers, Trump said “we have a great, great friendship and relationship with them.”

“They’ve really become beyond partners,” Trump said in 2012.

Yalcindag reportedly attended Trump’s 2016 election victory celebration in New York City on election night. He subsequently became president of the Turkish-American Business Council (TAIK), a group that in 2017 held a three-day conference inside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, attended by U.S. government notables including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

TAIK and Dogan Holdings did not respond to requests for comment and Yalcindag could not be reached for comment.

Last year, in an interview with several journalists, Yalcindag expressed confidence that Trump would ultimately sympathize with Turkey’s approach to foreign policy.

“U.S. President Donald Trump thinks regional problems should be resolved by regional actors. In this regard, the U.S. should see what is happening on Turkey’s borders from the point of view of its strategic ally, Turkey,” Yalcindag said.

According to Trump’s financial disclosure forms, the Trump business relating to the licensing of the Trump name to the Trump Towers Istanbul property in Turkey earned him $1 million to $5 million in royalties in 2015 and 2016. The royalties decreased, according to his disclosures, to $100,001 to $1 million for 2017 and 2018.

The conflicts extend to Trump’s hotel in D.C. Soon after the November 2016 election, “about 100 foreign diplomats, from Brazil to Turkey” were given “a sales pitch about [Defendant]’s newest hotel,” according to the Democrat-filed lawsuit.

There have been four events related to the Turkish government at his hotel, according to CREW. Two of the four were held by nongovernmental organizations: the American-Turkish Council and the Turkey-U.S. Business Council, both of which have ties to the government, and one of the events was sponsored by a Turkish airline that’s co-owned by the state. This year, two advisers to Erdoğan and the ministers of trade, defense and treasury all attended one of the events.

Maddening …

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QOTD: An ignoramus

by digby

The man who commands the most powerful military on earth:

The Kurds are fighting for their land, just so you understand, and somebody wrote a very, very powerful article today. They didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example, they mentioned names of different battles. But they’re there to help us with their land and that’s a different thing. In addition to that we—we have spent tremendous amounts of money on helping the Kurds in terms of ammunition, in terms of weapons, in terms of money, in terms of pay, with all of that being said, we like the Kurds.

God help this planet.

Trump appears to have gotten his “Kurds didn’t help us at Normandy” line from a Kurt Schlichter column. https://t.co/jAbsP9VCQt pic.twitter.com/6HknvoZ0gl

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) October 9, 2019

That would be this stable genius:

Right Wing Watch:

An article authored by Christian Vanderbrouk at The Bulwark last month examined talks in conservative circles about a “national divorce” or civil war, and it highlighted Schlichter’s book series. In those writings, Schlichter details a fictional account of a civil war that is eerily akin to the Turner Diaries, a fictional novel about a race war that was authored by a neo-Nazi and serves as a foundational text for America’s white nationalist movement. Vanderbrouk wrote, “Schlichter’s books and The Turner Diaries share the same paranoia that progressive governments, aided by white collaborators, are empowering blacks to enable them to rape white women and ultimately exterminate the white race.”

Schlichter has also trafficked in conspiracy theories, pushing claims that explosive devices mailed to prominent Democrats and news organizations targeted for scorn by President Trump were an elaborate hoax. He once referred to the then-teenage survivors of the Parkland school shooting as “lying ventriloquist dummies.” In 2015, he insisted during a CNN appearance that a “large number” of Muslims supported radical jihad, but floundered when asked to cite the sources for his claim.

Schlichter is not without critics from within conservative media. Last year Alex Griswold, a reporter at Free Beacon, called out Schlichter for applauding right-wing men who violently attacked a group of protesters demonstrating in Olympia, Washington. When called out, Schlichter doubled-down on his applause for the group of men.

The article Trump cited today was Schlicter’s grotesque Townhall column. He’s a mainstream Republican.

Trump’s great national security strategy in a nutshell:

On Wednesday, when asked by reporters whether he felt the Syria retreat and treatment of the Kurds sent a poor message to other US allies, Trump said, “Alliances are very easy.”

I need a drink.

By the way, the Kurds didn’t have a country in WWII. They still don’t have one today. I’m not sure what Schicter is talking about and Trump is mindlessly parroting, but it’s idiotic.

Got hypocrisy? Sure. So what?

by digby

This has gone viral and it’s telling for sure:

Lindsey Graham: A president who doesn't comply with Congressional requests for information is subject to impeachment. pic.twitter.com/Dhw5VBxbf0— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 8, 2019

It’s fune to watch but it will be 100% meaningless to Graham and his brainwashed supporters.

I have been saying for many years that the Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy and have engaged in what I used to call “epistemological relativism.” I meant that literally. They are hypocrites and propagandists and have been for a very long time now. It will mean nothing to point that out to them. They will simply say, as they always do, “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes.” And their followers will believe them.

And by the way, if anyone should know that it’s Bill Kristol.

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The Times gave Peter Schweizer a forum again? What?

by digby

I have held off piling on the New York Times this cycle because nobody is perfect and the paper is important and does good work.
But this is unforgivable:

2/ Genuinely amazed they ran this. Schweizer is at the center of what is one the Times biggest institutional scandals in years and one they’ve never held themselves accountable for.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 9, 2019

Peter Schweitzer is a professional right-wing hitman. He is funded by the Mercers and is a Breitbart editor. And they know it.

I wrote this Salon column about it in April 2015.  And then again in 2016:

There are dozens of facets to the Bannon story worth exploring in depth, but one project was particularly important to the election of Republican nominee Donald Trump. Breitbart News surely played its part, but it was Bannon’s blandly named Government Accountability Institute that really did the job. Green described as it as a nonprofit organization designed to create indictments against major politicians and then to partner with mainstream media like The New York Times and The Washington Post to achieve wide dissemination.  

Its main contribution to the 2016 campaign was a best-seller by the Government Accountability Institute’s president (right-wing propagandist Peter Schweizer) called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” which I wrote about for Salon. The mainstream press cooperated eagerly and the book created the framework for the “Crooked Hillary” theme that dominated the campaign.

And again just last week:

Unlike all the other Ukraine scandals, this Biden conspiracy didn’t spring from the right-wing fever swamps, nor did Rudy Giuliani “uncover it” as he likes to brag he did. This one was a professional hit job carried out by the same team that brought you “Clinton Cash,” the book about the Clinton Foundation that formed the basis of the “Crooked Hillary” campaign.

This time it was a book called “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” by “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer, who is now an editor at Breitbart News and president of the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit he founded with Steve Bannon and right-wing billionaire Rebekah Mercer. Its purpose is clear enough: To launder far-right smears and dirty tricks .

I wrote about this gang back in 2015 for Salon when Schweizer gulled the New York Times and the Washington Post into partnering with him on the Clinton story, apparently convincing them that the man who wrote “Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Ruined the Global Economy and Will Do It Again if We Don’t Stop Them” was a straight journalist just looking for a little accountability. The book was a huge success at what it set out to do: Tar Hillary Clinton as a corrupt criminal. Why not do it again with Joe Biden, who everyone knew was likely to run against Trump in 2020?

This time, with the notable exception of a couple of dubious stories in the New York Times, the media didn’t bite on the Biden story with quite the same eagerness. Bloomberg’s Joshua Green points out in this article on the subject that while it didn’t catch on in the mainstream press, it was huge in the conservative media, which apparently bothered Bannon a great deal. After all, the GAI was formed to push its smears into the mainstream. Stories that exist only in the conservative bubble simply don’t have the same power to move the broader electorate.

Green notes that because Trump mainlines conservative media, he saw the story as very beneficial to his cause, adding that “what differentiates Trump from other power-consumers of conservative media is that he’s the president and was willing to use his governmental powers to attack a political rival.” Indeed he was. And it was a big mistake — it finally got the Democrats off the dime on impeachment.

Schweizer denies working with Giuliani or the White House. But then, he didn’t have to. He planted the seeds and then Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the Trump and Rudy show made it grow. Green writes:

[T]here’s no question the anti-Biden effort has boomeranged on Trump, who is suddenly under siege from the Democrats’ fast-moving impeachment inquiry. … At this point, no one can say what effect all this will have on the 2020 election. But it looks increasingly like it won’t be the one that Biden’s antagonists, from Trump to Schweizer, were aiming for.

It’s possible this will end up hurting Joe Biden, as these smears almost always do. But it’s hurting Trump even more. And to be honest, I’m not sure that Schweizer and company care that much. If a pain in the neck like Donald Trump gets caught in the crossfire I doubt they’ll lose any sleep over it. Political hitmen aren’t sentimental. They just move on to their next assignment.

It’s unconscionable to give this character assassin any real estate in the New York Times. I’m stunned that they decided to do it again.

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President predator

by digby

I’ve run across a lot of sexual harassers in my day. I worked in Hollywood for decades. But this particular habit of Trump’s is fairly unique I think. Grabbing women by the crotch and forcibly kissing them, as he himself declared on tape that he likes to do, is a pretty unusual “signature.”

In the period before he proposed to Melania, Trump engaged in a wave of allegedly unwanted touching. One of those incidents happened during a Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party in the early 2000s. Karen Johnson spoke publicly about the events of that night for the first time in an interview with us.

Johnson said she was at Trump’s Palm Beach estate that night with her husband, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis, and another relative. The family visited the seaside club regularly; Johnson and her husband had even held their wedding reception there a few years earlier. Trump, whom she didn’t know before her wedding, had “chased some of my bridesmaids around,” said Johnson, but he had been “nice” to her.

At the New Year’s Eve party, Johnson, wearing a black Versace dress, danced with her friends. Shortly after glittering balloons fell from the ceiling at the stroke of midnight, her husband said he wasn’t feeling well and the relative was ready to go. Johnson decided to make a quick trip to the restroom before they headed home. “I hadn’t seen [Trump] that whole entire night,” said Johnson, who was in her late thirties at the time. “I was just walking to the bathroom. I was grabbed and pulled behind a tapestry, and it was him. And I’m a tall girl and I had six-inch heels on, and I still remember looking up at him. And he’s strong, and he just kissed me,” she recounted to us. “I was so scared because of who he was… I don’t even know where it came from. I didn’t have a say in the matter.”

Johnson said Trump then grabbed her hand and said, “You have to help me greet these guests out,” explaining that Melania was upstairs. “So I stood next to him while he greeted some guests out the door,” Johnson said. She didn’t let on that anything was amiss because she didn’t want to create an awkward situation. “I was afraid to say what had happened,” she said. “I didn’t even know how it happened.”

Documentation and photographs corroborate Johnson’s general description of the evening. A friend also said Johnson told him about the encounter years before Trump ran for office.

“When he says that thing, ‘Grab them in the pussy,’ that hits me hard because when he grabbed me and pulled me into the tapestry, that’s where he grabbed me.”

In the days after the incident, Trump began pursuing Johnson. “He started calling me. I answered my phone and he said, ‘Do you know who this is?’ And I knew his voice. And I was wondering how he got my phone number,” she said. He called her regularly for the next week or two, she told us, offering to fly her up to New York to visit him. Johnson told Trump she couldn’t because she was taking care of her dying husband. “Don’t worry about it, he’ll never know you were gone,” she said Trump told her. “He said he’d have me back by six o’clock. This was like crazy. He was going to fly me to New York for the day to see him. I said, ‘No, no, no.’” But Trump persisted. When he was in Florida, he called and said he would send a car to bring her to Mar-a-Lago. “I kept saying, ‘No, no, no,’” she said. “I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

In time, Johnson said, the calls stopped. She never went back to Mar-a-Lago. She eventually told the relative who was with her at the New Year’s Eve party what had happened, but she never told her dying husband. Years later, Johnson was shocked to hear Trump describing on the Access Hollywood tape exactly what he had done to her. “When he says that thing, ‘Grab them in the pussy,’ that hits me hard because when he grabbed me and pulled me into the tapestry, that’s where he grabbed me—he grabbed me there in my front and pulled me in,” she told us.

That’s from a new book called “All the President’s Women” in which the authors apparently interviewed 42 women who were assaulted by Trump.

He’s a true sexual predator.

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Mark it on your calendar, tattoo it on your forehead, the constitutional crisis is here

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

The top headline on the New York Times web site last evening was “White House Declares War on Impeachment Inquiry” referring to the astonishing letter produced by the White House Counsel’s office yesterday declaring that the impeachment inquiry is invalid because the Democrats are seeking to overturn the 2016 election. Since impeachment by definition is a constitutional process to overturn an election, that contention is embarrassingly daft.

But that’s beside the point. This document signals that the White House has decided to formally defy the Congress and challenge its clear constitutional power to check a president who has committed treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. They declared that the concept of checks and balances is no longer operative in the US Constitution. In fact, I don’t know if we can be sure they think the US Constitution is still operative at all.

As Stephen Colbert put it last night:

Colbert: “A lot of people have been saying, up to this point… when’s the constitutional crisis coming? Well mark your calendar, tattoo it on your forehead and flip off your boss, cuz it’s here.” pic.twitter.com/f4zFUEZehf

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 9, 2019

It wasn’t just the comedians saying so. Here’s conservative legal scholar Orin Kerr:

Ok, *now* there’s a constitutional crisis. (Just waiting for the right time to say that.) https://t.co/9LblNF4UwS

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) October 8, 2019

And

Former GOP staffer to Senate Judiciary, Rubio, and Thune blasts WH Counsel letter.🔥🔥 https://t.co/6TBYSZriRw

— Eric Columbus (@EricColumbus) October 8, 2019

It is a very strange “legal” document that is reminiscent of the amateurish James Comey “firing” memo that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein produced for President Trump. It sounds like 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.

It attacks House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Ca) in particular for paraphrasing the famous phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president during the Intelligence Committee hearing contending bizarrely that it proves the president is innocent of wrongdoing. Trump and his White House Counsel apparently see this banal event as some kind of smoking gun even though anyone who watched the hearing had no confusion about the matter and the “rough transcript” the White House released has been read by far more people than saw that hearing. The president’s own words are the problem, not Adam Schiff’s.

By way of “legal” defenses they offer up the decision by the DOJ that Trump didn’t commit a campaign finance violation which is certainly disputable not to mention irrelevant. They also fatuously assert that because Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky, looking like a frightened man in a hostage video, said Trump didn’t “pressure” him, the case is closed.

These “factual” rebuttals to the impeachment inquiry and they bear a striking resemblance to Trump’s twitter tantrums of the past few days. Indeed, it’s fairly obvious that Trump himself dictated the content of the letter. Certainly, the arguments that impeachment is “illegal” because the congress is attempting to overturn an election could not have been drafted by an attorney who plans to practice law after his or her stint in the White House is over. One can assume that is White House Counsel Pat Cippoline, who signed this vacuous document with a flourish.

If the White House argument was shrill and inelegant President Trump’s over-caffeinated lawyer Joe diGenova, appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show on Tuesday night made it sound downright genteel by comparison:

JOE DIGENOVA: What you’re seeing is regicide, this is regicide, by another name, fake impeachment. We get first one anonymous informant, then a second anonymous informant, I refuse to call them whistle-blowers. These two nonentities are suicide bombers that the Democrats have unleashed on the democratic process… It’s pretty obvious that this first suicide bomber who sent that complaint to the inspector general was a paid Democratic operative of the Democratic Party.

He said more than he meant to say there. Donald Trump does believe he is a king. Here’s something he tweeted just last week:

As the President of the United States, I have an absolute right, perhaps even a duty, to investigate, or have investigated, CORRUPTION, and that would include asking, or suggesting, other Countries to help us out!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 4, 2019

Surely it’s a coincidence that he has only seen fit to exercise this “absolute right” in pursuit of his political enemies.

It seems his accomplices in the White House, the Department of Justice and Congressional Republicans are prepared to defend this position. The DOJ decided that a sitting president can’t be indicted because the Constitution specifically orders a political process for presidential misconduct. That was the reason the Mueller Report did not file obstruction of justice charges against the president despite massive evidence of his crimes. Now the White House Counsel has declared that this alternative process is illegitimate because it is political and therefore the American people must make the final decision in the next election. Of course, the president is accused of attempting to sabotage the next election, which is a truly awe-inspiring Catch-22.

The Republicans in Congress seem to be coming around to the idea that they can beat this by pretending that the Democrats are breaking some non-existent rule even as the White House has decided that the constitution is no longer in force. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lugubriously announced:

So far, the House has fallen far short by failing to follow the same basic procedures that it has followed for every other President in our history.

As if McConnell is some kind of a stickler for procedure. (*cough Merrick Garland cough*) There have only been three previous presidential impeachments and in the first of them in 1868  “the House voted to impeach before even deciding what articles would be the basis for it.” So the idea that there are precedents that the House is failing to properly follow is absurd.

As of now, the official GOP talking point is that the process is unfair which, again, sounds as if it came from Donald Trump’s twitter feed. No five-year-old whines and cries as much about “unfairness” as the President of the United States. Unfortunately, at least some of the punditry is prepared to agree, suggesting that the Democrats need to capitulate to the president’s demands lest the public turn on them.  Unfortunately, the only thing the White House will agree to is for the Democrats to abandon their inquiry:

Senior administration official, in call orchestrated by White House, declined to specify what would need to change for White House to cooperate with impeachment inquiry. A “full halt,” official says on the call, of interviews or document requests.

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) October 8, 2019

The question before us now is whether the courts will back this imperial view of the presidency and if they don’t, whether or not Trump will adhere to their rulings. They have more or less respected judicial actions up until now. But that was before they “declared war”  — a war which  Trump and his henchmen are clearly determined to win by any means necessary.

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When It Comes to Killing People, Trump Is Acting More Like Bush

by tristero

During my lifetime, George W. Bush holds the record for being the US president directly responsible for the most deaths through neglect and violence. Bush’s incompetence and profoundly deep psychopathy killed both Americans (also, here) as well as non-Americans (but he specialized in the latter).

So far, Trump’s death record — as awful as it is — doesn’t come close to this monstrous level. That’s about to change:

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Wednesday that Turkey’s military has launched a long-expected offensive into northeastern Syria targeting U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish fighters who have played a central role in battling the Islamic State militant group. 

“The Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Syrian National Army, just launched #OperationPeaceSpring against PKK/YPG and Daesh terrorists in northern Syria,” Erdogan wrote on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, referring to the Syrian-Kurdish force as well as the Islamic State. 

“Our mission is to prevent the creation of a terror corridor across our southern border, and to bring peace to the area,” he said. Turkish media outlets aired footage of warplanes leaving from an air base in Turkey’s southeast and large explosions in Tel Abyad and another Syrian border town. 

The offensive has presented the Trump administration with a dilemma, because of the Syrian-Kurdish forces alliance with the United States. 

The White House announced Sunday that it was withdrawing U.S. troops from the area that Turkey planned to invade, igniting a firestorm of criticism. Republican leaders denounced Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds. Pentagon officials struggled with explanations, humanitarian workers warned of civilian casualties, and Kurdish commanders said they might be forced to abandon their Syrian prisons holding thousands of captured Islamic State fighters and head for the front lines against Turkey.

Anyone who thinks that America will be able to go back to pre-Trump norms or quickly recover global credibility is fooling themselves. That’s because even though the upcoming slaughter of the Kurds’ are on Trump, but all Americans will be blamed.

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Donald, Queen of Hearts
by Tom Sullivan

President Donald J. Trump has stepped through the looking glass, the same mirror on the wall that told him his poll numbers have increased “17 points in the last two or three days.”

Things work differently in Donald’s looking-glass world. The U.S. Constitution neither defines his responsibilities nor limits his powers. He is the law. His rule is imperial.

The State Department on Tuesday refused to allow U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland to appear before House committees engaged in the impeachment inquiry. Sondland, a key figure in the Ukraine investigation, had flown in from Europe and made arrangements to appear. But first he turned over to the State Department personal devices holding Ukraine-related documents committees wish to examine. His superiors now refuse to release them to Congress.

“The failure to produce this witness, the failure to produce these documents, we consider yet additional strong evidence of obstruction of the constitutional functions of Congress,” said Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats swiftly issued a subpoena and set a date for Sondland to appear.

3 surveys out today that show support for impeachment inquiry crossing 50% and potus thinks his best move was to send a letter to Congress declaring himself a king pic.twitter.com/sFwxRVfz5X— Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer 📈🔭🗿💪 (@RachelBitecofer) October 8, 2019

White House counsel Pat Cipollone Tuesday evening sent House committee leaders and Speaker Nancy Pelosi a hyperventilated and nonsensical letter accusing House Democrats’ inquiry of being, well, unfair to the president, of abusing their power under the Constitution and attempting to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

The White House flatly refuses to cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry, declaring “constitutionally invalid” the House of Representatives’ “sole Power of Impeachment” under Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution. As taxpayers, we are paying Cipollone for this legal expertise.

Constitutional crisis? “Ok, *now* there’s a constitutional crisis,” tweets Orin Kerr, professor of law at Berkeley law school.

The Washington Post Editorial Board writes:

PRESIDENT TRUMP is attempting to rewrite the norms of presidential behavior in two fundamental ways in the Ukraine affair. He is claiming the right to directly seek the assistance of foreign governments in pursuing compromising information about his political opponents, even in the absence of any legitimate U.S. investigation. He is also asserting the power to block congressional oversight by prohibiting administration officials from testifying about their official activities, even in private.

These are gross abuses of Mr. Trump’s oath of office. If they are allowed to stand, they will open the way for more offenses in the coming year — including more appeals for foreign intervention in the 2020 election — and they will establish new baselines for future presidents. So congressional Republicans, as well as Democrats, have reason to act forcefully to check Mr. Trump.

Republicans will do nothing. What Democrats will do to enforce their subpoenas remains unclear. These are uncharted waters.

Pelosi told a May press conference nothing was off the table, including inherent contempt powers:

HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: Well, that is a path. That would be inherent contempt. The contempt civil contempt, criminal contempt, and inherent contempt. And if they fail to–to a path I’m not saying an intent but I’m saying again then I mentioned to Katie that this is one of the possibilities that is out there. I am not saying that we are going down that path, I’m just saying it is not to be excluded. Nothing is to be off the table. So in inherent contempt you send a subpoena, they don’t honor it then hold them in contempt and if they do not comply then you can fine them. And then you can hold them accountable for the money that you fine them.

Hold them accountable how? How do Democrats enforce their Article 1 authorities against an administration that has declared itself a law unto itself?

Pelosi needs law enforcement powers to do more than use harsh language against an imperial administration. True believers will not comply unless they are fined to within an inch of their net worths or frog-marched to jail under the gaze of 100 cameras. But since appointing the House Sergeant at Arms as a Special Deputy U.S. Marshal overlaps Executive Branch authorities, a separation of powers issue results. Attorney General William Barr clearly will not accede to any effort to empower law enforcement in these matters.

So then what? Does the fate of the republic depend on White House, State and DOJ staff finding their consciences, lawyering up and sacrificing their careers in defense of the Constitution? We ask more of our military. Why not civilians? They took oaths to defend it as well.

Malone : And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way.

Trumplandia more resembles Wonderland than Looking-glass world, and Trump the Queen of Hearts more than the Red Queen.

The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said, without even looking around.

Place your bets. He’s well on his way.

Crazy and frightening — yet perfect in every way

by digby

Sounds like Trump:

A White House official who listened to President Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s leader described it as “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security,” according to a memo written by the whistle-blower at the center of the Ukraine scandal, a C.I.A. officer who spoke to the White House official.

The White House official was “visibly shaken by what had transpired,” the C.I.A. officer wrote in his memo, one day after Mr. Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in a July 25 phone call to open investigations that would benefit him politically.

A palpable sense of concern had already taken hold among at least some in the White House that the call had veered well outside the bounds of traditional diplomacy, the officer wrote.

“The official stated that there was already a conversation underway with White House lawyers about how to handle the discussion because, in the official’s view, the president had clearly committed a criminal act by urging a foreign power to investigate a U.S. person for the purposes of advancing his own re-election bid in 2020,” the C.I.A. officer wrote.

The document provides a rare glimpse into at least one of the communications with a White House official that helped prompt the whistle-blower’s formal complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general detailing a broad pressure campaign on Ukraine. The complaint and a reconstructed transcript released by the White House formed the basis of the House impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump.

The inspector general, Michael Atkinson, handed the two-page memo over to Congress last week. A person familiar with its contents described it to The New York Times. Fox News first reported details from it. Neither a lawyer for the whistle-blower nor a spokeswoman for Mr. Atkinson immediately responded to requests for comment.

The whistle-blower, who had no firsthand knowledge of the events he described, wrote in his complaint that he spoke to “multiple U.S. government officials” who said that Mr. Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”

It was not clear whether the White House official he spoke to on July 26 was the second whistle-blower, who has also provided information to Mr. Atkinson, or a different person. Neither whistle-blower’s name has been made public.

According to reporters on TV today, Trump really believed that his call was “perfect.” That doesn’t track with the fact that it appears EU Ambassador Sondland spoke with him personally while they were in the midst of this arms-for-Biden project and clearly instructed him to cover it up in that robotic, over-lawyerly text to acting Ukraine Ambassador Bill Taylor.

He’s an idiot. He does believe that he has a right to do anything or, at least, that he can say that and 40% of the people in this country will back him. But on some level he clearly knows he’s a criminal because he keeps covering it up!