Month: October 2019

Tuesday was bad for Trump; today could be worse
by Tom Sullivan

If you’re reading this before 10 a.m. EDT, you may want to tune into this. Otherwise, read on.

Acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor’s closed-door testimony before House investigators was devastating for the president’s “no quid pro quo” defenders across the capitol. His prepared statement made public Tuesday afternoon details the lengths to which President Trump through an “irregular” policy channel went to coerce — extort is not too strong a word — a public statement from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine was investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

“‘Everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,” Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told Taylor in early September. Trump held hostage $391 million in military aid authorized and appropriated by Congress and critical to Ukraine’s defense against Russian occupying forces. Trump was more interested in a public relations bludgeon to wield against his likely 2020 Democratic opponent.

Taylor testified Sondland told him, “President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.” No public statement, no military aid.

Taylor slowly became aware of this irregular policy channel after taking over the American embassy in Ukraine in mid-June. A month later, it became clear it was subverting official U.S. policy:

On a video conference call with White House officials on July 18, Taylor heard the voice of someone out of the camera’s frame, an official from the Office of Management and Budget informing the group that she had been instructed not to allow any additional military aid to flow to Ukraine until further notice.

“I and others sat in astonishment,” Taylor said. “The Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support.” The OMB official offered no explanation for the sudden suspension of this aid, except to say that “the directive had come from the president to the chief of staff to OMB.”

“In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened,” Taylor testified. “The irregular policy channel was running contrary to the goals of longstanding U.S. policy.”

John Podhoretz, conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, told MSNBC’s “The Beat,” Taylor’s testimony was “the worst day for the Trump presidency.”

Is Trump’s action impeachable? “Absolutely.” The identity of the original whistleblower “doesn’t matter anymore,” Podhoretz said. Taylor was there. Sondland was there. Trump and acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, have publicly admitted to the scheme.

Tuesday may have been “the worst day for the Trump presidency.” But today could prove worse.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero ruled two weeks ago against Trump’s efforts to keep his taxes from Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance. The U.S. Court of Appeals agreed to place a hold on that release pending Trump’s appeal. Law & Crime reports “the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed to allow a livestream audio of Wednesday’s oral arguments.” A refresher:

As previously reported by Law&Crime, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance in August subpoenaed eight years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns from the [resident’s finance firm Mazars USA as part of an investigation into whether Trump or the Trump Organization violated state laws in connection with the hush payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.

Trump’s attorneys filed the appeal with the Second Circuit after U.S. District judge Victor Marrero earlier this month denied the president’s request to prevent Vance’s office from enforcing the subpoenas demanding his tax returns. Marrero rejected the “extraordinary claim” that Trump, as president, was completely immune from complying with any criminal proceedings against him or his businesses.

In his 75-page ruling, Marrero rejected Trump’s assertion of executive immunity as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” Marrero wrote:

The notion of federal supremacy and presidential immunity from judicial process that the President here invokes, unqualified and boundless in its reach as described above, cuts across the grain of these constitutional precedents. It also ignores the analytic framework that the Supreme Court has counseled should guide review of presidential claims of immunity from judicial process. Of equal fundamental concern, the President’s claim would tread upon principles of federalism and comity that form essential components of our constitutional structure and the federal/state balance of governmental powers and functions. Bared to its core, the proposition the President advances reduces to the very notion that the Founders rejected at the inception of the Republic, and that the Supreme Court has since unequivocally repudiated: that a constitutional domain exists in this country in which not only the President, but, derivatively relatives and persons and business entities associated with him in potentially unlawful private activities, are in fact above the law.

Because the president’s claim rests on the series of Department of Justice memos that preclude the DOJ (and lately, Robert Mueller) from indicting a sitting president, Marrero spent much of his ruling examining their legal merits. He concludes their claims rely on “suppositions, practicalitiess, and public policy, as well as on conjurings of remote prospects and hyperbolic horrors,” and that “the DOJ Memos do not constitute authoritative judicial interpretation of the Constitution.”

Should the Second Circuit decide to uphold the lower court, Trump’s worst week in his worst month will get worse still.

You can listen to 40 minutes of oral arguments here at 10 a.m. EDT.

Update: Link reads 10:30 a.m.

The baby shark protest

Humans really can be very fine people.

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It looks like that Syria thing is going swimmingly

by digby

For some people anyway:

Putin and Erdogan Announce Plan for Northeast Syria, Bolstering Russian Influence

Russia’s leader hosted his Turkish counterpart as a U.S.-brokered cease-fire with Kurdish forces came to an end, underscoring Moscow’s emergence as a powerful player in the Middle East. His jets patrol Syrian skies. His military is expanding operations at the main naval base in Syria. He is forging closer ties to Turkey. He and his Syrian allies are moving into territory vacated by the United States.

And on Tuesday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia played host to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, for more than six hours of talks on how they and other regional players will divide control of Syria, a land devastated by eight years of civil war.

The negotiations ended in a victory for Mr. Putin: Russian and Turkish troops will take joint control over a vast swath of formerly Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria, in a move that cements the rapid expansion of Russian influence in Syria at the expense of the United States and its Kurdish former allies.

Under terms of the agreement, Syrian Kurdish forces have six days to retreat more than 20 miles from the border, abandoning land that they had controlled uncontested until earlier this month — when their protectors, the American military, suddenly began to withdraw from the region. The Syrian Kurdish leadership did not immediately respond to the demand.

Mr. Erdogan got most of what he wanted — a buffer zone free of a militia that Turkey regards as a terrorist threat — but it came at the expense of sharing control of the area with Mr. Putin and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, whose rule Mr. Erdogan has long opposed.

“Only if Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is respected can a long-lasting and solid stabilization in Syria be achieved,” Mr. Putin said alongside Mr. Erdogan after the meeting.

“It is important that our Turkish partners share this approach,” Mr. Putin added. “The Turks will have to defend peace and calm on the border together with the Syrians. This can only be done in the atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation.”

Isn’t that special?

Russia as the premier power broker in the Middle East isn’t inherently terrible except for the fact that millions of Kurds have now been ethnically cleansed and their homes will now be occupied by the non-Kurd Syrian refugees that have been living in Turkey during the Putin-Assad bombardment.

Trump is fine will all this because he thinks they’re all shithole countries anyway and is such an ignoramus that he doesn’t understand the ramifications of Russia being the most powerful mideast power broker.  Trump is simple-minded about how the world works and is completely clueless about what the Russian president might want to achieve in all this that is not in the national interest of the US. Of course, Trump believes that what’s in the national interest is what’s in his personal interest so perhaps the upcoming election sabotage on his behalf will be more than enough to make up for it.

I just heard on CNN that Assad is so “giddy” about Russia quickly moving troops into northern Syria that he called up Putin to personally congratulate him. So that’s nice.

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But her emailzzzzzzz….

by digby

This piece by Ian Millhiser takes an in-depth look at the grotesque journalistic malpractice of the last election in light of the State Department’s final report this week that concluded Clinton did nothing wrong with her emails. He goes over the substance of the complaint and lays out the facts. Then he goes into the media’s behavior, including the New York Times this week placing the exoneration on page 16, after pimping the story relentlessly on the front page right up until election day in 2016:

Clinton’s use of private email was the sort of minor scandal that the public deserved to be informed about at some point during the 2016 election — after which the news cycle could move on to other, more important stories. But that sure as hell wasn’t how it was covered. Indeed, it is likely that Donald Trump is president today in part because of the press’s obsession with this very small story.

The press covered Clinton’s emails with an Ahab-like obsession

Months after the 2016 election, a team of researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society set out to quantify which issues received coverage — and which issues were ignored — by major media outlets during that election. To do so, they read thousands of campaign-related articles in several major outlets, and counted how many sentences were devoted to various issues. The results are striking.Faris, Robert M., Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. 2017.

As CJR later summarized this research, the Berkman Klein Center “found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal.” Indeed, emails so dominated coverage that “the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.”

Meanwhile, CJR researchers Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild did a deep dive into how the New York Times covered 2016, and their findings are just as stark. “Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton,” during the last 69 days of the 2016 campaign, “291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidate’s positions.”

One-hundred fifty of these New York Times articles, moreover, appeared on the paper’s front page. Of these, only 16 discussed policy in any way, “of which six had no details, four provided details on Trump’s policy only, one on Clinton’s policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates’ policies.” By contrast, the Times ran 10 front-page articles on Clinton’s emails in just six days, between October 29 and November 3.

The overarching impression created by this reporting, in other words, was that the emails were more important than all of the policy questions facing voters in 2016 — questions like whether millions of Americans would lose health care, whether the United States would bar immigrants because of their religion, and who would control the Supreme Court.

We cannot know with certainty what would have happened if news outlets did not fixate on this story during 2016. But as Tina Nguyen wrote in Vanity Fair, “you could fit all the voters who cost Clinton the election in a mid-sized football stadium.” As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote in 2017, “Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28” that reinvigorated the emails story shortly before the election.

We do know, moreover, that the obsessive coverage of Clinton’s emails shaped how voters perceived the 2016 race. In September 2016, Gallup asked voters what they recalled hearing about the two major presidential candidates. The word cloud for Trump primarily shows a mixture of immigration policy and generic campaign terms.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s word cloud speaks for itself.

The press obsession with government IT security, moreover, appears to be a passing fad that ended the moment Clinton lost her shot at the White House. News broke last November, for example, that First Daughter and presidential aide Ivanka Trump “sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules.” Yet this story received only a fraction of the coverage that Clinton’s emails received.
There is an important conversation to be had about email security at the State Department, but we didn’t have it in 2016

Setting aside the media mania over Clinton’s emails, there is a very important story about classified email security at the State Department that journalists could have told in 2016. Broadly speaking, the federal government’s processes regarding how classified information should be handled are designed with low and mid-level personnel in mind, and are ill-suited for the issues facing very senior diplomats.

As of October of 2015, 4.3 million people have security clearances from the United States government. This includes some very low-level personnel who have access to extraordinarily sensitive information. Think of Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who leaked hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, battlefield reports, and other classified documents when she was a junior enlisted soldier.

Because there is such a high risk that someone could leak damaging national security information, the protocols for handling such information are often very strict, and the penalties for violating these protocols can be quite high. The fact that so many people must comply with these protocols also fed a perception that Clinton refused to obey rules that rank-and-file government employees must follow religiously.

But the fact is that the secretary of state — be it Clinton, Rice, or Powell — is very different from a low-ranking soldier like Manning. The rigid protocols that we impose on most people with security clearances do not always make sense for senior diplomats.

As Suzanne Nossel, a former deputy assistant secretary of state under Clinton, explained in a 2015 piece in Foreign Policy, “neither then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nor her aides had a classified smartphone.” Typically, State Department officials with access to classified information will have one email address for ordinary communications and another for classified communications (Clinton used her personal address as her address for ordinary communications). But, to access the classified address, an official must be at a special computer set up to access classified information. Because high-level officials are not always near such a computer, an email sent to a classified address may not be seen for “hours or even days.”

A senior diplomat might need the secretary to tell her how to vote on a particular United Nations resolution, for example. But if that diplomat follows proper protocol and queries the secretary over the classified email system, the secretary may not see the email until the vote has already taken place.

Senior diplomats, in Nossel’s words, must “make tough choices about the trade-off between security and the need for timely transmission of vital information.” And in the heat of an ongoing negotiation or an impending crisis, it is not always clear that following rigid protocols is in the best interests of the nation.

Clinton was, of course, the head of the State Department, so she fairly can be criticized for not implementing new processes that could address these concerns. There is a nuanced conversation to be had about how the State Department should balance concerns about information security with senior diplomats’ need to convey information quickly. News outlets could have used the controversy over Clinton’s emails as a jumping-off point to spark this conversation. Perhaps this kind of coverage could have pushed the department to implement needed reforms.

Instead, we got a circus where every new twist in the emails saga received big headlines and overwhelming coverage. We got an election cycle where Hillary Clinton’s IT practices received more coverage than her opponent bragging about how he grabs women “by the pussy” without their consent.

And now we have an appropriate bookend for this media-made scandal: a State Department report that finds it was no big deal in the end, published on page A16 of the New York Times.

This is for the record. It’s in the past. The problem is that they do not seem to have learned their lesson. When the Democratic nominee is decided I expect that they will immediately start to gobble up the usual right-wing character assassination, assuring themselves that they have to do it “because it’s out there.”

QOTD: the isolationist peacenik

by digby

This was an interesting little aside during yesterdays rambling Queeglike performance:

“I’m trying to get out of wars. We may have to get in wars, too. OK? We may have to get in wars. We’re better prepared than we’ve ever been. If Iran does something, they’ll be hit like they’ve never been hit before. I mean, we have things that we’re looking at.”

He wants his own wars, you see. Not those old wars that were started by those losers. He’s looking for a new war, the biggest war, the best war.

Oy vey, this too:

“ISIS was all over the place … It was me…who captured them. I’m the one who did the capturing. I’m the one who knows more about it than you people or the fake pundits.”

Hookay:

“There is no question that ISIS is one of the big winners in what is happening in Syria.”

They’re no angels

by digby

After pushing unfounded Biden conspiracies, Trump tells Hannity that if his sons Don Jr & Eric accepted payments from questionable foreign sources "it would be the biggest story of the century." (The Trump Organization does in fact take payments from questionable foreign sources) pic.twitter.com/mWPZGSLuOw— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 22, 2019

Uh huh:

Congratulations to our extraordinary @TrumpScotland team! Minutes ago, we received full & total approval for a new phase of development to include 500 homes, 50 cottages, sports center, retail & more. We also received approval to build a 2nd golf course! Very proud of them! pic.twitter.com/odVxomGdmf— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) September 26, 2019

Aaaand the big kahuna:

Junior and Ivanka were in that one up to their necks.

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People should pay more attention to Bernie Sanders on foreign policy

by digby

He doesn’t get much attention for this, but I continue to be impressed by Bernie Sanders’ approach to foreign policy. Here he is last night on PBS. It’s a short discussion and doesn’t get into much detail but as shorthand for the progressive position, it’s just right in my opinion:

Judy Woodruff:

Senator, a question about foreign policy.

As you know, President Trump this month pulled out 1,000 U.S. troops from Syria, from Northern Syria. He’s been criticized by people in both political parties as selling out the Kurds.

You in the past have been someone who has been, to put it mildly, skeptical of the value of U.S. troops abroad. What would you do if you were president right now about Syria? Would you put those troops back in?

Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Well, two things.

Judy, you’re certainly right. I would say the word skeptical is an understatement. I helped lead the opposition to the war in Iraq. And, tragically, much of what I feared ended up taking place.

And I will say this, that I think Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds, people who lost 10,000 soldiers fighting against ISIS, is one of the worst foreign policy and military decisions ever made by any president in the history of this country. It is outrageous.

And it’s going to haunt us for a long time, because our allies all over the world are going to say, can we really trust the United States of America to stand with us?

Now, Syria, as you well know, is an enormously complicated issue. You have got a president there who has used chemical weapons against his own people.

But our job right now is to work with the international community, with our allies to prevent further Russian gains and Iranian gains in that region, bring stability to that area, and do everything we can to create a peaceful situation in terms of what’s going on there right now.

Judy Woodruff:

So would you put the troops back into Northern Syria?

Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Well, you are asking me how I would undo the damage that Trump has inflicted on us in that region.

It’s something I think that, as a nation and as a community, as allies, I — we and our allies are going to have to work together on that issue.

But what Trump did is unforgivable in terms of his betrayal of the Kurds.

Judy Woodruff:

You would have left the troops there?

Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Yes, I would have.

Judy Woodruff:

And, finally, Senator…

Sen. Bernie Sanders:

I think, when you deal with troop withdrawal, when you deal with the — trying to end endless wars, was you don’t do it based on a phone call with Erdogan of Turkey, and you don’t do it through a tweet.

I mean, these are difficult issues. We want our troops home. I will do everything I can to end our involvement in endless wars. But you don’t do it just based on a phone call with the president of Turkey.

Judy Woodruff:

Senator Bernie Sanders, joining us today from Vermont, thank you very much.

Sanders is an internationalist in the best sense. I wrote this piece a year or so ago for Salon about his response to the rise of right-wing nationalism. It remains the best progressive response I’ve seen so far:

I suspect many members of the American left have been looking for their leaders to speak out on this. On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders came through with a searing op-ed in the Guardian condemning this far-right movement and calling it out for the serious threat it is. He calls it “a global struggle taking place of enormous consequence. Nothing less than the future of the planet – economically, socially and environmentally – is at stake … we are seeing the rise of a new authoritarian axis.”

Sanders didn’t use the term “axis” by accident. He writes:

While these regimes may differ in some respects, they share key attributes: hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish financial interests. … This trend certainly did not begin with Trump, but there’s no question that authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn inspiration from the fact that the leader of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy seems to delight in shattering democratic norms.

It is extremely important that one of the most important leaders of the American left puts this is such stark and evocative terms. He calls out the corrupt, authoritarian leadership of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, China and more and makes the connections among them clear, calling them part of a “common front” sharing tactics and even some of the same mega-rich funders.

Sanders doesn’t offer specific policies to combat this threat, beyond his social-democratic economic agenda and standard non-interventionist philosophy but that’s not the important part. He is issuing a wake-up call to the American left:

In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power. 

Such a movement must be willing to think creatively and boldly about the world that we would like to see. While the authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-second world war global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth, it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists now. 

We must look honestly at how that order has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support for their agenda. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a genuinely progressive global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace.

Neither the American left nor the international left is buying into Bannon and company’s cramped, ugly, Hobbesian worldview and it never will. The right-wing racists and nationalists are on their own.

Bernie is obviously seen as a democratic socialist most concerned with forcefully challenging the economic status quo. Your mileage may vary on all that. But he is also a progressive internationalist with a sophisticated and practical view of America’s place in the world going forward.

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Trump’s favorite daddies

by digby

Look who’s whispering in his ear:

President Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for information he could use against political rivals came as he was being urged to adopt a hostile view of that country by its regional adversaries, including Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said.

Neither of those foreign leaders specifically encouraged Trump to see Ukraine as a potential source of damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, nor did they describe Kyiv as complicit in an unsubstantiated 2016 election conspiracy theory, officials said.

I do not believe that last. Why? Well, ask yourself why Trump had a 2 hour private meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and started babbling feverishly about “the server” at the press conference when they asked him about Russian meddling in the election:

REPORTER (Jonathan Lemire from AP): Thank you. A question for each president. President Trump, you first. Just now President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every US intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did.

My first question for you, sir, is who do you believe? My second question is would you now with the whole world watching tell President Putin — would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?

TRUMP: So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the democratic national committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying? With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia.

I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone — just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails. So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that president Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Okay thank you.

Whether he mentioned Ukraine specifically is unknown but it’s almost certain that stupid server thing came up. And if Putin didn’t mention it to Trump, Trump almost certainly mentioned it to Putin. Do you suppose old Vlad just kept silent on that issue?

As for Orban, who knows? But he is a malevolent wingnut so whatever he said to Trump was bound to be something bad:

Just 10 days before a key meeting on Ukraine, President Trump met, over the objections of his national security adviser, with one of the former Soviet republic’s most virulent critics, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, and heard a sharp assessment that bolstered his hostility toward the country, according to several people informed about the situation.

Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Orban on May 13 exposed him to a harsh indictment of Ukraine at a time when his personal lawyer was pressing the new government in Kiev to provide damaging information about Democrats. Mr. Trump’s suspicious view of Ukraine set the stage for events that led to the impeachment inquiry against him.

The visit by Mr. Orban, who is seen as an autocrat who has rolled back democracy, provoked a sharp dispute within the White House. John R. Bolton, then the president’s national security adviser, and Fiona Hill, then the National Security Council’s senior director for Eurasian and Russian affairs, opposed a White House invitation for the Hungarian leader, according to the people briefed on the matter. But they were outmaneuvered by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, who supported such a meeting.

It’s so obvious that Trump is being manipulated by these strongmen. They instinctively get that he’s a clueless, blustery, bully who is in way over his head and they aren’t afraid to take him in hand. It’s hard not to psychoanalyze Trump because it’s endlessly challenging to try to understand him. But at this point, it seems pretty obvious that he’s got serious daddy issues. The despots and tyrants know just how to make him mind.

Update

Oh look another wingnut imbecile cozying up to Orban:

The annual Independence Day celebration at the United States Embassy in Budapest is usually a modest garden party, a chance for the ambassador to celebrate American freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

This year, the ambassador, David B. Cornstein, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a blowout gala for 800 guests. He flew in the singer Paul Anka from California. The guest of honor was Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has curtailed the very freedoms the event was meant to highlight.

Standing at a lectern, Mr. Cornstein declared Mr. Orban “the perfect partner” and “a very, very strong and good leader.” Mr. Anka serenaded the Hungarian leader with a personalized rendition of “My Way.”

For many in the room, it was a bewildering spectacle: an American ambassador lavishing praise on a far-right leader whose party has methodically eroded Hungarian democracy and pushed anti-Semitic tropes. But it was just another demonstration of Mr. Cornstein’s pattern of emboldening Mr. Orban.

Since becoming ambassador in June 2018, Mr. Cornstein has assiduously courted Mr. Orban, giving the Hungarian leader unexpected influence in the Trump administration. Mr. Cornstein used his decades-long friendship with President Trump to help broker a coveted Oval Office meeting for Mr. Orban last May — a meeting now under scrutiny by impeachment investigators in Washington.

At the time, some White House officials tried to stop the meeting, citing Mr. Orban’s anti-democratic record in Hungary and his growing closeness to Russia. The meeting went ahead, and Mr. Orban is said to have used it to fuel the president’s suspicions about Ukraine.

As yet, Mr. Cornstein’s role in that meeting does not appear to be part of the impeachment inquiry. But his freewheeling diplomacy and courtship of Mr. Orban have alarmed career civil servants and contributed to broader criticism, even among Republicans, that some members of the president’s foreign policy team are dangerously unprepared for the job.

During the past year, Mr. Cornstein, an 81-year-old jewelry magnate, has developed unusually close relationships with Mr. Orban and his advisers, according to several American and Western officials. He exchanges text messages with them, occasionally from personal devices, and boasts about his contacts — even as American security officials warn that Mr. Orban is trying to manipulate him.

Jayzuz…

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Advice and moving goalposts
by Tom Sullivan

Impeachment hearings continue today in the U.S. House, extending Donald Trump’s very bad October and whining from Republicans that the inquiry lacks formal authorization.

William Taylor, now the lead U.S. diplomat in Kiev, testifies in the presidential impeachment probe this morning in a closed-door hearing before the Democratic-led House of Representatives Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight Committees. Taylor’s text message to Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that holding up approved military aid to Ukraine for political reasons would be “crazy” made the former Army officer and career U.S. diplomat a key witness in the House investigations.

Taylor had concerns about President Trump using military aid to Ukraine to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Taylor made sure concerns he’d voiced appeared on the record:

[9/9/19, 12:47:11 AM] Bill Taylor: As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

Sondland waited hours to reply. After consulting with President Trump, Sondland sent a “formal-sounding denial” (NYT) and asked Taylor to stop putting his thoughts in writing:

[9/9/19, 5:19:35 AM] Gordon Sondland: Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign I suggest we stop the back and forth by text If you still have concerns I recommend you give Lisa Kenna or S a call to discuss them directly. Thanks.

Republicans defending the president insist the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry lacks validity without a House vote to authorize one. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has refused their demands, stating the House will not take a formal vote “at this time.” A formal vote is not required.

Dahlia Lithwick gets at why acceding to Republican demands is a fool’s game in a column explaining why a statement by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is not a crack in Trump’s firewall. “If you could show me that, you know, Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing,” Graham said.

Pressure is mounting on Republicans, Lithwick writes, “to do something about the Trump administration’s human rights violations, blatant corruption, Giuliani-hackery, and mounting counterintelligence problems.” But that doesn’t mean GOP feints in the direction of accountability are meaningful. Graham simply moved the goal posts:

Look at what Graham said again. He claimed that he would vote for impeachment in the Senate as soon as someone showed him “a crime,” and not only that—it needed to be a crime that was “outside the phone call.” In the event that you missed the head-feint there, under the plain language of the Constitution, impeachment requires no finding of criminal lawbreaking. The Constitution provides for impeachment and removal of the president and other high officers for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” We know what treason and bribery mean, but “high crimes and misdemeanors,” while amorphous, surely encompass a lot more than merely breaking criminal laws. As Frank Bowman has explained here in Slate, the notion that impeachment remedies only criminal conduct makes no sense.

Witness the same moving of goal posts when Graham goes one further in his alleged concession on impeachment to Axios. Not only does he claim that he needs to be shown a crime, he then goes on to constrain the crime he needs to see as one that demands a quid pro quo. First of all, recognize the absurdity of Graham saying he needs more proof of quid pro quo outside of that phone call, given that the phone call provides a pretty clear indication that quid pro quo-ing was going on.

“Quid pro quo” is simply the new “no collusion.” Thus, Lithwick adds, “It’s not paranoia to suggest that whenever you are offered impeachment assistance from the likes of Graham, you’ll first want to check that gift horse for bleeding gums, cavities, and halitosis before agreeing that he’s actually moving the needle on the impeachment process.”

This is why Pelosi will hold a formal impeachment vote in her own time and on her own terms. Republicans will reply to a formal impeachment vote by moving the goal posts. Digby suggested another reason for Pelosi to delay in a tweet yesterday:

Wouldn't it be smart to delay a Senate impeachment vote until after it's too late for the Republican Senators to draw a primary opponent?— digby (@digby56) October 21, 2019

Graham is not the only one offering helpful impeachment advice. Kelly Jane Torrance of Spectator USA cautions Democrats they are doing impeachment all wrong:

Impeachment of an elected president, especially when he’s up for re-election in just over a year, is a serious step. If the American people — and Republican members of Congress — are going to have any chance of backing this inquiry’s final recommendations, it needs to be conducted in an open and transparent way that respects established legal principles, such as the right to face one’s accusers and to cross-examine witnesses.

“As talking points go, this one is constitutionally illiterate,” the Washington Post’s fact checker wrote on Oct. 10.

“And why not begin with a full House vote?” Torrance adds.

Not required, says the Congressional Research Service. The House could, but “has always chosen to conduct an investigation first.”

Neither the White House nor House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) responded to fact checker’s questions regarding their talking points.

‘Tis the season for gift horses and mouths and moving goal posts.

He doesn’t like being contradicted

by digby

So, waddaya think? Was the finger a coincidence? Or was he acting like a snotty 15-year-old bully? It’s not as if that would be unusual…

He didn’t look happy…

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