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Month: December 2019

Remember when everyone was worried about “normalizing” Trump?

Remember when everyone was worried about “normalizing” Trump?

by digby

Well, it’s happened. From Brian Seltzer’s newsletter:


Impeachment fades from forefront

For only the fourth time in history, the President of the United States is facing impeachment. It’s a historic moment. And yet, some of the country’s biggest news organizations are putting the story on the back burner. Despite the House Judiciary Committee beginning debate over the articles of impeachment Wednesday evening, the news wasn’t in the top three stories on the three major broadcast networks.

ABC, CBS, and NBC all led their programs with the shooting at the Jersey kosher market. David Muir then covered the arctic blast and IG report. Lester Holt moved on to the tentative Harvey Weinstein settlement and New Zealand volcano. And Norah O’Donnell reported on the Boeing 737 MAX and IG report. Impeachment was the No. 4 story on all the major nets.

No impeachment story on NYT A1

But the impeachment story isn’t just fading from the network news broadcasts. The first edition of NYT’s A1 on Thursday features no stories on impeachment. Instead, only a small blurb indicates that the House Judiciary Committee “met at night to debate the articles,” and refers readers to page A19 for coverage. Yep, the paper of record will have only a minimal reference to impeachment on Thursday’s front page…

Fox & MSNBC carry regular programming

Over on cable news, CNN was the only outlet to carry the impeachment hearings uninterrupted. MSNBC carried the opening statements and dipped in and out, but largely charged through with normal prime time programming. Fox News didn’t even carry the opening statements live. The network aired normal programming throughout the night, occasionally playing a sound bite or two from the proceedings.

A reminder

News industry and political professionals are plugged into the news cycle and know the twists and turns of the impeachment story. But it’s worth keeping in mind, there is a considerable amount of the country that does not live on Twitter and watch cable news all day. They count on programs like the evening news. And those who tuned in Wednesday were seeing stories like the arctic blast or New Zealand volcano prioritized above history in the making.

I know that MSNBC covered the story in-depth all day, which is the most important thing. No on who watches that network doesn’t know what’s happening. But the many millions of people who watch Fox or catch the evening news are getting short-changed. 

This is one reason why so many people don’t have any real civic knowledge. Something monumental is happening in our politics. It’s hugely important to everyone in the country whether they know it or not. If Donald Trump manages to escape accountability, if cannot be held legally liable, his party refuses to remove him for gross violations of his oath to the constitution — and he is re-elected, we are in deep, deep shit. We are facing an unprecedented existential crisis with climate change and the world order as we’ve known it since the 1940s is coming apart and there is nothing but chaos replacing it. We can’t afford to lose another four years to this criminal and his dysfunctional, cowardly cult/party.

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The return of “Monica Goodling” by @BloggersRUs

The return of “Monica Goodling”
by Tom Sullivan

Was Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) really suggesting what he seemed to be suggesting?

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz figgeted during Graham’s 40-minute rant to open the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on his findings on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Graham was on a roll, one he continued as the hearing unfolded.

Graham, the committee chair, read emails from FBI staff critical of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and asked repeatedly whether FBI members up and down the investigative team had political bias “that reeked” influencing their decisions.

Horowitz said he found none. Graham was unfazed:

You did a great job. The old adage is if you wake up and the lawn is wet, you can assume it rained. If you’ve got a guy who hates Trump’s guts from day one, thinks Pence is stupid and everybody who voted for Trump’s a idiot, and you give him power over Trump, maybe you’re making a mistake. Or again, maybe all these people who had these biases did nothing about it. Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. We know what they did.

Graham’s bias-hunt implied people with strong political opinions (like him) cannot do their jobs in an honest, dispassionate, and professional fashion. He all but suggested there should be political litmus tests for federal officials or that only the politically neutered find employment. A lot of people in America believe Trump is an idiot and they are entitled to, Graham acknowledged, “but you shouldn’t be in the journalism business. You shouldn’t be at the FBI.”

We’ve been down that road before. Or at least, another Republican administration has. It was another another inspector general that found political bias in Department of Justice hiring under the Bush administration in July 2008. Bush appointees had violated federal law and department policy by screening applicants for their political affiliations:

The two offices focused on the activities of Monica Goodling, the former White House liaison at DOJ under ex-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as well as Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ former chief of staff, and Jan Williams, Goodling’s predecessor as White House liaison.

Goodling admitted during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that her hiring decisions for some career positions at DOJ may have been influenced in part based on political consideration,” including Assistant U.S. Attorneys, immigration judges and other senior career posts at Justice, but the OPR-OIG laid out in much greater detail what actually occurred.

“Our investigation found that Goodling improperly subjected candidates for certain career positions to the same politically based evaluation she used on candidates for political positions, in violation of federal law and Department policy,” the 140-page report states. “The evidence also showed that Goodling considered political or ideological affiliations when recommending and selecting candidates for other permanent career positions, including a career SES [Senior Executive Service] position in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA) and AUSA [Assistant U.S. Attorney] positions. These actions violated federal law and Department policy, and also constituted misconduct.”

With his repeated inquiries about bias driving investigative decisions, complaints echoing Trump’s “Deep State” conspiracy, Graham was arguing for kind of political screening last found illegal under the George W. Bush administration. Two 2018 reports from the Office of the Inspector General found wrongdoing in both DOJ’s hiring practices and in the political firings of nine U.S. attorneys (September 2008).

Goodling resigned in April 2007 after pleading the Fifth Amendment and refusing to testify on the attorney firings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, then chaired by Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont. She testified in May about the firings before the House Judiciary Committee under a grant of immunity. Gonzales resigned in August.

Attacks on career government officials and the appointment of less-qualified candidates with preferred political views is an extension of practices that took down Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The Trump administration is simply a restart of the “to the victor go the spoils” approach of the Bush ideologues, only more overt and with Bill Barr unlikely to resign if similar malfeasance comes to light. Clearly, political litmus tests are Graham’s preference and in line with Trump’s desire to root out the “Deep State” of his paranoid imaginings. Trump doesn’t want competence. He wants loyalists.

Character assassination from the bully pulpit

Character assassination from the bully pulpit

 by digby

This is disgusting. He made it up to entertain the ecstatic cult followers:

I don’t usually post commentary by Max Boot but I thought his observation was important:

In 1987, former labor secretary Raymond Donovan, who had resigned from President Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet after being indicted on fraud charges more than two years earlier, was acquitted by a New York jury. “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” he asked angrily.

I thought of Donovan’s famous lament this week after the Justice Department inspector general concluded that, while the FBI had made some mistakes in its investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, it had legitimate grounds to open the investigation, it did not spy on the campaign and it was not pursuing any political agenda.

So much for the vitriol President Trump has been spewing for years about former FBI director James B. Comey (“Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey”), former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe (“a major sleazebag,” “a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country”), former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and former FBI agent Peter Strzok (“incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers”), Justice Department attorney Bruce Ohr (“in legal jeopardy, it’s astonishing that he’s still employed”), former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (the “highly conflicted” leader of “18 Angry Democrats”) and various other individuals. Trump accused them of concocting a “Phony & Treasonous Hoax” and of attempting to “overthrow the President through an illegal coup.”

All lies. Damnable lies. The only hoax was the one Trump was perpetrating.

We are so used to the venomous way Trump tweets and talks that we have forgotten how unprecedented, appalling and unhinged this actually is. No president has ever reviled so many individual Americans by name. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was more respectful in discussing convicted atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg than Trump has been in referring to dedicated law enforcement professionals who have served our country for decades.

Trump likes to go on and on about lives that have been ruined. Most of the one’s he’s talking about are in jail because they committed crimes. The people Trump has degraded and demeaned in public have had their characters assassinated and their lives ruined because the president is an abusive, pathological liar. And apparently, his followers love him for it, which is even worse:

Some more highlights of his sickening rally last night:

The president is a crook who stole from his own charity

The president is a crook who stole from his own charity

by digby

 

Your president ladies and gentlemen:

The payments bring an end to the life of the Trump Foundation, which Trump started in 1987 to give away proceeds from his book “the Art of the Deal.” It went nearly dormant during Trump’s lean years in the 1990s.

In the 2000s, Trump began to use the charity in ways that benefited himself or his businesses, according to the attorney general’s lawsuit. He used the charity’s cash to buy paintings of himself and sports memorabilia and to pay $258,000 in legal settlements for his for-profit clubs.

Charity leaders are barred from using their nonprofits’ money for personal benefit.

Trump also used the charity to boost political campaigns — first, Pamela Bondi’s Florida attorney general campaign, and then his own 2016 campaign. Trump gave away Trump Foundation checks onstage at rallies, despite strict rules barring nonprofit charities from participating in political campaigns.

 The New York attorney general’s suit drew heavily on reporting by The Washington Post during the 2016 election.

Now, the foundation will be shuttered. The consequences of this case will linger for Trump. Under the terms of the settlement, he has agreed to special supervision if he ever returns to charity work in New York.

That’s not all:

“The court’s decision, together with the settlements we negotiated, are a major victory in our efforts to protect charitable assets and hold accountable those who would abuse charities for personal gain,” James said in a statement.

The state attorney general explained that “the Trump Foundation has shut down, funds that were illegally misused are being restored, the president will be subject to ongoing supervision by my office, and the Trump children had to undergo compulsory training to ensure this type of illegal activity never takes place again.”

Any other president would be destroyed by this. Yet the entire Republican party is in his thrall.

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QOTD

QOTD

by digby

Guess who said this?

How the hell did this whole thing start? What got us here today? 

They opened up a counter-intelligence investigation in July. We know the Russians are messing in our election. And it was the Russians, ladies and gentlemen, who stole the Democratic National Committee’s emails, Podesta’s emails, and screwed around with Hillary Clinton, it wasn’t the Ukrainians. It was the RUSSIANS. And they’re coming after us AGAIN.

So, to be concerned that the Russians are messing with presidential campaigns was a legitimate concern. So, they looked around at the Trump campaign, and said, “Well, let’s see if we can protect the Trump campaign.”

That was Lindsey Graham today. I know. Pigs are flying all over Washington DC today.

But it’s important to remember a couple of important facts. They were already investigating Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort for laundering money for a Russia-affiliated Ukrainian oligarch. His campaign chairman! That’s on top of Trump asking Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, praising Wikileaks and half a dozen weirdos on the campaign who kept traveling to Russia during the campaign and getting drunk and blabbing to Australian diplomats in English pubs about Russian interference!~

How anyone can think the FBI and others wouldn’t investigate that is beyond me.

Update: How about this?

The world has gone mad.

Speaking of human scum

Speaking of human scum

by digby

By the way, here’s what this pig is doing around the world on the environment:

The rocky highlands of Central Asia, in a remote region of Western Mongolia, are home to a plummeting population of the largest sheep in the world, the argali. The endangered species is beloved for its giant curving horns, which can run over 6 feet in length.

On a hunting trip this August, Donald Trump Jr. shot and killed one.

His adventure was supported by government resources from both the U.S. and Mongolia, which each sent security services to accompany the president’s eldest son and grandson on the multiday trip. It also thrust Trump Jr. directly into the controversial world of Mongolian trophy hunting — a polarizing practice in a country that views the big-horned rams as a national treasure. The right to kill an argali is controlled by an opaque permitting system that experts say is mostly based on money, connections and politics.

Trump Jr. received special treatment during his summer trip, according to records obtained by ProPublica as well as interviews with people involved in the hunt. Listen to the episode.

The Mongolian government granted Trump Jr. a coveted and rare permit to slay the animal retroactively on Sept. 2, after he’d left the region following his trip. It’s unusual for permits to be issued after a hunter’s stay. It was one of only three permits to be issued in that hunting region, local records show.

Afterward, Trump Jr. met privately with the country’s president, Khaltmaagiin Battulga, before departing the capital of Ulaanbaatar back to the U.S., according to Khuantai Khafezyn, a local government official in the region where Trump Jr. hunted the argali and a former government official with knowledge of the meeting. It isn’t clear what was discussed. Trump Jr. wouldn’t answer questions about the meeting. Representatives for Battulga haven’t responded to requests for comment.

“What are the chances the Mongolian government would’ve done any of that to someone who wasn’t the son of the United States’ president?” asked Kathleen Clark, a professor specializing in legal ethics at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. She said that though Trump Jr. is not a government employee, he’s nonetheless politically influential, incentivizing foreign officials such as the Mongolian leader to treat him favorably out of a “desire on the part of a foreign government to curry favor with the president’s family.”

He is a grotesque,bloodthirsty killer. He likes to hunt endangered species.

He is extremely popular in the Republican Party.

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It’s Not Just the Jews — and It’s Not Just America by tristero

It’s Not Just the Jews — and It’s Not Just America 

by tristero

India:

India’s parliament has passed a bill which offers amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants from three neighbouring countries. 

The controversial bill will provide citizenship to religious minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. 

The government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), says this will give sanctuary to people fleeing religious persecution. 

Critics say the bill is part of a BJP agenda to marginalise Muslims…

Delhi-based lawyer Gautam Bhatia says that by dividing alleged migrants into Muslims and non-Muslims, the bill “explicitly and blatantly seeks to enshrine religious discrimination into law, contrary to our long-standing, secular constitutional ethos”. 

Historian Mukul Kesavan says the bill is “couched in the language of refuge and seemingly directed at foreigners, but its main purpose is the delegitimisation of Muslims’ citizenship”. 

Critics say that if it is genuinely aimed at protecting minorities, the bill should have have included Muslim religious minorities who have faced persecution in their own countries – Ahmadis in Pakistan and Rohingyas in Myanmar, for example. (The government has gone to the Supreme Court seeking to deport Rohingya refugees from India.) 

 And speaking of Myanmar

A day after Daw Aung San Suu Kyi listened at the world’s highest court in The Hague to testimony of the horrors inflicted upon the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar — veils ripped off girls before their rapes, babies thrown to their deaths, hundreds of villages turned into kindling — the Nobel Peace Prize laureate on Wednesday defended her homeland from accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice. 

“Genocidal intent cannot be the only hypothesis,” she said in day two of public hearings, adding that her country’s own judicial system was investigating any possible crimes and would be reaching its own conclusions. 

Presenting what many human rights experts have called some of the worst ethnic pogroms of this century as the result of “cycles of intercommunal violence going back to the 1940s,” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi chided outsiders for not having an adequate understanding of Myanmar’s complex ethnic and social makeup.

As if any country’s “complex ethnic and social makeup” justifies genocide.

William Barr is Trump with brains

William Barr is Trump with brains

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

I must have heard the words “historic day” uttered a hundred times on Tuesday and it wasn’t hyperbole. The Democratic leadership announced that they have decided to charge President Donald Trump with two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress. The process is proceeding at a breakneck speed and should be concluded within the next month or so. I have no idea what any of the players intend to do after that, but I have a sneaking suspicion Trump will be happy to carry on with his own “impeachment” of the Democrats and he’s got a very powerful collaborator ready to do all he can to help: Attorney General William Barr.

Barr almost certainly choreographed the release of the long-awaited Department of Justice inspector general’s report into the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation to drop during this eventful week, particularly since the report was not very favorable to the right’s preferred storyline. Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that while there were low-level errors and some serious impropriety in the handling of the FISA application for former Trump adviser Carter Page after he’d left the campaign, the FBI had an adequate factual basis (or “predication,” in legal terminology) to begin the investigation. He also found that there was no bias, political or otherwise, that affected the process.

Unable to use his preferred method of sending a letter weeks in advance of the report mischaracterizing the investigator’s conclusion in order to mold public opinion before anyone has a chance to read it, Barr was forced instead to release a statement immediately after the report’s release saying that he disagreed with it, which isn’t nearly as effective. In fact, Barr ended up on a different page than the White House, which simply lied outright saying the report backed up Trump’s repeated insistence that the FBI leadership was a bunch of “dirty cops” who tried to destroy his campaign and overthrow his presidency.

Again, that is the opposite of what the report said.

Barr then apparently felt the need to sit down with journalists and explain that his previous comments only meant to say that Horowitz was prevented from doing a more thorough job due to pesky DOJ rules.

This explains why his hand-picked special prosecutor, John Durham, broke every rule in the book by issuing his own statement saying he also disagrees with the IG’s conclusions, hinting broadly that he’s onto something big. If you can’t remember a federal prosecutor ever talking about an ongoing investigation this way, it’s because it simply isn;t done. Well, it hasn’t been done. But at least it clarified that Durham is either a Rod Rosenstein-esque toady, afraid to stand up for himself, or another Trump partisan. A straight shooter wouldn’t have broken that rule. Now we know.

In the astonishing and chilling interview with NBC’s Pete Williams on Tuesday, Barr made it clear that he was not prepared to stop until he found a way to nail someone in the government for having the temerity to be suspicious of the fact that dozens of Russians and Americans with Russian connections were crawling all over Trump’s campaign, at the same time as the Russians were hacking into the computers of his political opponents and running a blatant propaganda campaign on social media. How outrageous of the FBI to think that might be worth looking into! (One imagines they will certainly think twice about doing that over the next year, no matter how flagrant the interference might be.)

Barr explained that his main reason for pursuing the investigation is his deep concern about the government using “the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.” Strangely, he wasn’t the least bit concerned about the two investigations the FBI conducted into Hillary Clinton while she was running for president. Indeed, he even personally weighed in on one of them, the Uranium One and Clinton Foundation investigation, which was “predicated” on a right-wing oppo hit by the man who later became the Trump campaign CEO, Steve Bannon. Barr told the New York Times before he came back to government that he had “long believed that the predicate for investigating the uranium deal, as well as the [Clinton] foundation, is far stronger than any basis for investigating so-called ‘collusion.’”

While Barr claims to know nothing about this Ukraine business, he doesn’t seem to have a problem with Trump using “the apparatus of the state” in the amount of almost $400 billion in military aid, to try to affect the outcome of the next election.

But that’s no surprise. As I pointed out a while back, Barr himself is implicated in a scheme to use the “apparatus of the state” to affect the outcome of an election. I quoted Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Times writing back in 2016:

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, specifically to September 1992, when Attorney General William Barr, top-ranking FBI officials and — believe it or not — a Treasury Department functionary who actually sold “Presidential Bitch” T-shirts with Hillary Clinton’s likeness from her government office, pressured the U.S. attorney in Little Rock to open an investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater investment.

Back in those days, there were still a few Republicans with integrity, but Bill Barr was not one of them. That U.S. attorney, Charles Banks, refused to do what Barr and his associates wanted him to do. But as you no doubt remember, Republicans in the Congress grabbed the baton and ran with it. It’s clear that Barr suspects the FBI was running a biased, partisan investigation because that’s what he would have done in their position.

Williams asked Barr if his reasoning was based upon civil liberties concerns, and despite his earlier vacuous hand-wringing over abuse of government power, he didn’t say yes. This was his answer:

I think our nation was turned on its head for three years. I think, based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press. And I think that there were gross abuses of FISA. And inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.

In other words, his “concern” is political.

As I mentioned, Barr claims to know nothing about the Ukraine scandal. But according to Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, the president has asked him to brief the AG and Republican senators on all the “evidence” Giuliani collected during his recent trip to Kyiv. He’s got an elaborate new conspiracy theory involving Barack Obama and Adam Schiff, featuring a brand new investigation with the DOJ and some Ukrainian crackpots. Once this pesky impeachment is dispensed with it’s entirely possible that Barr will get right on it. If there’s one thing that he and Trump cannot abide it’s political corruption.

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Anti-Semitism Is About to Become Official US Policy by tristero

Anti-Semitism Is About to Become Official US Policy

by tristero

The United States is about to enshrine anti-Semitism as its official policy:

Liberal American Jewish advocacy groups have reacted with horror to reports that President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order defining Judaism as a nationality rather than just a religion. 

According to a Tuesday report from The New York Times, the president is planning the order to help combat anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses and crack down on boycott campaigns against the state of Israel. 

But progressive Jewish groups suggested the reported move is actually anti-Semitic, in that [it] casts Jews as a separate nationality to all other Americans…

Exactly. If Judaism is a nationality, then Jews by definition, can no longer be American citizens. Unless, of course, they renounce their loyalty to Judaism. Regardless, there will always be the suspicion of dual loyalty.

And that, dear readers, is anti-Semitism, plain and simple.

*****

Adding: Trump’s anti-Semitic initiative also implicates Jews more directly in Israeli policies. Because Jews are, by definition, citizens of a Jewish nation, that means that Jews living in the US who forcefully criticize Israel (their actual nation, the nation of Jews) betray their country.

No, it’s not really coherent, but it doesn’t matter. What matters are the consequences of this incredibly dangerous Trump policy:

If you think anti-Semitic hate crimes are on the rise — and they most certainly are — you ain’t seen nothing yet.

UPDATE: And what I mean is there will be more killings, like Pittsburgh and, now, Jersey City 

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Desperately seeking Aaron Sorkin by @BloggersRUs

Desperately seeking Aaron Sorkin
by Tom Sullivan


Still image from A Few Good Men.

Even Thomas Friedman thinks the Trump cult’s fealty to Donald J. Trump is “right out of ‘The Twilight Zone.'” Republicans’ seemingly inevitable acquittal of Trump in an impeachment trial in the Senate would effectively make him a king. With Attorney General Bill Barr as regent, Friedman doesn’t say, but that’s where we’d be.

“Oh, how we will miss [America] when it’s gone,” writes Friedman, never one to stoop to the maudlin.

If Trump did shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, Frank Bruni is sure Trump would not only not lose voters, but he wouldn’t lose Bill Barr:

Execution privilege, Barr would probably call it. He’d release a statement or hold a news conference to say that Trump had a spastic trigger finger or was triggered by Adam Schiff or was set up by those dastardly Ukrainians, who are never up to any good. Such is the magnitude of Barr’s servility, the doggedness of his deference. He’s the president’s moral launderer. Trump does evil, and Barr washes him clean.

As attorney general, he’s supposed to be the nation’s lawyer. But he has bought into the autocratic delusion that Trump equals America, that national interest and presidential prerogative are inextricably intertwined. So he’s Trump’s advocate, come hell or high crimes, as surely as Pat Cipollone or Rudy Giuliani is.

America’s B-movie attorney general went straight to video on Tuesday. Barr gave an interview with NBC News’ Pete Williams immediately after his inspector general’s report confirmed Democrats were right that the FBI’s investigation of Trump was legitimately predicated. Barr claimed just the opposite, “slowly and calmly” brushing off the Trump campaign’s soliciting help from Russia and insisting contrary to the report’s findings that, yes, the government had spied on Trump in 2016.

Republicans were also right, Marcy Wheeler adds, that the FISA warrants on Carter Page “may not have been adequately substantiated (and the vetting on the follow-ups was even worse).” But as her tweet-rant on the Barr interview points out, Barr was there to dismiss Trump’s offenses and do damage control for Trump rather than defend his own agency’s report.

He’s done it before. He did it again Tuesday “with even less subtlety and more sanctimony,” Bruni writes.

Republicans are closing ranks, fearful of wrathful Trump tweets and the votes (or non-votes) of Trump cultists back home. The only people speaking out in favor of removing Trump are Democrats and former Republican officials:

Jeff Flake, a former Republican senator from Arizona and a longtime critic of the president, said Republicans could reasonably say that the evidence presented in the impeachment inquiry doesn’t justify removing Trump from office.

“But to argue as House Republicans have done that the president did nothing wrong . . . has long-term implications for the party,” Flake said. “That is what baffles me and pains me deeply, to see people just contort themselves and to do the type of gymnastics it takes to justify this behavior and just the willingness to play for an audience of one.”

Other longtime GOP officials agreed.

“It amazes me,” added Jim Edgar, a former Republican governor of Illinois, noting how Trump uses whatever he can to defend himself, even if it strains or runs contrary to the truth. “You can catch him dead to rights, and he goes out and turns it around, and people believe it.”

Meanwhile, Trump programs followers outside the Beltway for genocide and defenders in the Senate sound like they get briefings from Alex Jones.

Throughout this nightmare for democracy, those uninfected by prion disease have hoped for some deus ex machina to remove the mad king and somehow cure the cult’s addiction to up-is-downism. We’ll bite through our lips during the Senate trial waiting for one of Trump’s lackeys to defiantly shout under oath that, hell yes, Trump ordered the “code red.” The spell will break. Republicans will vote to remove Trump. A vacant, impotent Mike Pence will take his place for the last year of the cycle and his party will go down in flames next November.

But this isn’t an Aaron Sorkin script. It’s by Rod Serling.