Month: January 2020

Trump’s legal team of religious right activists, corrupt politicians, crackpots and camera hogs isn’t the best.

The impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump begins on Tuesday morning. If you’ve been closely following the Trump saga since he came down his golden escalator and declared his candidacy, as I have, you are not terribly surprised that it has come to this. Unfortunately, most of us who could see how he might seduce the faction of the country that had been primed for a demagogue like him over the past several decades also overestimated the patriotism of Republican officials, many of whom made it clear in the beginning that they knew what he was and have since rolled over for him like trained poodles. That phenomenon is what will determine the eventual outcome of the trial we are about to witness.

We have an incompetent and corrupt president, who has clearly committed multiple cases of abuse of power, being protected by his party — which is openly engaged in a cover-up of his high crimes. Leading Republicans are no longer even trying to pretend they are statesmen (or women). It is just an exercise of pure partisan resistance to any and all accountability for their leader.

The best illustration of that is the way Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has manipulated the trial procedures to be as opaque and hurried as possible. His rules for the media, and his demands that much of the trial be presented in the dead of night, are nothing more than an attempt to cover up the proceedings as much as possible.

Trump’s attorneys’ legal arguments show how contemptuous the president is of the process. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe has called them “garbage dressed up as legal argument.” Nonetheless, Trump’s team seems highly confident that this is all they need to do, knowing that their GOP allies will do as they’re told and Republican voters will be shielded from the truth by Fox News and other right-wing media.

So what kind of lawyers would take a case like this? It appears that it isn’t top conservative legal talent. According to George Conway, the Trump critic and high-powered conservative lawyer (and husband to White House aide Kellyanne Conway), the top law firms won’t go near Trump. He has a bad reputation for not paying his legal bills and refusing to follow his attorney’s advice, making the lawyer (and him) look like fools. They also worry that the top law school talent will go elsewhere rather than be associated with this administration.

Trump has already gone through a slew of attorneys in his three years in office. His original White House counsel, Don McGahn, left long ago, as did Trump’s personal lawyers John Dowd and Ty Cobb, who handled the Mueller investigation. Also gone is Emmet Flood, who was on Bill Clinton’s impeachment team and would have likely been an asset in this proceeding.

So he’s left with his latest White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, a former corporate lawyer and Catholic activist. (Fox News host Laura Ingraham has called him her “spiritual mentor.”) Cipollone was highly recommended by his good friend Bill Barr and Trump’s other lawyers, Jay Sekulow and Rudy Giuliani. From what other lawyers say about Cipollone’s legal arguments during the impeachment process so far, particularly the incomprehensible screed he sent to the House before the hearings (which was quite likely dictated by Trump), he is no longer concerned with his reputation as a serious jurist.

The second in command on the Trump team is Sekulow, previously known as a legal advocate for the Christian right. Like so many of his brethren in that movement, he apparently sees no barrier to empowering and defending a corrupt, libertine president. But then, Sekulow has more in common with Trump than he admits. He’s also personally implicated in the Ukraine scandal, which is not unusual for a Trump attorney. Since these guys are throwing out the common understanding of the Constitution, they might as well discard any notions of conflict of interest as well.

There are a couple of other deputy White House counsels added to the list, Patrick Philbin and Mike Purpura. Both of them are former Department of Justice attorneys who’ve been handling much of the stonewalling detail work. Jane Raskin, who was hired along with her husband last year to help Trump with the Mueller investigation, is also on board but not expected to be out front.

And then there are the Fox News “stars,” meaning Ken Starr, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Ray and Pam Bondi, who were obviously brought on because Trump wanted to hire the lawyers from “Law and Order” but was gently informed that they were fictional characters. (OK, I made that part up — but it’s sad that such a thing is so believable.) He settled for Fox News talking heads who can speak credibly to the only people who matter — his base.

I don’t think I have to explain who Starr is, other than to point out that aside from his role in the inane Monica Lewinsky scandal, he was fired from his most recent job for covering up a sex scandal at Baylor University. He is yet another alleged puritan strangely drawn to Donald Trump.

Dershowitz is also famous enough that I don’t need to run down his credits. He’s been all over TV the last few days, claiming that he isn’t defending the president but rather the Constitution and making all kinds of contradictory arguments in which he insists the president can’t be impeached for abuse of power or obstruction of Congress. His view is decidedly a fringe interpretation.

Robert Ray, another independent counsel from the Clinton years, is on the team as well. That’s a good thing, since he’s been presenting himself on TV as some kind of neutral observer when it’s clear that he’s a Trump partisan through and through. And finally there is Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida and one of Trump’s favorites, presumably because she was so willing to please when he offered her a donation at the time she was considering whether to join the lawsuit against Trump University. She’s Trump’s kind of lawyer.

So what of Rudy Giuliani, supposedly Trump’s personal attorney and trusted legal adviser? The last we heard from him, Giuliani was begging to defend Trump against impeachment by “prosecut[ing] it as a racketeering case,” which he claims to have “kind of invented.” Apparently, the president was persuaded that Giuliani might not be all that helpful to his case, since he’s heavily implicated in the scheme himself and now under investigation in the Southern District of New York. Also, he is quite unhinged.

So here we go America. The third presidential impeachment trial in history is about to begin, and the president is being defended by religious right activists, corrupt politicians, crackpots and camera hogs. It should be quite a pageant. Go ahead and pop some popcorn, but I suspect you’ll be needing an adult beverage to go with it before the day is over.

My Salon column reprinted with permission 

Donald J. Trump could stand in the well of the Senate and shoot somebody and his lawyers would argue no law could stop him. Republican witnesses would refuse to testify, and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would disallow others to in any impeachment trial.

Trumpism and McConnell have in three short years bankrupted American democracy, decimated our international standing, and rendered the United States all but a laughingstock. Trump’s failed casinos lasted longer.

McConnell on Monday issued his terms for the conduct of Trump’s impeachment trial beginning today for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. McConnell sees Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s abuse of power charge and raises her with abuse of process. “No witnesses. No evidence. No time. No cameras, ” tweeted David Frum.

“Sen. McConnell’s proposed rules depart dramatically from the Clinton precedent – in ways that are designed to prevent the Senate and the American people from learning the full truth about President Trump’s actions that warranted his impeachment,” Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “The McConnell rules don’t even allow the simple, basic step of admitting the House record into evidence at the trial.”

“Under this resolution, Senator McConnell is saying he doesn’t want to hear any of the existing evidence, and he doesn’t want to hear any new evidence. It’s a cover-up, and the American people will see it for exactly what it is.”

A Potemkin court. A show trial without a show. A sham process for a sham president. But then, Trump is the Republicans’ sham president.

Twenty-four hours for the prosecution to present its case over two days. The same for the president’s defense. Senators then get 16 hours to present questions, then four hours of arguments, equally divided. Only then will the Senate consider whether to call witnesses. Unless Democrats can persuade four Republicans to vote with them, McConnell’s prevent defense will hold. If it does not, witnesses must first be deposed. McConnell wants no surprises.

The Washington Post reports Trump’s lawyers and GOP defenders are “quietly gaming out contingency plans” to keep former national security adviser John Bolton out of public view should Democrats somehow persuade enough Republicans he should testify. Option 1 of their Plan B is to move any Bolton testimony to a classified setting. Bolton, who called Trump’s attempt to extract an investigation into Democratic rival Joe Biden from Ukraine a “drug deal,” is the key fact witness in the case and has said he would testify if subpoenaed.

The president’s lawyers issued a 110-page filing laying out the outlines of their defense, claiming Trump did “absolutely nothing wrong.” That language echoes the president’s.

Trump thinks he’s done nothing wrong because he’s done nothing out of the ordinary for him. Shielded by inherited wealth, he has lived his whole life transgressing laws or evading them. Donald Trump routinely deploys threats of lawsuits and teams of lawyers to dodge virtually any culpability for acting like Donald Trump. Before accepting the presidency, he had never held a job where he was accountable to anyone. He doesn’t understand the very concept and now thinks it all unfair. When Trump tells the truth, it is by accident.

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality under law feels like oppression.

Released today, “A Very Stable Genius” by Pulitzer winners Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, presents yet another picture of chaos and dysfunction in the Trump White House. An incident they report regarding Trump’s view of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act paints perhaps the sharpest image yet of a man who has no shame, who respects no boundaries, and who sees nothing wrong in corrupt behavior if there is profit in it.

Catherine Rampell explains:

The FCPA, passed after Watergate, was a trailblazing law. It said that bribes were illegal not only when paid to U.S. officials, but also when paid to foreign ones. That is, people or entities that operate in the United States (whether or not they’re American) can be held criminally liable here if they grease palms in, say, China.

In criminalizing the payment of bribes in foreign jurisdictions, the FCPA arguably made the United States the first country to significantly leverage its own market power to encourage more ethical business practices everywhere.

But ethics are for suckers, in Trump’s view. He quashed a bipartisan anti-corruption rule soon after taking office. He’s been looking for some way to repeal the FCPA since then, calling it a “horrible law” that has “the world is laughing at us.”

Leonnig and Rucker report Trump complained in early 2017, “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas.”

“Does ‘our companies’ refer to the Trump Organization?” Rampell asks. “Or perhaps, given the president’s frequent conflation of his own private and government interests, the executive branch of the U.S. government?”

This is the man for whom McConnell and other Trump defenders would sacrifice any dignity they have left; for whom they would set the Constitution alight and snicker as it burns; all the while feigning patriotism and love of country in pursuit of personal power. They are no better than Trump himself. Perhaps worse. They know better and just don’t give a shit.

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You have to wonder if the SDNY will prosecute on of their own. I have my doubts. But it’s interesting to note that when he was the US Attorney there Giuliani prosecuted one of his own prosecutors so he’s the last guy who can complain:

It’s nearly unheard of for a federal prosecutors’ office to investigate one of its own, but in 1985, the Manhattan US Attorney’s office did just that.Prosecutors brought a criminal case against their own colleague, a well-regarded prosecutor who was charged with stealing more than $41,000 in cash and five pounds of drugs from the office evidence locker.

The US Attorney who brought the case? Rudy Giuliani.

Thirty-five years later, Giuliani is now under investigation for a wide range of possible crimes by the very office he led from 1983 to 1989, a scenario that has prompted intense public interest and media attention and has led Giuliani to lash out against those investigating him, in one instance referring to the prosecutors as “assholes.”

Giuliani told CNN, “if they are investigating me they are acting irresponsibly and allowing massive leaking of things I didn’t do to harm my reputation, I learn what I know from press and that is one false charge after another. I’m sorry any of my former colleagues are disappointed. I’d just have to say is all we know are leaks and they should give me the benefit of the doubt on those.

He assumes they will protect him. And, of course, he has the presidential pardon insurance in his back pocket too. And although they are quoted saying they find it all disturbing, I have to say they don’t sound all that determined to see justice done in his case:

He was like all of us. He’s imperfect, but he was a very good and inspiring United States Attorney who made major prosecutions,” said Paul Shechtman, a partner at law firm Bracewell LLP who worked under Giuliani as a federal prosecutor, including as head of the office’s appeals division.”For those of us who worked for him, the fact that our old office is investigating him is a dark day,” Shechtman said.It’s a sentiment shared by the younger generation of alumni, many of whom point to their years in the office as the highlights of their career.

“It’s one thing to be investigated. Innocent people get investigated,” said Glenn Kopp, a former assistant US attorney in Manhattan from 2008 through 2013. If Giuliani is indicted, Kopp said, “it will be a sad day. I can speak for myself, and I would not be happy with that result.”

Oh please. They know he was a showboating jackass who was always parlaying his career as a prosecutor into politics — which isn’t unusual — but it’s not the sign of a committed crime fighter.

There’s something very weird about the SDNY investigation. There is no sign that they or the FBI did anything with the Parnas documents they returned recently, not even the texts about stalking a US Ambassador. The didn’t visit the guy who sent them until last week. Giuliani says they haven’t talked to him or asked for any documents.

It certainly seems as if they’re slow-walking this at the very least.

The US Attorney of the SDNY is Giuliani’s former law partner although they apparently didn’t work on any cases together. Still, it would be wise for him to recuse himself. (Of course, we know how Dear Leader feels about that…) The rest of the prosecutors are all very “sad” about a former US Attorney being associated with a crime spree. Somehow, I doubt they spare those feelings for other people in similar circumstances. Parnas and Furman certainly aren’t getting any such consideration.

It’s possible that Barr has put the kibosh on this case. And it’s possible they’re just proceeding cautiously with this delicate, political situation. But let’s just say that I won’t be surprised if this case ends up being quietly closed.

Update:

Just in: Parnas attorney @josephabondy has claimed in a new filing that prosecutors have “refused to meet with Mr. Parnas and to receive his information regarding” Trump, Giuliani, others. Could explain Parnas’ recent decision to go public. H/t @TomerElk https://t.co/VN5Ze8nN4D pic.twitter.com/TgvOUqKZ63

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) January 20, 2020

He’s going to pretend he cares about the environment and climate change. Democrats can’t let him get away with it.

This piece from a while back from Greg Sargent reports on their lame attempts.

The New York Times reports that internal polling for Trump’s campaign revealed that his environmental record is a key obstacle to winning millennials and suburban women. Those demographics, of course, helped drive the Democratic takeover of the House in 2018 amid a sizable national popular vote win. According to a senior administration official who reviewed the polling, Trump might not win voters who feel strongly about climate change, but it showed that a certain type of moderate who likes the economy might feel okay about Trump if she is persuaded he’s being “responsible” on environmental issues.

Hence Trump’s latest speech, in which he claimed that he has made it a “top priority” to preserve “the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.” Trump actually mouthed the words that we have a “profound obligation to protect America’s extraordinary blessings for the next generation and many generations, frankly, to come.”

But as New York Times fact checker Linda Qiu documents, the speech was full of distortions. Trump absurdly took credit for environmental improvements secured under his predecessors. He also misleadingly claimed the United States is leading other countries in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, when in fact our reduction as a percentage of overall emissions — a much more meaningful metric — trails many others.

In reality, Trump has sought to dismantle multiple efforts to combat global warming. His Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing a new rule to replace former president Barack Obama’s effort to curb emissions from coal plants, which will undermine progress, as well as another one rolling back tailpipe emissions standards. Trump is pulling out of the Paris climate deal. Trump is doing all this, even though a comprehensive assessment by over a dozen federal agencies — within his own administration — concluded that global warming poses a dire future threat to U.S. interests. Trump dismissed this finding by saying: “I don’t believe it.”

Trump offered condolences to Australia, which is more than he did for California. But then he forgot he was supposed to care. He tweeted this over the week-end:

A massive 200 Billion Dollar Sea Wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2020

It’s important that some Super PAC or Bloomberg or the Democratic party or someone makes this the subject of a relentless ad campaign. He is a menace when it comes to climate change and we are starting to see some movement among the public. We can’t afford to waste any more time.

You know by now that Alan Dershowitz is all over TV saying that you can’t impeach a president unless he violated a federal criminal statute. He also says he’s been consistent on this for decades and I’m sure if cornered he would find some way to insist he was despite the evidence. He’s a skilled attorney.

But you don’t need to be a lawyer to see that he’s full of it:

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1219281743271944194

Extorting a foreign government to smear your political opponent in a presidential election — after having benefited from exactly the same thing in the previous election —doesn’t subvert the very essence of democracy? Interesting.

I sure hope the House managers and the lawyers who are helping them are putting together a case that can illustrate for the country the fatuous nonsense these people are pushing. I’m actually a little bit shocked that what we’re seeing is this bad.

Not that I think it will change Republican Senators’ minds. Look what they defend every day. But still, I would have thought the lawyers would have been a little bit more serious, if only for their place in history. But then, as George Conway pointed out over the weekend, they aren’t exactly the A-list and those that are famous are more notorious than respected.

Oh look. His explanation is as fatuous as you might expect:

There is no inconsistency between what I said during the Clinton impeachment and what I am saying now. I said then that there doesn’t have to be a “technical“ crime. I have said now there must be “criminal-like” conduct, or conduct “akin to treason and bribery.”

— Alan Dershowitz (@AlanDersh) January 20, 2020

Good old Rod Rosenstein. It turns out that he gave Trump some of his most revolting talking points during the Mueller Investigation:

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized the release to the media of text messages between two highly placed FBI employees who exchanged criticism of then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Justice Department has revealed in a new court filing.

Rosenstein also said in the court filing submitted shortly before midnight Friday that he made the decision to share the messages with the press in part to protect FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page from the drip effect of incremental releases of the texts by lawmakers or others.

No, he did it to curry favor with Trump and the right-wing. And I would guess he’s not the last DOJ employee to do that. In fact, they are probably doing it as we speak. The Department is entirely compromised at this point.

Here’s Trump deploying the ammunition Trump gave him:

Look at the good Christians behind him loving every minute of that disgusting rant. Rod must be so proud.

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and given the recent and familiar saber-rattling we’ve been hearing, this time agitating for a war with Iran, it seems like a good time to visit King’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam.” He delivered it at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, a year before he was assassinated. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute has the text and audio, and it’s nice to listen to his sonorous cadences. King took a significant risk in pushing back against concerns about political caution and instead spoke his conscience. Some of the references are very much tied to the era, but others remain all too timely.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

Digby has featured this speech before, emphasizing other good passages – it’s full of them. And The New Yorker has a good piece from 2017 giving more background on crafting the speech and the political costs King knew it would incur. (It also covers John Lewis’ memories of the speech.)

I appreciate that King linked war, and basically imperialism, to issues of class, race and lost opportunities in America. He received backlash for the speech, even though some passages of it are simpatico with that noted political radical, Dwight Eisenhower, who in 1953 asserted that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” King emphasized race much more, of course, which surely made some of his white audience uncomfortable. And many of his points unfortunately remain all too pertinent.

In the questions for this election cycle’s primary debates and in political chatter in general, we’re essentially told that war, and all military spending, is free. According to conservatives, tax cuts and other giveaways to the rich and powerful are free as well or otherwise a national boon, and such largess will theoretically trickle down to we the peons. Apparently, it’s only health care, and other domestic programs that could benefit the overwhelming majority of Americans, that cost money and need to be interrogated. Perhaps some wars are indeed necessary, yet the same people most likely to recklessly agitate for them typically argue against even the possibility of new or better social programs domestically. “I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor,” said King. He wasn’t fully appreciated in his lifetime, and his willingness to link the civil rights struggle to challenging other pervasive, oppressive notions is still not fully acknowledged now. As Cornel West put it, we should resist the “Santa Claus-ification” of King; it would be vanity to suppose we’ve already learned all he has to teach us.

Even Trump’s lawyers are childish little whiners.

If you are curious about the contours of the arguments in the Senate trial you can see from the briefs that have been filed by both sides what they plan to do. The Democrats will present the evidence of Trump’s corrupt, self-serving abuse of power and obstruction. The Republicans will shriek about “unfairness” and claim the whole thing is “rigged” and a “charade.”

Politico reports:

The lengthy brief filed by Trump’s team suggests Democrats ran a “rigged” impeachment investigation that led to the adoption of the two charges against Trump: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Their arguments largely ignored the growing body of evidence Democrats presented indicating Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his Democrat rivals, while withholding desperately needed military aid to the beleaguered nation.

Instead, Trump’s lawyers focused on broad, constitutionally questionable claims that the House’s process invalidates the articles of impeachment outright. The most prominent is that the House did not allege a violation of any specific statute.

The Trump lawyers argue the Democrats didn’t present any evidence the president made any link between security assistance and a White House meeting with the new Ukrainian leader. “The facts show that the president was not pressuring anyone to do anything about any investigation,” a source working with the president’s legal team told reporters Monday.

“Congress failed to state any violation of law, whatsoever,” the source added, outlining the forthcoming brief.

Democrats built their case on a transcript of Trump’s July 25 call to Ukraine’s newly elected president, Voodymyr Zelensky, in which he urged the Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden. The House Intelligence Committee also interviewed 17 witnesses, including some who described deep confusion and chaos inside the administration after Trump ordered the withholding of military aid to Ukraine.

The obstruction charge arose from Trump’s blanket order to his administration to refuse cooperation with the House probe, an order that many of the 17 witnesses defied. Trump also prevented the State Department, Pentagon and White House budget office from sharing documents that could shed light on the arrangements. Several key witnesses, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton have refused to cooperate as well.

But it appears Trump’s team plans to sidestep the substance of Democrats’ cases and focus instead on what they claim was a rushed investigation that offered no meaningful chance for Trump to participate. Democrats did offer Trump’s attorneys a chance to present a rebuttal and propose witnesses during the Judiciary Committee’s hearings in December, but the attorneys declined, claiming the process was unfair. Democrats also note that Trump’s allies in Congress had equal access to the hearings to question witnesses and push back on the allegations.

They are going with the Trump tweet defense: scream “it’s a hoax!”, claim it was a perfect phone call and strongarm the GOP Senators behind the scenes. McConnell wants to keep as much of the trial blacked out as he can so that Fox News can interpret the trial in Trump’s favor for the cult. And they want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

In fact, there’s been talk over the week-end that McConnell has a “kill switch” embedded in the procedure:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly is close to finalizing a rule that would allow President Trump’s team to move to dismiss the articles of impeachment in the Senate quickly after some evidence has been presented, as a sort of safety valve in case Democrats try to drag out the trial for weeks.

The discussions came as Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that the trial could extend “to six to eight weeks or even longer” if the Senate decided to hear from additional witnesses — a prospect that could interfere with the imminent presidential primary contests, as Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., likely would get pulled off the campaign trail.

McConnell, R-Ky., wouldn’t be obligated to publicize the final version of his resolution setting the parameters of the impeachment trial until Tuesday, but top Republicans have said they supported affording Trump the opportunity to cut the trial short.

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, for example, said he would be “very, very surprised” if McConnell’s resolution didn’t include that kind of kill switch.”I am familiar with the resolution as it stood a day or two ago,” Hawley told Axios. “My understanding is that the resolution will give the president’s team the option to either move to judgment or to move to dismiss at a meaningful time.” Trump, Hawley wrote on Twitter after Axios’ article was published, “deserves the right during Senate trial to ask for a verdict or move to dismiss – otherwise trial will become endless circus run by Adam Schiff.”

It will never fail to amaze me how Trump-lovers say things like that with a straight face. Trump is beyond Barnum and Bailey every single day. I mean:

Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 29, 2014

Mike Pompeo is doing a great job, I am very proud of him. His predecessor, Rex Tillerson, didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell. Now it is a whole new ballgame, great spirit at State!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

That’s what the GOP is lining up to defend to the death in an impeachment trial by whining and crying and gnashing their teeth that everything is so unfaaaair.

According to this year’s Best Countries Report, done annually since 2016 by U.S. News & World Report and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania:

The US came in at number 18 for best country to raise a child, beaten by many countries in Europe, Canada and Australia. Child raising is just one of several categories listed in the survey.

Top marks went to Denmark, Sweden and Norway, a typical trend.”These countries tend to have generous paternal leave and maternal leave, offer free preschool and have good overall public education systems,” said Deidre McPhillips, senior data editor at U.S. News & World Report.”One area where the US falls behind quite a bit is in the safety metric,” she said. “In that attribute, the US actually ranks 32, pretty far down the list. So that really impacts its ratings for raising kids, of course.”

Right. We let our kids get gunned down on a daily basis because we have an abstract commitment to gun rights for self-defense that potentially makes everyone who isnt armed lose their right to life. It’s a little weird.

The US also came in at number 15 in citizenship, quality of life and best place to visit. It ranked 17th in greenest countries, 18th in most transparent countries, and 26th in best places to travel alone — another safety issue.And on a key attribute, gender equality, the US came in at number 15, way behind the Scandinavian countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

“Gender equality tends to have a strong correlation with many of the positive attributes that country can have,” McPhillips said. “We would consider this a driver of what makes a best country overall because so many of the top countries rank highly in this attribute.”

Yeah, gender equality isn’t one of our best attributes.

The Times claims they endorsed both Warren and Klobuchar. I’m sure, as Atrios suggests, they thought they were doing something edgy, attention-grabbing, and super-smart.

But in reality, they only endorsed Klobuchar. They stuck a knife in Warren. And twisted.

Here’s how the Times constructed the difference between the two of them:

The history of the editorial board would suggest that we would side squarely with the candidate with a more traditional approach to pushing the nation forward, within the realities of a constitutional framework and a multiparty country. But the events of the past few years have shaken the confidence of even the most committed institutionalists. We are not veering away from the values we espouse, but we are rattled by the weakness of the institutions that we trusted to undergird those values.

There are legitimate questions about whether our democratic system is fundamentally broken. Our elections are getting less free and fair, Congress and the courts are increasingly partisan, foreign nations are flooding society with misinformation, a deluge of money flows through our politics. And the economic mobility that made the American dream possible is vanishing.

Both the radical and the realist models warrant serious consideration. If there were ever a time to be open to new ideas, it is now. If there were ever a time to seek stability, now is it.

That’s why we’re endorsing the most effective advocates for each approach. They are Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

Got that? There are only two ways forward. Warren’s a radical. Klobuchar’s a realist. This all but guarantees that if Warren wins the nomination, Trump will run ads in swing districts that begin, “Even the leftist NY Times calls Warren a radical.”

(BTW, of course, Warren is no radical . She’s demonstrated over and over that she’s a moderately progressive and pragmatic liberal. The Times constructed their false radical/realist dichotomy out of thin air.)

The Times devotes a considerable amount of space, roughly four long paragraphs, to criticizing Warren:

…a conservative federal judiciary will be almost as significant a roadblock for progressive change. For Ms. Warren, that leaves open questions — ones she was unwilling to wrestle with in our interview. Ms. Warren has proposed to pay for an expanded social safety net by imposing a new tax on wealth. But even if she could push such a bill through the Senate, the idea is constitutionally suspect and would inevitably be bogged down for years in the courts. A conservative judiciary also could constrain a President Warren’s regulatory powers, and roll back access to health care.

In her primary campaign, however, she has shown some questionable political instincts. She sometimes sounds like a candidate who sees a universe of us-versus-thems, who, in the general election, would be going up against a president who has already divided America into his own version of them and us.

This has been most obvious in her case for “Medicare for all,” where she has already had to soften her message, as voters have expressed their lack of support for her plan. There are good, sound reasons for a public health care option — countries all over the world have demonstrated that. But Ms. Warren’s version would require winning over a skeptical public, legislative trench warfare to pass bills in Congress, the dismantling of a private health care system. That system, through existing public-private programs like Medicare Advantage, has shown it is not nearly as flawed as she insists, and it is even lauded by health economists who now advocate a single-payer system.

American capitalism is responsible for its share of sins. But Ms. Warren often casts the net far too wide, placing the blame for a host of maladies from climate change to gun violence at the feet of the business community when the onus is on society as a whole. The country needs a more unifying path. The senator talks more about bringing together Democrats, Republicans and independents behind her proposals, often leaning on anecdotes about her conservative brothers to do so. Ms. Warren has the power and conviction and credibility to make the case — especially given her past as a Republican — but she needs to draw on practicality and patience as much as her down-and-dirty critique of the system.

By contrast, here’s the Times’s critique of Klobuchar. It lasts all of one mildly concerned paragraph plus one sentence about her positioning in the horse race:

Reports of how Senator Klobuchar treats her staff give us pause. They raise serious questions about her ability to attract and hire talented people. Surrounding the president with a team of seasoned, reasoned leaders is critical to the success of an administration, not doing so is often the downfall of presidencies. Ms. Klobuchar has acknowledged she’s a tough boss and pledged to do better. (To be fair, Bill Clinton and Mr. Trump— not to mention former Vice President Biden — also have reputations for sometimes berating their staffs, and it is rarely mentioned as a political liability.)

Ms. Klobuchar doesn’t have the polished veneer and smooth delivery that comes from a lifetime spent in the national spotlight, and she has struggled to gain traction on the campaign trail. 

Between the two, the Times is clearly endorsing Klobuchar. But they’re going further. They are trashing Warren. In addition to falsely branding Warren a radical, the Times’ criticism of Warren is, for the most part, gratuitous and insubstantial. For example:

The Times does not describe what is “consitutionally suspect” about a wealth tax. And it’s assumed by them that Warren, a master negotiator, could not create a constitutionally valid tax that has a significant impact on the amassing of obscenely large fortunes.

Yes, Warren uses us vs them rhetoric. Just like FDR:

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

In other words, sometimes it really is “us versus them.” And like FDR before her, Warren is absolutely right.

RE: Medicare for All, Warren has made it very clear — and lost some progressive support making it very clear — that the ultimate goal is subject to negotiation, compromise, and being rolled out in stages. In short, she sets lofty goals for healthcare but is quite realistic and pragmatic in trying to achieve them.

As for Warren laying “a host of maladies from climate change to gun violence at the feet of the business community,” the Times doesn’t engage with this at all. They assert that Warren is being unfair to business but they give no reasons or evidence that engages, let alone refutes, Warren’s analyses of business’s role in these maladies.

The Times is playing a cynical game here, played so that they won’t lose their (increasingly dismayed) cohort of progressive readers who were appalled at the awful way they treated Clinton in ’16 and how they still refuse to describe Trump as the racist he clearly is. They are pretending to endorse both Warren and Klobuchar, but they’re really only endorsing Klobuchar. Worse, they are helping Trump brand Warren as somehow outside the mainstream and they are doing so using the same tactics Trump uses: by name-calling and empty assertions.