You can always count on the great populist hero Wilbur Ross to tell it like it is:
You can’t make it up.
"what digby sez..."
Month: January 2020
New polling to make you even more anxious than you already are:
When it comes to the 2020 presidential election, Democrats are nervous wrecks and Republican excitement has grown.
That’s according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research as Americans look ahead to a high-stakes election that is 10 months away but still very much top of mind. While emotions could change in the coming months, the findings give Democrats one more worry to add to the list: Will anxiety or enthusiasm be a bigger motivator come November?
On the verge of the first votes being cast in a primary contest with no clear leader, 66% of Democrats report anxiety about the election, compared with 46% of Republicans. Democrats are also more likely to feel frustration. Republicans, meanwhile, are more likely than Democrats to declare excitement about the race, and the share of enthusiastic Republicans appears to be rising.
The findings aren’t surprising to anyone who’s talked to an undecided Democrat about the crowded primary field. Behind an intense desire to oust President Donald Trump, Democrats often describe deep uncertainty about what sort of candidate has the best chance and whether the party will be able to win the votes. There’s also hard division over policy and whispers about a contested convention. It can all feel a bit too much for some.
The poll found that 43% of Republicans say they’re excited about the election, up 10 percentage points from October. Meanwhile, 33% of Democrats reported excitement.
I’d say they are feeling something akin to dread. This is not surprising because there are fresh memories of 2016 and also the knowledge that Trump will cheat again. Indeed, he’s being waved through by his party to do whatever it takes.
And I think we are all coming to see that relying on any Republican’s patriotism, decency or honesty to observe what we used to believe was the rule of law is a waste. Those who have any of those characteristics are no longer in the party. Every last one who is left is a Trump true believer who will obviously do anything to preserve their power.
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that makes you feel a little bit anxious.
About three-quarters of both Democrats and Republicans say they are highly motivated to cast ballots this year. But that only raises the question of which emotion will be stronger in turning out the vote around the margins.
A party usually wants its voters excited rather than anxious, said George Marcus, a political scientist at Williams College who has studied the role of emotion in politics and polling. Marcus found that voters who report fear and anxiety are more likely to be confused and split their vote.
“sigh”. I wish I couldn’t see that happening.
Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said the contrast between GOP excitement and Democratic anxiety and frustration is not a surprise.
“In general, supporters of the party in power are going to be more optimistic and hopeful, while supporters of the party out of power are going to be frustrated and angry,” Greenberg said.
She also noted that Democrats have been stressed since Trump won the White House. “Since Trump was elected, Democrats have been particularly anxious about both the idea of disinformation and election interference in 2020 and what could happen in a second Trump term,” Greenberg said. However, she added, “there is no evidence that Democrats are any less enthusiastic about voting in 2020, and the results of the 2018 election would suggest that they are highly motivated to vote.”
Indeed, the poll suggests that the feeling among Democrats might be a driver: About 9 in 10 anxious Democrats say they feel very motivated to vote this November, compared with about half of those who are not anxious.
They talked to some Democrats who are worried about a fair election. Gee, I wonder why?
“I’m just not sure we can have a fair election right now,” the 65-year-old Democrat said. “That’s probably my biggest anxiety right now.”
Trump voters, oddly enough, don’t have the same worries:
Domingo Rodriguez thinks these worries are ridiculous. The 75-year-old retired translator lives in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, and, though he’s not affiliated with either party, supports Trump. “I think Trump will win again. I’m not nervous,” Rodriguez said, chuckling as he thought about Democrats’ view of the election.
They don’t care how he wins. Because if you like Donald Trump and think he’s a great president you must, at this point, believe in winning by any means necessary.
I’m riddled with anxiety 24/7. At times it’s overwhelming. I think many of us are. But we can’t allow ourselves to become confused and disoriented. We must keep our heads clear and focused like a laser on removing this monster from office and disempowering his accomplices. He is an existential threat.
This coming election is in danger of foreign interference but since Trump is so inept, it’s fairly likely the Republicans haven’t been able to rig it fully. So it’s important to win big enough that they can’t steal it.
Senator Chris Coons noted the following this morning about the other astonishing argument coming from the president’s defense team yesterday.
So – I asked the President’s lawyers a simple question: does the President agree with the statement in your brief, that foreigners’ involvement in American elections is illegal? This is where it gets disturbing.
Patrick Philbin, a member of the President’s legal team, started by dodging the question, but then, he said something that made my jaw drop: he said, effectively, that it’s OK for the President to accept and then use dirt on other candidates that he gets from foreign countries.
Here’s the exact quote: “I think that the idea that any information that happens to come from overseas is necessarily campaign interference is a mistake.”
And: “Information that is credible that potentially shows wrongdoing by someone who happens to be running for office, if it’s credible information, is relevant information for the voters to know about for people to be able to decide on who is the best candidate for an office.”
This is the President’s counsel, on the floor of the United States Senate, saying that it’s OK for the President to use information from foreign governments, including hostile ones, to get elected.
Let’s be clear about what Russia and China just heard – an invitation.
Russia’s listening – they’re hearing loud and clear that they should continue to help the President’s campaign.
China’s listening, too: they’re hearing loud and clear that they can get away with helping President Trump with his re-election campaign, and it might help them in their trade negotiations with us.
Regardless of what happens in this impeachment trial – we can’t let this slide.
To which the Republicans respond, “waddaya gonna do about?”
Everyone needs to think hard about what is happening here. The president’s team isn’t saying that the president was wrong to do what he did but it doesn’t rise to the level of a high crime. That’s ridiculous too but it’s defensible. The definition of a High Crime is purposefully vague. What this Philbin and Dershowitz (which I posted below) are saying is that anything a president does to secure his own election is perfectly legal.
Dershowitz made the broad claim to that effect and Philbin made the narrower one, but it adds up to the same thing.
So, going forward, if Donald Trump wants to ask Vladimir Putin next time he sees him to hack into private emails and disseminate the information in order to bolster his campaign, that would be perfectly fine. In fact, he can do it right out in the open because it’s now ok to do this if the president believes it’s “relevant” for the people to know. As Dershowitz says, a president’s re-election is, by definition, in the national interest in his mind, which means it’s not impeachable.
Imagine the second term now that the Republicans have shown that they are prepared to allow him to do anything, no matter what, because he is a very stable genius whose every thought, whim and impulse is, by definition, in the national interest.
So go for it Trump. The Republican Party celebrates your reign. They are staging a massive cover-up of what you did while at the same time putting forward the argument that what you did is perfectly constitutional. Your acquittal is validation that you have a green light to do anything you choose.
I thought I would remind people of the context of Richard Nixon’s famous comment:
David Frost: The wave of dissent in America, occasionally violent, which followed the incursion into Cambodia by US and Vietnamese forces in 1970, prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him on the domestic front. To this end, the deputy White House counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings with representatives of the CIA, the FBI, and other police and intelligence agencies.
These meetings produced a plan, the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against anti-war groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasised to Nixon, were clearly illegal. Nevertheless, the president approved the plan. Five days later, after opposition from the FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, the plan was withdrawn, but the president’s approval was later to be listed in the articles of impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power.
Would you say that there are certain situations – and the Huston Plan was one of them – where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?
Richard Nixon: Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.
Frost: By definition.
Richard Nixon: Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.
The point is: the dividing line is the president’s judgment?
Yes, and, so that one does not get the impression that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate. We also have to have in mind that a president has to get appropriations from the Congress. We have to have in mind, for example, that as far as the CIA’s covert operations are concerned, as far as the FBI’s covert operations are concerned, through the years, they have been disclosed on a very, very limited basis to trusted members of Congress.
The dividing line is the president’s judgment.
President Donald Trump.
Think about that.
Yesterday, Trump’s lawyer Alan Dershowitz went before the Senate and took that one step further.
He claimed that the president not only has the power to do anything in the national interest, it’s even acceptable to rig elections in his favor because that’s obviously in the national interest:
“A complex middle case is ‘I want to be elected, I think I’m a great president, I think I’m the greatest president there ever was and if I’m not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly.’ That cannot be an impeachable offense.”
I think it’s pretty clear that Donald Trump believes that he is the greatest president who ever lived and the national interest rests on whether he is re-elected. So Dershowitz has given him the green light to outright steal the next election.
And a Senate acquittal will validate that belief.
China quarantines entire cities to contain the spread of the new coronavirus. But after the first day of impeachment question-and-answer, it’s a wonder the world hasn’t banned travel by Senate Republicans to stop the spread of whatever brain-eating virus they are carrying.
Alan Dershowitz rode into the Senate on a pale horse Wednesday, and with him, pestilence. Forget Richard Nixon, the plumbers and Watergate. In the new dispensation — in the reign of Donald John Trump — all that is a bygone era. All things are clean to the man who thinks banning bribery is “unfair.” Trump must be acquitted. Actions he takes in furtherance of extending his monarchy cannot be impeachable.
Thus sayeth the prophet.
“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz argued.
“That would allow a president to do literally anything and destroy re-elections as a check on presidential behavior,” former U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal told an MSNBC panel:
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley law school, said he thought Dershowitz’s argument was “absurd and outrageous.”
“It means that a president could break any law or abuse any power and say that it was for the public interest because the public interest would be served by his or her election,” he said.
Trump’s defense team argued seeking the truth from witnesses such as former national security adviser John Bolton would be too burdensome on the Senate to undertake. As they argued, support among GOP senators for hearing witnesses receded a day after it seemed to be rising. Trump aides circulated a letter on Capitol Hill that informed Bolton the White House “was moving to block publication of his forthcoming book.” In it, Bolton reportedly claims Trump tied releasing military aid to Ukraine to officials there investigating political rival Joe Biden.
White House Deputy Counsel Patrick Philbin twisted reason into fantastical shapes worthy of Reed Richards. Even if the president had a corrupt personal motive for withholding military aid to Ukraine, any coexisting public purpose excused his actions.
But robbing a convenience store to feed your children, is in no way acceptable under the U.S. code of laws, former Sen. Claire McCaskill(?) told MSNBC viewers.
The president’s lawyers argued even soliciting and accepting opposition research from foreign governments is acceptable in one nation under Trump.
Windsor Mann of USA Today and The Week tweeted, “Question for GOP senators: If you don’t want a fair trial, why should anyone think you want a fair election?
Even as they warned the impeachment set a bad precedent for the future, Trump’s defenders tore at the foundations of the present in attempting to render meaningless any oversight of a Republican president. No one need guess that their enthusiasm for oversight will return with a literal vengeance the moment a Democrat wins the presidency. Just as surely as their concern for budget deficits is reborn.
Never Trumper George Will argued in the Washington Post that acquittal for Trump and his inevitable “vindication tour” does not mean the impeachment effort was in vain. Will writes, “[T]here is more utility than futility in the impeachment trial. Because of it, this year’s electorate will have pertinent information. And future presidents will have a salutary wariness.” Even if acquittal simply emboldens this president. That’s not very comforting.
If only there had been singing and costumes Wednesday, America might have been watching a production of “Götterdämmerung.” The GOP is determined to burn the republic to the ground in Trump’s name. No distortion of reason, nor of law or the Constitution, is too low. Republicans have lased themselves to Trump and will see the country destroyed before they risk losing power. Yesterday they were dancing in the flames.
Charlie Pierce has long joked that Republicans are afflicted en masse with prion disease.
Meanwhile, Trump supplicant, Rep. Devin Nunes of California, is suing an imaginary cow.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
His head is now on a metaphorical pike:
Real Clear politics reports:
The conservative group “Club For Growth” is reportedly spending $40,000 to air this ad online and on FOX News in Utah attacking Sen. Mitt Romney as a “Democrat secret asset” who is “plotting to take down President Trump with impeachment.”
“Slick, slippery, stealthy: Mitt Romney had us fooled… Posing as Republican, he tried to infiltrate Trump’s administration as Secretary of State,” the narrator says.
“Now his cover’s blown. Exposed by news reports as a Democrat secret asset. Sources say Romney’s plotting to take down President Trump with impeachment. Tell Romney, quit colluding with Democrats on impeachment,” it says, showing Romney in sunglasses and displaying his office phone number.
Mitt’s not up for re-election and he has very little to fear from this. It’s a shot across the bow to anyone who might be thinking of crossing Dear Leader.
That ad is from the Club for Growth. You remember the tax slashing deficit scolds? Yeah, it turns out they aren’t concerned about that second thing at all. For now. They will be on a full-blown anti-deficit crusade if a Democrat takes office.
And Mitt will undoubtedly be with them.
He would have them carry him on their shoulders into the Senate for the State of the Union if he could:
President Donald Trump is already itching to broadcast the series finale of his impeachment.
In recent days, he and top White House aides have been considering how he should celebrate his presumed acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate and whether he should deliver a rare Oval Office address to mark the occasion, according to three senior administration officials.
Trump has not settled on a specific plan yet, but the internal machinations show the extent to which the president remains focused on the details and optics of his ongoing impeachment trial — from the TV slot in which his lawyers argued his case to the performance of his legal team to the look and feel of a speech or ceremony marking the end of the months-long saga.
“The president is giving a lot of thought to where he goes when he is acquitted and vindicated,” a senior administration official said. “This isn’t a one-and-done moment. This will be a sustained exit from a long dreary impeachment process and a great reset to 2020 — not just the 2020 reelection but the 2020 domestic and international arena.”
“This isn’t a one-and-done moment. This will be a sustained exit from a long dreary impeachment process and a great reset to 2020.”
– A senior administration official
White House aides had been hoping to use the State of the Union address to lay out Trump’s agenda for the rest of the year as well as a potential second term, and lately Trump has tried to cast impeachment and the investigations into his conduct as one of his many accomplishments for the country.
[…]
Trump also just loves a good victory lap.
Every campaign rally morphs into a celebration of his presidency and often, a retelling of his November 2016 upset win even as he enters the fourth year of his presidency.
In March 2017, Trump hosted a victory lap in the Rose Garden after the House voted to repeal and replace Obamacare — a celebration that ultimately proved premature since the Senate lacked the votes to kill off the sweeping health care law.
More recently, Trump held a White House ceremony in the East Room of the White House to highlight his and the Senate’s record of filling judicial nominations with over a hundred conservative judges installed on federal district courts, circuit courts and the Supreme Court.
White House aides expect Trump to treat impeachment as a Democratic ploy he managed to beat, and any post-impeachment celebration will likely marry Trump’s love of the victory lap with his penchant for political grievances.
It’s going to be very hard to take. But the Democratic primary will be in full swing so maybe he won’t get the usual attention.
Oy.
Well, not really. But close:
New York Times: Anything a president does to stay in power is in the national interest, Dershowitz argues.
Washington Post: Dershowitz argues that a president is immune if he views his reelection as in the public interest
CNN: Alan Dershowitz argues presidential quid pro quos aimed at reelection are not impeachable
CBS News: Dershowitz says Trump can’t be impeached for a quid pro quo to win reelection
Washington Post: Trump’s impeachment team argues that anything he does to win reelection isn’t impeachable
NBC News: Dershowitz: Trump pursuing quid pro quo to help re-election is not impeachable
New York Post: Alan Dershowitz: Quid-pro-quos to help Trump get elected aren’t impeachable
He also said that if you have a non-corrupt motive as well a corrupt motive, the corrupt motive doesn’t count.
I’m sure it’s a coincidence. But still. The caliber of people in Trump’s orbit continues to amaze. Via, NBC:
The Dutch man who claimed to have Marie Yovanovitch under surveillance when she was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine has been masquerading as a U.S. federal law enforcement officer and told people he was starting a tech company that could track movements electronically, according to interviews and documents obtained by NBC News.
And despite saying he had “no connection” to Ukraine, the man, Anthony de Caluwe, was romantically involved with a Ukrainian woman, who returns regularly to her home country, at the same time in early 2019 that he sent text messages about Yovanovitch’s purported whereabouts in Kyiv, according to two people who know de Caluwe and photographs obtained by NBC News.
[…]
The FBI has been sharing information with multiple foreign governments regarding de Caluwe, who is currently in Belgium, a source with knowledge of the coordination said. Since his texts about Yovanovitch came to light, the U.S. Embassy in Brussels has reached out to de Caluwe, who is cooperating, a spokeswoman for de Caluwe said…
Leland McKee, a Trump supporter and frequent guest at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, met de Caluwe in Orlando, Florida, in 2018 at the request of a mutual acquaintance. He said de Caluwe wanted him to invest in a “tracking thing” he was developing. “He said he was with the DEA and all that, law enforcement,” McKee said. “He was trying to solicit money from anyone he could get money from, and I knew there was something not quite right.”
Photos obtained by NBC News also show him wearing what appears to be a DEA badge. One person said de Caluwe flashed the badge when he identified himself to new people as a DEA agent and sought information about drug cases he was purportedly investigating.
De Caluwe told three people who spoke to NBC News that he’d spent years busting drug rings for the DEA in Latin America, including Venezuela and El Salvador. He told at least two people that his dog, a Dalmatian named Maximus, was trained to sniff out drugs. Photos show that he dressed the dog in a harness identifying it as a DEA police canine…
Karyn Turk, de Caluwe’s spokeswoman, confirmed that he “did work in El Salvador,” but she declined to say whether he had worked for the DEA there or elsewhere. “Any work that he did for the government would be confidential,” Turk said. “Our client is always interested in serving the best interest of America and keeping American interests safe.”
In his WhatsApp profile, screenshots obtained by NBC News show, de Caluwe identified himself as “Anthony DEA/K9 Unit.” He posted numerous photos of himself on social media wearing clothing with DEA and FBI markings, including photos posted on an Instagram account under the handle “AnthonyFBI.”
He’s described as being a fanatical Trump follower and he was in attendance at Trump functions including at Mar-a-lago. How many of these guys are there?
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
The president’s lawyer today, ladies and gentlemen:
I guess he’s hinting that Joe Biden put a hit on Shokin? That’s what it sounds like.
As if Shokin didn’t have enough enemies as a prosecutor in Ukraine. Oy.
Meanwhile today:
I really couldn’t believe that Trump had one of his lawyers do an entire presentation defending Rudy in his impeachment trial. Rudy’s insurance policy must be gold-plated.
His former accomplice Lev Parnas showed up at the Capitol today, wandering the halls declaring that he wants to testify about Rudy.
In late 2018, Rudy Giuliani said he delivered an unusual missive to Sen. Lindsey Graham, according to the lawyer of one of his ex-associates: a letter calling for sanctions on a host of Ukrainian government officials, including one widely viewed in the West as a brave reformer and another who helmed the company where Hunter Biden was a board member.
Joseph Bondy, the attorney for Lev Parnas, an indicted Florida businessman involved in the U.S.-Ukraine saga, told The Daily Beast that Giuliani showed his client the letter and told him he delivered it to Sen. Graham (the letter misspelled the South Carolina Republican’s first name as “Lingsey”). Bondy said Giuliani also showed Parnas a second, similar letter addressed to Sigal Mandelker, who at the time was a top official at the Treasury Department.
The letters, which The Daily Beast reviewed, claim that an eclectic mix of Ukrainian political figures and businesspeople were part of an alleged “organized crime syndicate.” The letters claim that the individuals were “actively involved in the siphoning of funds appropriated by the American government for aid to Ukraine.” And they claim that the alleged crime syndicate used those funds to buy black-market military parts from a Russian company under U.S. sanctions. All the while, they say, Ukraine’s then-prosecutor general (Giuliani ally Yuriy Lutsenko) couldn’t fight the crime because then President Petro Poroshenko wouldn’t let him take the case to court.
“It concerns me, as should any fellow American, that a taxpayer’s money is rudely been stolen in Ukraine [sic],” reads the letter to Mandelker.
The letter-writer introduces himself in the letter addressed to Mandelker as a Ukraine-born U.S. citizen named Michael Guralnik who graduated from the Soviet Military Academy and was “a 10-year veteran of the Soviet Army.”
The letter to Graham, meanwhile, also bears Guralnik’s name but contains no introduction. It arrived a month before Giuliani tried to help former Ukrainian top prosecutor Viktor Shokin travel to the U.S. and meet with Graham, Bondy said. A few weeks before the date of the Guralnik letter, Giuliani sent Graham a letter of his own asking his staff to help three unnamed Ukrainians get visas so they could come to the U.S. and share information about the Bidens. The State Department did not give Shokin a visa.
Graham and Giuliani did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and it was not immediately clear if lawmakers ever even considered the sanctions. A spokesperson for Graham did not respond to a request for comment.
Who in the hell is paying Rudy Giuliani?