Month: January 2020

Many people wondered what exactly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was thinking when she decided to delay delivery of the articles of impeachment against President Trump until after the holiday recess. That question has never been adequately answered, but if it was because Pelosi had a feeling — or perhaps knew for sure — that more evidence of Trump’s abuse of power would trickle out almost daily, she was absolutely right.

From White House emails revealed through the Freedom of Information Act to Rudy Giuliani’s “associate” Lev Parnas passing on documents and tapes it’s been a steady drip, drip, drip ever since the middle of December. But none of it is as important or as incriminating as the potential testimony of former national security adviser John Bolton. Keeping him from testifying in the impeachment trial has been Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s singular focus from the very beginning. This week we found out why.

As I wrote on Monday, the New York Times’ reporting about Bolton’s book has upended what was to be an open-and-shut trial with no testimony or evidence. The plan was to feature some dull arguments by the House managers and the president’s lawyers, followed by a few questions from senators and a quick vote before the Super Bowl, where Trump is slated to have a “yuge” victory interview with Sean Hannity. Basically, it was to be a constitutional wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

It isn’t working out the way they planned. The president’s defense has been all over the place, I suspect because his lawyers knew the outcome of the trial was fixed so why put any more effort into it than you have to? They’ve claimed that Democrats are trying to steal both the 2016 and the 2020 elections, that Joe Biden is the real criminal, that the president did nothing wrong but that even if he did you can’t impeach a president for abusing his power. It pretty much comes down to, “Whatever. We have the votes.”

As it turns out, the White House has had a copy of Bolton’s book since late December. The lawyers say they didn’t know anything about it and McConnell insists that nobody told him about it either, all of which strains credulity, especially if Bolton’s contention that copies were made in the White House is true. Certainly, Trump’s comments about Bolton’s potential testimony posing a “national security” problem indicate that the administration has been contemplating ways to keep the book from being published.

Bolton may be a far-right warmonger, but he’s got absolutely no incentive to lie about this. I’m sure he’s being paid a lot of money for this book but with all the money sloshing around in Trump World, it’s hard to believe he couldn’t have put that much together in some other way. Virtually everyone around Trump seems to be making big bucks lobbying for foreign governments. If Rudy Giuliani could do it, surely a former national security adviser would be in much demand. (And unlike Rudy, Bolton has an unquestioned reputation for honesty, if nothing else.)

It’s far more likely that ego is driving Bolton. His is almost as large as Trump’s, and when the president refused to listen and insulted him publicly, Bolton decided to fight back rather than submit as everyone else has done. On Tuesday he got a little back-up from another former insider, former White House chief of staff John Kelly.

Kelly told a Florida audience on Monday:

If John Bolton says that in the book, I believe John Bolton. Every single time I was with him … he always gave the president the unvarnished truth.

It’s nice of Kelly to weigh in on Bolton’s behalf, but let’s face it: He, like so many others, could have blown the whistle long before now. Instead, he’s chosen to make vague references to Trump’s incapacity while never really putting himself at odds with the president’s ferocious defenders. You can say the same thing for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats or any number of others who have intimate knowledge of the Trump administration’s internal chaos and could have stepped up at any time but chose not to.

Bolton is already paying a price. According to the Washington Post, the online smearing began almost immediately, with Trump loyalists promoting an old social media post full of what the paper calls “innuendo and half-truths” about Bolton being in cahoots with “cartels, terrorists and Iran.” That suddenly went viral, and within hours memes like “Book Deal Bolton” were trending and Fox News was echoing the charges.

Bolton was a Fox News contributor for 11 years. But these days at that network, anyone whose fealty to Trump is in question winds up with their head on a pike. Metaphorically speaking, of course. The network’s most flamboyant Trump sycophant, Lou Dobbs, immediately dismissed Bolton as a traitor saying:

Bolton has sadly reduced himself to nothing more than an unprincipled tool of the Radical Dems and Deep State: And he’s sacrificed his integrity to sell a lousy spiteful book, pathetic … 

Trump himself retweeted Dobbs’ comments.

The irony is that, as Vanity Fair points out, Bolton was pushed hard for his White House job by Fox News and Trump rejected him at first because he hated the walrus mustache. Ultimately he hired him anyway because Bolton defended him so fervently on Fox News every night.

But it isn’t just Fox. Talk radio is in a tizzy as well. Rush Limbaugh was very upset, saying “if this passage in the book is true, and this is actually what’s intending, it’s not the John Bolton I thought I knew, this kind of disloyalty.” Mark Levin thinks Bolton is “disgruntled.” another term you hear being used a lot in right-wing media.

2. On a daily basis, there are robust and passionate discussions about policy, etc., in every administration.  Publishers pay big bucks for these kinds of books.  And often the author is disgruntled and self-serving in their narrative and trying to settle scores.

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) January 27, 2020

I have no doubt Bolton is settling scores. That doesn’t mean he’s lying. After all, other witnesses, including former National Security Council Russia expert Fiona Hill, have testified to his “disgruntlement” with Trump and Giuliani’s Ukraine “drug deal.”

In any case, this means that McConnell’s carefully laid plans to have a quick and dirty impeachment acquittal so Trump can hold a triumphant State of the Union address next week and rub his impunity in Democrats’ faces have been disrupted. As of Tuesday night, McConnell is reportedly saying he doesn’t have the votes to prevent witnesses.

But according to CNN, this is really just Mitch’s way of putting pressure on anyone who’s thinking of voting the wrong way. I’m guessing Democrats will get three Republicans to vote for witness testimony — but not the four they require. The rest of the Senate GOP will hold hands and jump over the cliff together, in the hope that we’ll be dealing with a global pandemic or World War III by November, so voters simply won’t remember how they covered up Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Short of that sort of catastrophe, however, I suspect Republicans are headed down the slippery slide. Democrats and vengeful NeverTrumpers will do everything in their power to make sure these people’s blind loyalty to a corrupt president will be the first thing anyone thinks of when they see their names on the ballot in November.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

“Across the globe, democracy is in a state of malaise,” Roberto Foa tells the BBC. Foa authored a report from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy showing public faith in democracy at the lowest point ever measured (since 1995). Dissatisfaction with democracy has risen 10 points from 48% to a record 58%.

Data going back to the 1970s showed a steady upswing through the latter decades of the 20th century. Over the last decade, however, dissatisfaction has been rising. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent, ” BBC adds:

But a group of European countries has been bucking this trend, with satisfaction with democracy higher than ever before in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands.

Some of the dissatisfaction may have origins in the financial shock of 2008 plus the refugee crisis of 2015 and “foreign policy failures.” Dissatisfaction in the United States has been climbing since the late “aughts” to its highest point on record. A majority now report they are dissatisfied.

“[I]f the public lacks commitment to democratic principles, or loses faith in democratic institutions, demagogues and opportunists may brush these aside,” Foa cautions along with Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic, adding:

… the drop in satisfaction with democracy is both especially rapid and especially consequential in the United States. For much of its modern history, America has viewed itself as a model democracy that could serve as an example to countries that wished to emulate its success. Survey data show that there was a little substance to this hubris: as recently as 10 years ago, three out of every four Americans said that they were satisfied with the state of their democratic system.

During the 2008 financial crisis, this began to change. And since then, Americans have become more pessimistic about their system every single year. For the first time on record, polls show that a majority of Americans (55 percent) are dissatisfied with their system of government.

When David Cameron and Barack Obama led London and Washington, D.C., Italians had rejected proto-populist Silvio Berlusconi, the pair write, and the party of Germany’s Angela Merkel held its largest parliamentary bloc in decades.

Since then, Donald Trump won the presidency in the U.S. and Germany has seen the return of far-right politics. You know, to get back to the good old days.

Oh, those good old days. Trump allies are handing out money in black communities as corrupt Democrats once did:

The first giveaway took place last month in Cleveland, where recipients whose winning tickets were drawn from a bin landed cash gifts in increments of several hundred dollars, stuffed into envelopes. A second giveaway scheduled for this month in Virginia has been postponed, and more are said to be in the works.

Politico reports the cash giveaways have been organized by an outside charity, the Urban Revitalization Coalition. Under current rules, donors may make donations anonymously and take tax deductions for them.

The acting president is on trial for attempting to blackmail a foreign government into investigating Americans he is sworn to defend. Trump is turning the executive branch into a “Sixth Family.” Americans plainly see money buys access. Money and digital “sub rosa electioneering” are contorting the upcoming election. The one percent rig capitalism with impunity as everyone else gets poorer. GOP operatives continue to sell voters on the idea elections themselves are corrupt and effectively invite foreign adversaries’ help in making it so.

“Democrats are bracing for the possibility that if President Donald Trump loses the 2020 election, he and his aides will bungle a smooth handover of power – and maybe even try to outright sabotage the transition,” Politico reports.

Donald Trump is not on trial in the Senate. The Constitution and our democratic republic are.

Public faith in democracy is flagging? Ask not for whom the pitchforks pitch.

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In a wide ranging interview @RudyGiuliani said he’s ready to testify if he gets clearance from the White House and responded to congressional testimony that John Bolton likened him to a “grenade that was going to know everyone up.” https://t.co/NnvCPNzTc4

— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) January 29, 2020

I can’t wait.

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday called former national security adviser John Bolton a “backstabber” in response to explosive claims about Mr. Trump and the pause in aid to Ukraine. Giuliani also expressed disbelief that Mr. Trump had ever told Bolton the release of military aid to Ukraine was contingent upon Ukraine investigating the president’s political rivals.

“He never said to me, ‘I’ve got a problem with what you are doing in Ukraine,'” Giuliani said in an interview with CBS News. “Never once, never winked, never sent me a little note. He is a personal friend, I thought. So here’s the only conclusion I can come to, and it’s a harsh one, and I feel very bad about it: He’s a backstabber.”

When confronted with the seriousness of leveling such a claim against a former administration official, Giuliani doubled down.

“It’s not serious, it’s true. If your friend was complaining about you behind your back and didn’t have the guts to come up to your face and tell you, “I think you’re screwin’ up, Catherine,” that’d be a backstabber. That’s classic backstabber. So I feel I got a swamp character here.”

“I find his testimony about the president pretty close to incredible,” Giuliani added. “I can’t imagine that the president of the United States said that to him.”

That is, uhm, not helpful to the president.

Lol.

From a NY Times editorial:

Mr. Bolton, a hard-line conservative with decades of service in Republican administrations, is no anti-Trump zealot, which makes his allegations against the president that much more devastating.

No it doesn’t.

What makes the allegations so utterly devastating is that genuinely decent, reasonable Americans — Vindman, Hill, Yovanovitch, and many others — had the courage to testify publicly. Bolton, in contrast, has behaved like a coward who puts his own selfish interests above his principles.

And the Times describing Bolton as a ‘hard-line conservative?” That’s like calling a regurgitated kumquat “edible. ” Well, I guess so, but it kind of misses the point in a nauseating way.

Please don’t misunderstand. Of course, Bolton must be called as a witness. Of course, he must obey a subpoena and tell the truth — he risks serious penalties if he doesn’t. But this little episode is being used by the press to normalize Bolton into some kind of sober, credible patriot. He’s not.

The real patriots are the whistle-blower, those who have already testified, and the amazing team of investigators led by Schiff and his colleagues. And what they described was devastating: grossly criminal and unethical behavior by the president of the United States.

Remember that tape of a conversation with the President of the United States over dinner that Lev Parnas released a few years ago?

Oh wait, it was just last week. It just feels like it was years ago.

Anyway, we all heard him saying “take her out” about Marie Yovanovich. But there was a lot more to the tape than that. Trump was having dinner with big donors to one of his Super Pacs and they were asking for favors. This used to be illegal until Trump proved that the law doesn’t apply to him and his cronies.

The NY Times listened to the whole thing and pulled up a few of the more interesting moments. Some excerpts of what they found:

Here we look at six revelatory moments from the recording, which was captured at the Trump International Hotel in Washington on April 30, 2018.

A location pitch for a summit in North Korea

Time stamp: 21 minutes

At one point, one of the guests asked Mr. Trump to hold his upcoming meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in Songdo, a business district on the western coast of South Korea. A New York-based firm, Gale International, is helping develop the district there.

“My family, specifically, and the Gales, as well, would be honored if you would consider it,” the guest told the president. Mr. Trump responded, “We’re very far down the line, but I will,” and then quickly changed the subject.

“You know that Kim Jong-un is a great golfer. You know that, right?” Mr. Trump told the guests, who included Jack Nicklaus III, the grandson of the legendary golfer. As the dinner party erupted in laughter, one of the guests said to Mr. Trump of Mr. Kim, “His goal in life is to meet you! It’s true! His whole goal in life! He wants to meet the president! He wants to be you! He would like to be you!”

The excessive bootlicking throughout this dinner is so nauseating. That he welcomes it and needs it so much is pathetic.

Marijuana causes an ‘I.Q. problem,’ Trump suggests

Time stamp: 45 minutes

“Do you think the whole marijuana thing is a good thing?” Mr. Trump asked the guests. “No,” one woman responded.

Mr. Parnas said, “It’s something that is in the future, no matter how you look at it. I think it’s something that’s already so far out that you’re not going to stop it.” Mr. Trump indicated he was not impressed with the results of legalization in Colorado. “In Colorado, they have more accidents,” Mr. Trump said. “It does cause an I.Q. problem.”

Trump muses on if Hillary Clinton had picked Bernie Sanders as her running mate

Time stamp: 54 minutes

“If Bernie were Hillary’s vice president, it would have been tougher,” Mr. Trump said, “because all those people that hated her so much who voted for me.” Mr. Trump added, “You know I got 20 percent of Bernie vote. People don’t realize that, because of trade, because he’s a big trade guy, you know he basically says we’re getting screwed on trade, and he’s right, and I’m worse than he is, and we can do something about it, I don’t know if he could have.”

Trump’s dream of a concrete wall is scuttled by the potential dangers of drugs being thrown over it

Time stamp: 23 minutes

An unidentified guest said they shipped 125,000 tons of material for the wall at the border. Mr. Trump then said he wanted a “concrete wall, 30 feet high, very slick outside.”

Another individual can be heard saying that border agents have said that could be dangerous. “They actually said these drug dealers, it’s so dangerous to have a solid wall because they take the drugs, it weighs 100 pounds, approximately, you know a satchel, they call it a satchel, they throw it over the wall, it goes over the wall, and it will land on a guy’s head and it kills him,” Mr. Trump said.

That’s where he got that ridiculous talking point!

Mr. Trump clarifies that “our border guys” are the victims. “It can hit people,” Mr. Trump says. “Can you imagine, you get hit with a hundred pounds of drugs?”

Trump bashes the European Union

Time stamp: 16 minutes

“The European Union is a group of countries that got together to screw the United States,” Mr. Trump told his guests. “It’s as simple as that.” Mr. Trump continued: “And frankly, they’re probably worse than China in a sense, just smaller. They’re worse than China in the sense of barriers.”

“But the European Union is really bad,” he said. “You know it doesn’t sound like it. You know, the European Union, we’re all sort of from there, right? But the European Union is brutal. But we’re changing that rapidly, too. They can’t even believe it.”

Remember, he’s saying this to some very shady people from Ukraine …

A Canadian billionaire presses his case on steel tube imports

Time stamp: 1 hour, 7 minutes

Barry Zekelman, a Canadian citizen who owns a Chicago-based steel-tube manufacturing company that donated $1.75 million to a political action committee supporting Mr. Trump, urged the president to further limit steel imports to the United States, which he has said undermine sales for his American business.

Mr. Zekelman then questioned rules intended to prevent fatal truck accidents by using electronic monitoring systems to limit how many hours drivers can be on the road. The rules, he said, were having an impact on Mr. Zekelman’s ability to move the steel pipe he manufactures.

“Say someone is half an hour from home on their long haul truck — they literally have to pull over on the side of the road and stop,” Mr. Zekelman said. “They can’t go home. They don’t even want to do it anymore.” Mr. Zekelman said they cannot get enough drivers to haul his products.

Mr. Trump did not seem to be aware of the rules. “They have a method that you shut down a truck?” Mr. Trump said. Since the dinner, legislation has been introduced in the House with the cosponsorship of 12 Republicans to allow smaller trucking companies to get exemptions from the rule.

This is just one dinner with his big donors where Trump invites them to make their pitch. You know it’s far worse with the real VIPs.

Who could have predicted?

A retired Navy SEAL whose war crimes trial made international news has launched a video attack on former SEAL teammates who accused him of murder, shooting civilians and who testified against him at his San Diego court-martial in June.

In a three-minute video posted to his Facebook page and Instagram account Monday, retired Chief Special Operator Edward Gallagher, 40, referred to some members of his former platoon as “cowards” and highlighted names, photos and — for those still on active duty — their duty status and current units, something former SEALs say places those men — and the Navy’s mission — in jeopardy. […]

Two former SEALs who served in Gallagher’s platoon in Iraq during his 2017 deployment spoke to the Union-Tribune Monday about the video. Neither testified at Gallagher’s court-martial. David Shaw, a former petty officer 1st class, said he questioned Gallagher’s decision to publicize information that’s normally kept quiet for operational security…

Shaw also defended his former teammates and their decisions to testify against their chief.“ Each and every one of the guys who came forward were performers of the highest caliber and people of the highest reputations within the platoon,” Shaw said. “(One) was selected to serve at the most premier institution at Naval Special Warfare and that tells you everything you need to know about his performance and speaks volumes about his character.”

Another former SEAL from the platoon said publicizing the faces of active-duty SEALs — including one assigned to the elite Development Group, or SEAL Team 6 — could put the lives of the men and their families in danger.

It appears Gallagher is going for wingnut welfare. By putting targets on the backs of his critics:

The video appears to be a trailer for an unspecified future project. Tim Parlatore, one of Gallagher’s attorneys, declined to say Monday what that project is or when it will be published.

He’s Trump’s boy all the way.

I’ve been watching the right’s media machine for a long time. And there have always been shady characters lifted to the top of the wingnut food chain — Oliver North and G. Gordan Liddy come to mind. But actual war criminals, accused of killing civilians including kids and knifing prisoners, becoming right-wing media heroes even surprises me, even if they were acquitted by a last-minute, very dubious, witness testimony. Of course, this would not be happening if Trump hadn’t been glued to Fox news and heard from their resident psycho, Pete Hegseth, who represents the racist murderer wing of the military, saying this guy was “tough warfighter.”

I don’t know what his shelf-life is but both North and Liddy made a handsome living in the right-wing media for many years. So selling out his fellow Navy Seals, possibly even getting them killed, could be his ticket to Fox News stardom.

Why does the right-wing hate the troops so much?

Once more, he resorts to mob-boss talk to disparage a woman

After the sycophants in the room wildly cheered for Mike Pompeo, Trump said:

“That reporter couldn’t have done too good a job on you. I think you did a good job on her actually.”

“Take her out”, “she’s gonna go through some things” “you did a good job on her…”

And, by the way all those comments were about Marie Yovanovitch. It really makes you wonder if that surveillance story was actually true. Trump turns into Tony Soprano whenever her name comes up. No doubt somebody might have taken him seriously.

By the way, Pompeo is known as Trump’s most obsequious bootlicker and that is a hell of thing considering all the bootlickers he’s surrounded himself with. And one way he’s giving the president what he needs is by treating women like crap. He had a temper tantrum with the reporter in question and then banned another NPR reporter from his plane.

Trump loves that. And so do his voters. In fact, if you’ll recall, they all voted for him even after it was revealed that liked to brag about physically assaulting them. So what else is new? Pompeo is just following in Dear Leader’s footsteps.

Are we seeing a crack in the wall? Maybe:

[O]ne of Trump’s former top aides told a Sarasota crowd Monday evening that if the reporting on what Bolton wrote is accurate, he believes Bolton.

“If John Bolton says that in the book I believe John Bolton,” said retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff for 18 months.

Kelly spoke Monday at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall as part of the Ringling College Library Association Town Hall lecture series. The general worked with Bolton during his time as chief of staff, which ended in early 2019. Kelly said Bolton is an honest person.

“Every single time I was with him … he always gave the president the unvarnished truth,” Kelly said of Bolton, who has become a figure of intense interest in the impeachment inquiry. Asked about the passages in Bolton’s book — which has yet to be released — that appear to reinforce the impeachment allegations, Kelly said Monday evening that “John’s an honest guy. He’s a man of integrity and great character, so we’ll see what happens.”

There are growing calls for Bolton to testify in the Senate impeachment trial, something GOP leaders have resisted. Kelly said he supports calling witnesses during the trial. I mean half of Americans think this process is purely political and shouldn’t be happening but since it is happening the majority of Americans would like to hear the whole story,” Kelly said.

“So I think if there are people that could contribute to this, either innocence or guilt … I think they should be heard,” Kelly said, adding: “I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate but I wasn’t there. But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”

John Bolton is a fanatical right-wing hawk. I find him to be an extremely dangerous man. But I haven’t ever known him to be a liar, at least not in the sense that these Trump people are all liars. Whatever his faults, and they are many, he’s always been upfront about his fanatical, right-wing hawkery.

Kelly is a similarly character. He did lie about Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson taking credit for something she didn’t do. He’s a right-wing fanatic also. But compared to the cascade of lies that comes out of the White House every day, he’s George Washington.

Acknowledging that these people aren’t inveterate liars is not to valorize them or forgive their ideology. But if you want to convince Republicans to do something you need to find validators they have a hard time dismissing as partisan and Bolton and Kelly are two who can potentially do that.

I say potentially because there is a lot of evidence that Republicans are already circling the wagons around their Dear Leader.

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): I’ll tell you something else that’s not on anybody’s mind is John Bolton. Most people don’t know who he is, especially with all the coverage of the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash…

Trump is trying to extricate the United States from affairs and military entanglements like this, and Bolton left in a huff. And he was ticked off about things. I have to also say this. I’ve had dinner with John Bolton a couple times. I’ve met him two or three times, and if this passage in the book is true, and this is actually what he’s intending, it’s not the John Bolton I thought I knew, this kind of disloyalty. You may say, “Well, Rush, it’s not disloyal. He’s simply telling the truth. The president didn’t want to…”

Yeah, but it is disloyal.

The guy who said the Abu Ghraib torturers were just “blowing off steam” and fluffed Bush and Cheney so hard he almost passed out is now a peacenik? There is literally nothing these people won’t say to please their masters.

But it is interesting to see if there is any line they won’t cross for Donald Trump. Throwing two hardcore wingnuts like Bolton and Kelly over the cliff to protect him would pretty much say it all.

I mean … wow. This is 2020, people.

The story is here.

“No one scares President Trump as much as people who used to work for him,” explains Windsor Mann at The Week. They would be his Kryptonite if he were the genetically superior Superman of his ravings. But that would require he champion truth, justice and the American way. Not bloody likely.

Mr. “America First” is on trial for trying to coerce a foreign government into investigating a couple of U.S. citizens that as president he was sworn to defend.

Trump’s assembled Ministry of Truth on Monday spent its time in the well of the Senate smearing Joe Biden and Barack Obama. If he couldn’t get the Ukrainians to do it, Trump would turn his impeachment trial into a day-long attack ad. Anything to distract from headlines surrounding former national security adviser John Bolton’s unpublished manuscript for “The Room Where It Happened.“

The president told Bolton he “wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens,” the New York Times reported Sunday. On Monday, the Times supplemented that with the revelation Bolton had expressed concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr last August that Trump was “effectively granting personal favors to the autocratic leaders of Turkey and China.”

Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman write:

Mr. Bolton’s account underscores the fact that the unease about Mr. Trump’s seeming embrace of authoritarian leaders, long expressed by experts and his opponents, also existed among some of the senior cabinet officers entrusted by the president to carry out his foreign policy and national security agendas.

Trump is making nice with autocrats hoping they’ll let the addled wannabe into their he-man’s club. Not bloody likely.

Trump’s Minitrue attorneys want to disappear that and more down the memory hole. “The Republicans would like to pretend that the past doesn’t exist, and also that the future won’t exist,” Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate. They are trying to isolate the case to the events of the July 25 Ukraine call, cherry-picking bits of the prosecution case to attack it and ignoring “mountains of corroborating testimonial evidence, leaked emails, and ongoing media reports, all of which establish a clear timeline of the Ukraine scandal.” None of that appears in the White House call summary. (Despite the loose use of the term, we’ve never seen an actual call transcript.)

Where addressing statements from former employees is unavoidable, Team Trump deploys a couple of standard memory-hole flushes. Bolton is trying “to sell a book.” Anthony Scaramucci is “a disgruntled employee.”

Another dodge the man with “the world’s greatest memory” tries, Mann writes, is to deny knowing the person making unfavorable claims against him. “I don’t know him at all,” Trump says of Lev Parnas, indicted for campaign finance felonies. Parnas produced a string of photos of the two together and an email from Trump attorney Jay Sekulow saying Trump had approved John Dowd defending him.

Paul Manafort? Trump claims he barely knows him. Manafort ran his presidential campaign for “a very short period of time.” Manafort is serving a 7.5-year federal prison sentence for tax and bank fraud charges and for conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Down the memory hole.

Even if Senate Republicans ultimately acquit Trump, Republicans who would rather tout the economy this election season must beat back revelations that, if Trump’s Senate firewall against witnesses testifying breaches, threaten to expose what everyone knows about him but refuses to see or hear. Buried drainpipes can only pass so much so fast before they back up and overflow into the daylight.

The memory hole is choking.

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