Month: January 2020

The story of Mike Pompeo’s interview with Mary Louise Kelly from NPR and his subsequent response calling her a liar came out while I was reading Catch and Kill and watching Bombshell.

Those stories showed the multiple ways the powerful hide their lies and crimes. The good news is that both those stories give us a model to use to stop them.

I’ve watched several Pompeo interviews and they show a man who isn’t skilled in talking to the media so he resorts to insults and intimidation.  I’ve seen this attitude many times before, almost always from men. They think “media training” means figuring out how to train the media to do what they want.  They know it’s not a crime to lie to the public or the press. As former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said,  ‘I have no obligation to be honest to the media.’

Pompeo and his staff start off using bribes of access to control who is doing the interview and what the topics will be. When that doesn’t work they use name calling and threats. Remember his interview in October with the Tennessee reporter? Pompeo made his dissatisfaction clear.  I can guarantee that following that interview all the producers and reporters trying to set up interviews knew exactly what happened.  Pompeo’s staff were tasked with preventing that from happening again in the future.

Because of what happened with the Nancy Amons interview in Tennessee in October 2019  I knew that NPR would have email evidence that Pompeo was lying about the conditions of the interview. Sure enough they did. (Emails support NPR host after Pompeo calls her a liar in setting up contentious interview Washington Post )

After NPR backed up Kelly Trump tweeted and threatened NPRs funding.

A very good question! https://t.co/8z6uQLKz8M

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2020

Because of Fox News, Pompeo’s insult of reporter leads to Trump threatening NPR (Media Matters)

So what happens next? If we look to Catch and Kill and Bombshell we can see that journalists alone can’t stop the rich and powerful. In order to stop these men it takes a team. It takes insiders to get the evidence of lies and crimes. It takes a legal strategy that can work in our rigged system.  It takes financial leverage that powerful people can’t ignore. It takes a plan to get the evidence of crimes into a lawsuit. There needs to be a way to get witnesses to testify under oath and a way for the testimonies to be public so they can’t be hidden with non-disclosure agreements, “national security” claims and/or “executive privilege” excuses.

Sick Fun Fact: In Catch and Kill, Bombshell and Pompeo’s interviews I noted one person involved with covering up for Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes and Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani.

Here’s a clip of Nancy Amons of WSMV in Tennessee on October 11, 2019 asking Pompeo about a meeting in Poland with Giuliani. Note how he smirks when he is asked but you can see he is upset before he repeats his cover lines twice.  During the interview he questioned Amons’ knowledge and suggested she is working for the DNC. When she asks hard questions she is “doing a real disservice to the employees and the team at the United States Department of State.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbHv5KyGzw&w=560&h=315]

As you can see, Pompeo has used these intimidation methods before. Instead of learning from his Nancy Amons interview he attacks Kelly and makes the accusations louder and more formal.  A statement from the State Department is EXACTLY what he wants other reporters to “hear about” and to expect from his office if they dare question him off his approved topic list.

NPR and Kelly aren’t going to file a defamation lawsuit against Pompeo. They will do what they did which was to release what they had and wait for Pompeo to weasel word out of it.  However, this most recent example of how easy and often the Trump administration lies to the media should be used as a reason to demand Pompeo be subpoenaed to testify under oath about what happened in the Ukrainian case. 

 

Not that it wasn’t obvious, but if you were wondering why they are going after Biden so hard in the impeachment trial (aside from fluffing the Commander in Chief) this says it all:

Apparently she didn’t get the memo about not saying out loud the quiet thing — that this whole deal is about their fear of running against Joe Biden https://t.co/1Z2PfdAyi7

— Steve Schale (@steveschale) January 28, 2020

Does that remind you of anything?

Trump isn’t the only loose-lipped Republican …

*Screwing the pooch

Basically, the president’s defense today has been Ken Starr fatuously railing against the use of impeachment, another lawyer defending Rudy Giuliani, some nonsense about the process being unfair, Pam Bondi smearing Joe Biden and some lawyer basically arguing for a retroactive impeachment of Obama and scolding the House Managers for failing to pass the president’s agenda instead of impeaching him.

They are utterly shameless:

Today’s big lie to the Senate is that Shokin was investigating Burisma. Credible reporting suggests his investigations were dormant, and pressing for Shokin’s replacement made real scrutiny of Burisma (and thus Hunter Biden) more likely.

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 27, 2020

Here’s that story:

At the heart of Congress’ probe into the president’s actions is his claim that former Vice President and 2020 Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden strong-armed the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor in order to thwart an investigation into a company tied to his son, Hunter Biden. 

But sources ranging from former Obama administration officials to an anti-corruption advocate in Ukraine say the official, Viktor Shokin, was ousted for the opposite reason Trump and his allies claim.

It wasn’t because Shokin was investigating a natural gas company tied to Biden’s son; it was because Shokin wasn’t pursuing corruption among the country’s politicians, according to a Ukrainian official and four former American officials who specialized in Ukraine and Europe.

Shokin’s inaction prompted international calls for his ouster and ultimately resulted in his removal by Ukraine’s parliament. Without pressure from Joe Biden, European diplomats, the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations, Shokin would not have been fired, said Daria Kaleniuk, co-founder and executive director of the Anti Corruption Action Centre in Kiev.

“Civil society organizations in Ukraine were pressing for his resignation,” Kaleniuk said, “but no one would have cared if there had not been voices from outside this country calling on him to go.” In a July phone call, Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden’s actions.

That prompted a whistleblower to accuse Trump of asking a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, which is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry. The actions at the center of Trump’s allegation occurred in late 2015 and early 2016, when U.S. aid was critical to Ukraine. Russia had seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and was supporting separatists who were fighting Ukrainian forces in the eastern part of the country.

Biden took an interest in Ukraine, said Steven Pifer, a William J. Perry fellow at Stanford University and former ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “You saw the vice president begin to emerge as really sort of the senior policy lead on Ukraine,” Pifer said. “It’s good to have attention at that level.” At one point, Biden withheld $1 billion in aid to Ukraine to pressure the government to remove Shokin from the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claim Biden did this to quash Shokin’s investigation into Ukraine’s largest gas company, Burisma Holdings, and its owner, oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. They say this benefited Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who served on Burisma’s board of directors – for which he was paid $50,000 a month. 

Their assertion is contradicted by former diplomatic officials who were following the issue at the time. Burisma Holdings was not under scrutiny at the time Joe Biden called for Shokin’s ouster, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency set up in 2014 that has worked closely with the FBI.

Shokin’s office had investigated Burisma, but the probe focused on a period before Hunter Biden joined the company, according to the anti-corruption bureau.  The investigation dealt with the Ministry of Ecology, which allegedly granted special permits to Burisma between 2010 and 2012, the agency said. Hunter Biden did not join the company until 2014.

Critics of Hunter Biden have questioned how he landed such a lucrative role with no experience in Ukraine or the gas industry. But it’s not unusual for Ukrainian companies to bring on high-profile people from the West in an effort to burnish their image and gain influence, Pifer said. Cofer Black, who served as Bush’s CIA counterterrorism chief, joined Burisma’s board in 2017. 

There is no evidence Hunter Biden did anything wrong, said Yuri Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who succeeded Shokin. However, Lutsenko, who’s also faced criticism for his actions as prosecutor, supported Trump’s claim before changing his story. He resigned as prosecutor in August. The Burisma investigation ended with a settlement and a fine paid by one of the firm’s accountants, according to Sergii Leshchenko, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who spearheaded anti-corruption efforts under former President Petro Poroshenko.

Jesus. Here’s fact-checker Daniel Dale on Bondi’s outrageously disingenuous presentation:

Here are four key facts Bondi omitted:

1. Shokin’s former deputy, Vitaliy Kasko, said the investigation into Burisma and company owner Mykola Zlochevsky was inactive at the time of Joe Biden’s pressure in late 2015 and early 2016. A leading Ukrainian anti-corruption activist said the same.

“Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Washington Post for a July article. “And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”

2. Shokin was widely seen — by Ukrainian activists, US diplomats, European governments and the International Monetary Fund — as ineffective or corrupt. In a speech in 2015, Geoffrey Pyatt, then the US ambassador to Ukraine, castigated Shokin’s office for impeding the investigation of Burisma’s owner Zlochevsky. Pyatt called for people in Shokin’s office to be fired, “at minimum.” 

“Rather than supporting Ukraine’s reforms and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the prosecutor general’s office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform,” Pyatt said.

3. Biden was acting in accordance with official US policy. Because of Shokin’s reputation, the US and its allies believed that removing him would increase, not decrease, the chances of people like Zlochevsky being pursued.

“What former Vice President Biden requested of former president of Ukraine, (Petro) Poroshenko, was the removal of a corrupt prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin,” George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, testified in the impeachment inquiry. Kent went on to say Shokin had “undermined” a US-funded program to try to investigate corrupt Ukrainian prosecutors. 

4. Some Republican senators had also demanded changes to the prosecutor general’s office Shokin led.

In a bipartisan 2016 letter, Republican senators Rob Portman, Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson joined Democratic colleagues in calling on then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.”

I don’t care much about Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, but this dishonest crapola is outrageous.

They could make the argument that Trump did something wrong but it’s not impeachable and there wouldn’t be much anyone could do about it. That determination is left to senators to decide and while I’d disagree with them, it’s not something based totally upon outright lies and smears. But Trump won’t let them and they seem to be fine with doing it his way.

These people are making a Trumpian mockery of the constitution and it’s damned depressing. I don’t know how you put this lying, evil genie back in the bottle

Here’s another useful PSA on the virus from theprepared.com

Judging by the forums and private Facebook groups we follow, the most terrifying feature of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak so far has been the Chinese government’s aggressive response — whole cities and tens of millions on sudden lockdown in their homes, public gatherings banned, internal travel by road cut off with roadblocks.

Why would China take such disruptive and expensive measures to stop the spread of a virus with well under a hundred deaths and a few thousand infections (per the official count)? It doesn’t add up, and the internet has noticed, giving rise to the theory that Chinese are trying to cover up how catastrophically deadly this outbreak really is.

But newly published migration data suggests a far less terrifying logic behind China’s aggressive response: it seems an astonishing five million people bugged out from Wuhan in the days before intercity travel was banned. Some portion of that was due to planned holiday travel, but it’s clear many people left (or left earlier than planned) due to the virus news.

Our Chinese reporter in Beijing explains it this way:

• SARS is still fresh in the minds of many Chinese.
• Modern Chinese people are already wary of weird food sources as a possible epidemic spark — in this case, it looks like a mix of bat and snake at the local Wuhan food market is to blame.
• There’s a degree of mistrust towards the government, so people expect party leaders to downplay legitimate concerns.
• Local people were glued to their phones for instant updates very early in this process.
• Every social media post that could even seem related, such as a person collapsing at a hospital, instantly spreads.
• That combination of predisposed fear, viral media, and modern on-demand transportation networks meant millions of people “bugged out” of Wuhan very quickly.
• So the governments only way to contain the spread was to use fast and heavy lockdowns.
• But even with such a heavy response, it was too late, and the virus left Wuhan.

This level of sudden, coordinated action across a population of this size in response to breaking news was unthinkable in the days before social media.

But it’s likely now the new normal in societies as connected as China. That new reality makes China’s “shock and awe” response look less like a desperate measure to stop Black Death 2.0 and more like a logical effort to arrest a set of social-media-driven, “flash mob”-style mass migrations before centrally planned containment measures could be put in place.

While initial reports indicated that over a hundred thousand people left Wuhan by rail in the single day before the quarantine, the Times has now reported that including the entire leadup and all travel modes, the true figure was closer to five million people — about 45% of the population of Wuhan.

With so many Wuhan citizens spread to every part of the country, the move to lock down public spaces across the country as a whole makes a certain amount of sense; any measure intended to be effective at arresting the epidemic’s exponential spread would have to be carried out nationwide to be effective.

In addition, this explains the intercity travel ban being put on Wuhan despite the “cat [being] out of the bag”: if a precedent were established that affected cities would empty entirely, as Wuhan may have done, the migrations may have become even more destabilizing as active propagation of the virus began to hit other major cities.

For me, the scariest aspect of this virus was the extreme Chinese response. It indicated that it was likely far worse than what we were being told. This explanation makes sense. With millions fanning out across the country due to hearing about it on social media, well, they really had no choice even if the virus was much more contained than they may have thought.

And the authors of this post are right. This will likely be the standard response going forward. Nobody believes the government, any government, and panic will likely follow social media if something like this happens in any country.

As Tom wrote this morning, this is yet another fallout from the assault on reason and lack of trust in institutions and authorities and even common sense. On the other hand, we as individuals can cultivate trusted sources and keep our heads in these situations. It’s a good idea to be ready.

As I write this I am listening to Ken Starr, with his usual chilling, unctuous, sanctimony, rail against the use of impeachment for partisan purposes, insisting that it is being trivialized.

Here he is during the Clinton impeachment:

Here he is today:

Ken Starr unironically lamenting that impeachments are happening "all too frequently" is so much better with a laugh track pic.twitter.com/qmuHjQNe0G

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 27, 2020

Right now–the look of people who lived through the Clinton impeachment as they listen to Kenneth Starr. pic.twitter.com/MGyFumjKv6

— Julian Zelizer (@julianzelizer) January 27, 2020

Here’s a little reminder of what Starr’s “charges” were all about:

Starr’s investigation climaxed in the fall of 1998 with the publication of a bodice-ripper with an unusually long title: Communication from the Office of the Independent Counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, transmitting appendices to the referral to the United States House of Representatives pursuant to Title 28, United States Code, section 595(c)

As Retropolis reported last year, when publishers in New York rushed out copies, they shortened the title to “The Starr Report,” which was easier to market. The report shot up the bestseller list, in part because it read more like a Danielle Steel novel than a prosecutorial document.

Starr turned to two experienced lawyers/authors on his staff to write the bulk of the 475-page report, including Stephen Bates, who already had written several books and contributed to magazines such as the New Republic and Playboy before penning the ultimate Penthouse Letter.

Readers, including professional readers like book critics and actual authors, immediately noticed the report had an unusual tone and structure. “The prose, far from a dry, factual recitation, contained rich, erotic details of the sort we expect from a book-club romance,” Daniel M. Filler, a prominent law professor, wrote in a California Law Review article.

Here’s an example:

En route to the restroom at about 8 p.m., she passed George Stephanopoulos’s office. The President was inside alone, and he beckoned her to enter. She told him that she had a crush on him. He laughed, then asked if she would like to see his private office. Through a connecting door in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office, they went through the President’s private dining room toward the study off the Oval Office. Ms. Lewinsky testified: “We talked briefly and sort of acknowledged that there had been a chemistry that was there before and that we were both attracted to each other and then he asked me if he could kiss me.”

Ms. Lewinsky said yes. In the windowless hallway adjacent to the study, they kissed. Before returning to her desk, Ms. Lewinsky wrote down her name and telephone number for the President.At about 10 p.m., in Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection, she was alone in the Chief of Staff’s office and the President approached. He invited her to rendezvous again in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office in a few minutes, and she agreed. (Asked if she knew why the President wanted to meet with her, Ms. Lewinsky testified: “I had an idea.”)

They met in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office and went again to the area of the private study. This time the lights in the study were off.

This time.

You might be wondering what happened next. Not to worry — the writers do not leave their audience hanging: “She and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth.

His buddy Kavanaugh helped with that too.

Today he’s defending the man who says he can grab women by the pussy and they let him do it because he’s a star. And he’s complaining that the impeachment of that man because he extorted a foreign government to help him cheat in his election is not an impeachable offense.

I think I can finally see the Trump strategy. Just gaslight us until we finally all go mad.

It’s working.

Update from the “shamelessness in their superpower” files:

Ken Starr in his book, "Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation," on Abuse of Power:

"The reaction of the abuse-of-power skeptics –including Republican members of the House-surprised me. This wasn’t an obscure legal doctrine. This is what had brought Nixon down." pic.twitter.com/xEB83ODnOW

— Jesse Lee (@JesseCharlesLee) January 27, 2020

In his presentation today he simply pointed out that the House had rejected the argument in 1999 as if he was just a potted plant in the whole proceeding.

Nothing factual — absolutely nothing of substance — was added by yesterday’s Times report that John Bolton, one of the most hot-headed nut right wing jobs that has ever served in government, wrote that Trump withheld millions of dollars of aid so he could cheat on the 2020 election.

Yet, as seems the norm today, the press is attaching more weight to the words of a single extremist than to the mountain of careful evidence amassed by some of the most sober and level-headed people elected to Congress.

“Even the well-known conservative X has a problem with Y” is the general structure of the argument. As if somehow the gold standard for what is reasonable and factual is not whether a statement is factually true or an argument is logical and reasonable. A right winger also has to agree, the more extreme the better, or there is no reason to accept it.

This really has to stop.

Of course he did:

By Monday morning, several Republican senators had angrily called the White House trying to determine who at the administration knew about Mr. Bolton’s manuscript, which aides there have had for several weeks, and what was in it. They told the White House they felt blindsided, according to people briefed on the calls who insisted on anonymity to describe private discussions.

One reason for their ire is that Mr. Bolton’s account flies in the face of the rationale the president’s lawyers have offered the Senate for his actions, and which many Republicans have latched onto themselves as a defense of his conduct.

Michael Cohen warned them:

“I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years. The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

The impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump continues this week, with the president’s defense team making the case for his acquittal followed by questions from senators. The president’s lawyers opened their presentation on Saturday with a mere two hours of arguments.

It’s clear they are anxious to get this over with so that the Republicans can bring the “vindicated” Trump into the House chamber like a conquering hero on Feb. 4 for the State of the Union address. They certainly don’t want him to deliver it in the middle of his impeachment trial. If the incontinence Trump has displayed on his Twitter feed over the last few days is any indication, there’s a good chance he’ll leap off the dais and try to strangle House manager Adam Schiff with his bare hands.

He came perilously close to an outright threat on Sunday morning:

Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man. He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2020

He didn’t say, “He’s going to go through some things,” but you know he was thinking it.

Throughout the weekend the whole country listened to audio of the president having dinner and intimate conversation with Lev Parnas, the indicted co-conspirator of Ruy Giuliani — immediately followed by footage of the president insisting over and over again that he doesn’t know the man. That conversation included a discussion of former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, with Trump saying, “Get rid of her, take her out,” as if he were Sonny Corleone giving the order to Luca Brazzi.

There was no word from the delicate GOP Victorians who got the vapors during the trial last week about this bullying, mobster talk from the president. Perhaps they all went to a spa retreat to calm their overwrought nerves and didn’t hear any of it.

They were present on Saturday morning when White House counsel Pat Cipollone began his presentation with a twist, claiming the Democrats were trying to meddle with the 2020 election. “They’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history,” he said. You have to give them credit for gall, if nothing else. They are defending the president who eagerly welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election and extorted it from a different country for 2020 by claiming that using the constitutional remedy of impeachment for such acts is actually preemptively stealing the next election. I don’t think they can even hear what they are saying anymore.

Reporting throughout the weekend suggested that despite the president’s anemic defense, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the White House have been able to keep Republicans on board, leading to a quick end to the trial, possibly as early as Friday.

Nonetheless, there has still been some jockeying back and forth over the question of witnesses. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri is said to be preparing subpoenas for former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson and the unnamed whistleblower, threatening a possible circus that has the timorous vulnerable senators up for re-election this year in a tizzy. Cipollone complained during his Saturday presentation that Schiff didn’t appear before the House Judiciary Committee, hinting that he might be called to testify as well.

Trump is said to be happy with the trial so far, and even thinks he can get a few Democrats to vote for acquittal. He’s particularly focused on Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Doug Jones of Alabama, both of whom have been saying they have an open mind. But it’s pretty obvious that both Manchin and Jones are dangling this possibility in order to hear witnesses, which they’ve both demanded from the beginning.

That seemed increasingly unlikely as the weekend wore on. From what we could tell, with the exception of Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who said he was “very likely” to vote for witnesses, the GOP Senate caucus seemed to be firm in its desire to end the process as quickly as possible.

Then came Sunday night and this New York Times bombshell:

President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton. …

Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president’s private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.

We don’t know how this manuscript came into the New York Times’ hands, but the paper claims that Bolton shared drafts with close associates and delivered one to the White House to determine whether it contains classified information as is usual practice. While the motive behind leaking it is unclear, it stands to reason that Bolton may have feared that the White House would withhold the book on national security grounds after hearing the president say this in Davos last week:

The problem with John is that it’s a national security problem. You know, you can’t have somebody who’s at national security — and, if you think about it, John, he knows some of my thoughts.  He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader, and it’s not very positive, and then I have to deal on behalf of the country? It’s going to be very hard. 

That sounds very much like a rationale Trump’s lawyers were testing out to keep Bolton’s book from seeing the light of day.

And speaking of the lawyers — and Mitch McConnell too, for that matter — they all knew what Bolton would say since the manuscript was turned over to the White House at the end of December. Yet they went before the American people and lied repeatedly as recently as Saturday. There doesn’t seem to be any accountability for anyone in this administration, so I doubt there will be penalties. But these lawyers are shockingly unethical.

So, by the way, is John Bolton. All this drama could have been avoided if he had simply volunteered to speak before the House under oath. Perhaps he’s more of a Trumpist that he likes to think.

We don’t know whether any of this will make a difference. Donald Trump has strong-armed senators into covering up for his crimes altogether, rather than allowing them to simply say that what he did was wrong, but he hadn’t committed an impeachable offense. He won’t stand for anyone saying he isn’t perfect. So they must all agree to be his accomplices.

Those senators may have been tossing and turning on Sunday night, however. In just the last three days, recordings have come to light that show Trump has been lying about knowing Parnas and Fruman, and now Bolton’s book testifying to Trump’s personal involvement has been leaked. Every day there’s something new. They have to be wondering how much more they will be forced to answer for next November

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

We joke that the conservative echo chamber operates on the “Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” principle. Senses can lie. Listen to us, they say. We’ll tell you what’s true and what isn’t. Except what they’re reading out isn’t true either.

The pilot of Kobe Bryant’s Sikorsky S-76B may have crashed the basketball legend’s helicopter into rising terrain after becoming disoriented in Los Angeles area fog Sunday morning. Paul Cline, assistant professor of aviation at the City University of New York, told Jeff Wise of New York magazine:

“When you get in the soup, your senses don’t work,” Cline, the aviation professor, said. “For me, I always feel like I’m falling to the right. Other people might feel like they’re falling to the left, or climbing.”

“Visual Flight Rules,” or VFR, no longer work in low visibility. Pilots train themselves instead to rely on instrument readouts, hard data, to stay alive. They train to ignore misleading input from their own senses. But switching to “Instrument Flight Rules,” or IFR, is “time-consuming and constrains pilots to following the directions of controllers.”

“A ton of rules come into play, and people don’t always want to fly that way. It takes away their ability to do whatever they want to do,” Cline said. “The trade off is, you get to live.”

This model helicopter has a strong safety record. We don’t know exactly what caused this crash. But Kobe Bryant and his passengers wanted to catch the start of a basketball game in Thousand Oaks. Flying IFR might have meant waiting. Being in a hurry may have cost them their lives.

The impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump resumes this morning in the U.S. Senate. His defense team will use the same tactics that have worked so well for conservative media for decades. Listen to us. Ignore your lyin’ eyes. Ignore the facts. Facts cannot be trusted.

Gathering additional data from witnesses will be time-consuming and get in the way of what Trump’s lawyers and Senate supporters want to do. They are in a hurry to get this over, to declare victory and go home. This isn’t even a low-visibility environment. The facts are in plain sight. More are coming in daily.

The New York Times reported Sunday evening that former Trump national security adviser John Bolton’s upcoming book recounts that Trump said in August he “wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens.” Bolton’s testifying to that under oath is data defenders would rather not hear and will ignore anyway. Loyalty to the president demands it.

The famously untrustworthy president responded in a tweet just after midnight, “I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.”

Well. Trump said it. They believe it. That settles it.

Decades of a misinformation diet has dulled Americans’ ability to process hard data. Everything your everyday senses tells you and what you hear from the “liberal” media is suspect. Trust us instead, conservative spinmeisters insist. Master manipulators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin deliberately create a fog of lies to create public demand for a strong man with a loud voice to lead the way out of the soup they’ve cooked.

They may lead the country into a hillside at 170 mph instead.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

Wow. No one could possibly have guessed:

President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.

For some reason, whenever I hear about more evidence confirming Trump’s very obvious guilt, I keep thinking about this scene from Austin Powers.

Update: There are reports to the effect that the leaking of Bolton’s book might lead to some Republicans supporting Democrats’ requests to call witnesses.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.