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Month: January 2020

Lordy, there are tapes

Published by digby on January 24, 2020

Donald Trump on Lev Parnas last week:

“I don’t know him at all, don’t know what he’s about, don’t know where he comes from, know nothing about him. I can only tell you this thing is a big hoax. He’s probably trying to make a deal for himself. Perhaps he’s a fine man. Perhaps he’s not … I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to him. I don’t need the help of a man that I never met before other than perhaps taking a picture at a fundraiser.”

He said this about him earlier this week:

I don’t know him, other than he’s sort of like a groupie. He shows up at fundraisers. I don’t know anything about him. …Parnas, I don’t know, other than he probably contributed to the campaign along with tens of thousands of other people. This weekend I was taking pictures with hundreds of people. Every once in a while I’ll look at somebody and I’ll say, ‘Gee, I wonder when that picture is going to be in The New York Times, or The Washington Post or on Fox.

As you probably guessed he protested too much:

A recording reviewed by ABC News appears to capture President Donald Trump telling associates he wanted the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired while speaking at a small gathering that included Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — two former business associates of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani who have since been indicted in New York.

The recording appears to contradict statements by President Trump and support the narrative that has been offered by Parnas during broadcast interviews in recent days. Sources familiar with the recording said the recording was made during an intimate April 30, 2018, dinner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“Get rid of her!” is what the voice that appears to be President Trump’s is heard saying. “Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it.”

Parnas appears to say: “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration,” Parnas can be heard telling Trump. “She’s basically walking around telling everybody ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.” (Yovanovitch actually had served in the State Department since the Reagan administration.)

This tracks with Parnas’s interviews in which he talks about this dinner and says that it was he who blackened Yovanovitch’s reputation in an attempt to get Trump to fire her. Parnas apologized for doing that explaining that he was doing what he thought would advance the cause.

Now we don’t really know what Parnas’s motives were. It’s very hard to sort out whether he was just a “groupie” who got caught up in Giuliani’s web or whether there were other reasons and inducements. We certainly don’t fully understand where all the money came from.

But as this pertains to Trump, if this tape is validated, it proves that he was lying about Parnas. Not that we didn’t know this, but a tape is a valuable piece of evidence. I wonder if the House will obtain it and find reason to play it during the question period next week.

I wonder if Lev has any other tapes? I’ll bet Trump and Rudy are wondering that too.

Update:

Some people are engaged in what’s happening.

Published by digby on January 24, 2020

And when they see what the Republicans are doing, they are frightened.

Crooks and Liars caught some random C-SPAN callers this morning. They may surprise you:

John called Trump IMPOTUS and started to cry over what is happening to our democracy.

Annie in Oregon said after this week she is embarrassed to be a registered Republican and that yes, right matters.

Yes, I know that C-SPAN is often full of cranks and weirdos and this doesn’t mean much in the larger scheme of things. But there are people like this out there, despite the fact that it seems the only people who matter are the Real Americans who love Donald Trump, or others who allegedly only care about their pocketbooks.

Some people are actually engaged and they clearly see the threat posed to the culture and the Constitution by the Republicans.

image via youtube

The delicate Victorian spinsters of the GOP Senate are “offended”

Published by digby on January 24, 2020

They’re about to faint dead away at the rudeness of the House Managers.

When you watch a trial, whether you’re on a jury yourself or on the couch in front of the TV, the prosecution’s presentation always seems airtight — until you see the defense. So I don’t want to say at this stage that the House managers in Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial have made their case. But seriously, it’s hard to see how the president’s team can plausibly explain away this behavior. Their only choice will be to admit that all the evidence is true and tell the American people that it was perfect.

Republican senators are all doing their part, acting as if the House managers are a bunch of primitive barbarians rampaging through their hallowed halls, gibbering incomprehensibly and rudely insulting them and their president with the shocking suggestion that he might have done something wrong.

You may recall that on the first night of the trial, at the end of an 11-hour day, Chief Justice John Roberts admonished both sides to be careful of their rhetoric because they were speaking in front of the world’s greatest deliberative body and they’ve earned the House’s respect. As it turns out, he did that because Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, had sent him a note asking him to scold Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, for saying that senators would be covering up for the president’s misdeeds if they refused to call John Bolton to testify.

On Wednesday, other pearl-clutching senators also complained about Nadler’s comments. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told the media she was “very offended” and Josh Hawley of Missouri chimed in, saying that Democrats “managed to alienate senators, attack their own jury” — as if any Republicans in the chamber had seriously been considering voting to call Bolton (or any other witnesses) until Nadler hurt their feelings.

Sure enough, the media dutifully asked every Democrat on Thursday if they would distance themselves from Nadler’s comments, giving the impression to the public that this alleged insult was truly over the top. So far, at least, Democrats have resisted the temptation to do that.

Republicans will obviously be using this tactic going forward, even though anyone can see that the House managers are extremely well-prepared and are making their arguments calmly and professionally. At the end of Thursday’s session, lead manager Adam Schiff gave a powerful closing argument in which he explained why the stakes are so high. It was not histrionic or insolent, but it was a sharp condemnation of the president that the House majority concluded must be removed from office for abusing his power.

Here’s the reaction. Again:

Republicans have the delicate sensibilities of upper-class Victorian maidens, apparently. If there’s one thing they simply cannot abide, it’s rudeness. Take, for example, the president they are defending, who tweeted this on Thursday:

You can understand why they become indignant whenever House managers assert that such a dignified statesman might have committed the acts of which he is accused.

This is a game I have written about many times. I call it “The Art of the Hissy Fit,” in which the right uses faux outrage to get the media to press the Democrats to disavow or apologize for something they were perfectly entitled to say or do. Most often, it’s something extremely mild, compared to what Republicans say and do every day.)

Recall this example from a few years back during the financial crisis. When the vote on a bailout failed because then-House Republican leader John Boehner couldn’t hold his caucus together at the last minute, this was the excuse:

House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said that when Pelosi blamed “the Bush administration’s failed economic policies” for the current economic mess, she “poisoned” the well. Added Republican Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, “There’s a reason that this vote failed — and that is Speaker Pelosi’s speech.”

Needless to say, that was not the real reason.

Those who weren’t calling for the smelling salts over the allegedly outrageous rhetoric of the House managers made a big show of being bored and tired and cranky. Some Republican senators were doing crossword puzzles, making paper airplanes and even using fidget spinners like 11-year-old kids.

This is the behavior of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” that Chief Justice Roberts was going on about the other night?

It is all heading toward exactly what Amanda Marcotte predicted here last week: jury nullification. As she pointed out, historically this was used by all-white juries to acquit white defendants who had committed crimes against blacks in the Jim Crow South. Considering Trump’s history of calling for the death penalty for innocent young black men, a brazenly racist act which he defended as recently as last June in a White House interview, this isn’t much of a stretch.

I doubt this gentleman thinks of it those terms but it amounts to the same thing:

That’s not just jury nullification. It’s reality nullification.

But in Trumpian fashion, the president has turned that inside out by modeling his defense on the O.J. Simpson trial, even hiring a member of Simpson’s Dream Team for his own, Alan Dershowitz. He’s portraying himself as a victim of a rigged system and his “jurors” are prepared to acquit him on that basis. One of his supporters even said outright, “He is our O.J.”

He is. According to CBS News, the White House has been telling Republican senators, “Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.”

Trump should consider, however, that while O.J. Simpson was acquitted he lost his reputation anyway. Once people heard what he had done, they couldn’t unhear it, even if they believed that L.A. police had framed a guilty man. Simpson ended up going to prison a few years later for a different crime and now lives a life of ignominy, reminiscing about the good old days with his pal Donald Trump.

Unlike O.J., Trump may not live long enough to see the full destruction of his legacy. But since he brought his children into his mess, they will have to bear the burden for him. The Senate can nullify the Constitution, at least for now. It can’t nullify the truth. 

My Salon column reprinted with permission

Schiff

Published by tristero on January 24, 2020

One of the most powerful speeches of my lifetime. Once again, Adam Schiff has outdone himself.

If you haven’t seen or heard this clip yet, stop what you’re doing and watch. It’s one for the history books.

Picking clean democracy’s bones

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 24, 2020

What kind of person douses his/her reputation in gasoline, sets it alight, and holds it aloft like a cigarette lighter at a rock concert? The kind who sermonizes on the dangers of letting law-breaking go unpunished and then lets it go.

“History will be busy wondering why we impeached a President without a crime or a victim,” tweeted Republican Matt Gaetz of Florida Wednesday in response to Justin Amash’s (I-Mich.) warning to Republicans that they would not evade the judgment of history for supporting Donald Trump.

Citing Hamilton from Federalist 65, Amash replied, “The high crime is using his public office to solicit the aid of a foreign government for personal gain. The victim is society itself. “

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) was more blunt, “Actually, it’s even simpler. For any elected official who believes the conduct of @realDonaldTrump is not a crime, you should call up your favorite foreign government and ask them to help your re-election campaign. Then announce it publicly. I dare you.” Doing so can draw a prison sentence.

Trump will draw none, much less conviction in the Senate. Republican senators will not remove him from office at the end of this trial without witnesses. Trump Himself has decreed it:

Pew Research finds:

About six-in-ten Americans (63%) think that Donald Trump has probably or definitely done things that are illegal either during the 2016 election campaign or during his time in office. Slightly more (70%) say he has probably or definitely done things that are unethical.

Even so, a narrow 51 percent of the public says Trump should stay. Americans have grown accustomed to white-collar criminals going unpunished. Especially Republicans. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans who believe Trump has committed crimes believe he should remain in office.

The chances Trump would be removed by a Republican Senate were always slim to none. After nearly three years of Trump’s criming, Democrats saw no other option but to try. Impeachment, Dahlia Lithwick observes, “was undertaken not just to punish past misconduct, but to attempt to deter more of it.”

So far, it’s not working. A recent string of Trump administration efforts to avoid oversight have been lost “under cover of the fog of impeachment,” Lithwick writes, adding:

It perhaps bears mention that William Barr and Pat Cipollone—both of whom have participated in the acts at issue in the impeachment—are involved in defending Trump’s conduct in these proceedings. Also this week, D.C.’s Attorney General Karl Racine charged the Trump inaugural committee and the Trump Organization with using $1 million of charitable funds to enrich the Trump family during the inauguration. If you’re interested in more, CREW has more and more. This list isn’t by any means comprehensive, by the way. It’s more a tasting menu. None of this is normal, none of it OK, all of it is sliding by, as oversight moves away from government to journalists and private watchdogs, and as defiance of the law becomes the new normal.

Trump once had to rely on a team of private lawyers and threats of lawsuits to indemnify his schemes. Now voters have handed him the U.S. Department of Justice and the levers of the presidency. Add in the acts of homage to their liege lord and faithless oaths and Republicans have defined lawlessness down, as Lithwick puts it.

Donald Trump has already broadcast he is open to taking opposition research on his opponents from foreigners if it will help his reelection. Foreign intelligence operatives will be lining up to ingratiate themselves and get leverage on the phony deal-maker. He’s already proven tyrant-pliable, a sucker for flattery, and prone to conspiracy theories. Leaving him in office backed by his coterie of sycophants and grifters is to surrender the U.S. experiment in democracy to its enemies without firing a shot. The vultures are hovering, waiting to pick clean its bones.

As if this were not chilling enough, don’t read this on an empty stomach.

Read again the quote in the image at the top. Then organize and fight to save the country as if your lives depend on it.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

The plot

Published by digby on January 23, 2020

Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum   sez it plainly::

Trump used military aid as a way to extort a personal benefit from Ukraine. That’s the start and the finish of the whole thing. If he had used military aid as bait to get Ukraine to fall in line with American interests in one way or another, no one would have blinked.

But he didn’t. He used the aid as bait to get a personal favor from Ukraine: namely an investigation into an opponent in a presidential campaign. That’s as plain an example of abuse of power as you could imagine. And after he was caught, Trump didn’t apologize or promise not to do it again or anything like that. He conducted a scorched-earth attack that left Democrats with no choice but to impeach.

The Senate Republicans all know this. It’s not complicated. They simply believe it’s more important to cover for this president than to acknowledge what he did and hold him accountable.

They are just like him. They’ll keep this president in office, and themselves, by any means necessary. There are no limits.

The Trump Has-Beens

Published by digby on January 23, 2020

Starr, Dershowitz, Gingrich, Manafort, Giuliani , Penn … back in the saddle.

This piece by Peter Beinert about all the has-beens in Trump’s inner circle is very instructive. He makes the point that it’s really about fame for these people which I would contrast with the Bush has-beens who all had serious unfinished business. (Bill Barr would be more in line with those earlier had-beens.) These are people who are merely seeking to relive their glory days.

Beinert writes:

Trump’s recklessness, cruelty, and corruption have led many Republicans in the prime of their career to avoid working for, or publicly defending, him. “Help Wanted,” read a 2017 Washington Post headline: “Why Republicans Won’t Work for the Trump Administration.” In 2018, CNN reported that Trump was experiencing “an unheard-of problem: The president can’t find a lawyer.”

This has provided the has-beens their opening. One early example was Paul Manafort, who in the Ronald Reagan era helped run a lobbying firm that Newsweek once called “the hottest shop in town.” But by 2016, as my colleague Franklin Foer has detailed, this once “indispensable man,” now in his late 60s, was no longer “missed in professional circles. He was without a big-paying client, and held heavy debts.” The Trump campaign, which Manafort briefly ran, offered a “return to relevance.”

While Manafort was angling to be Trump’s campaign manager, Newt Gingrich was angling to be his running mate. Two decades earlier, Time had named Gingrich, then the 52-year-old Republican speaker of the House, its Man of the Year. But after a failed 2012 presidential bid, Gingrich’s star had dimmed, an excruciating prospect for a man who once said, “If you’re not in The Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist.”

Gingrich didn’t get the vice president’s job. But his incessant defenses of Trump—particularly on Fox News—have afforded the 76-year-old what Politico has called “a rare third political life.” He has already published three Trump hagiographies. He’s appeared on Fox News or written op-eds for its website nine times so far in 2020 alone. All this apologizing for Trump, however, has its reputational costs.

I think we all know the stories of Starr, Dershowitz and Giuliani. They are so obviously desperate to be back in the spotlight in their dotage that they are making utter fools of themselves.

I hadn’t heard about this one, though:

 In November, The Washington Post reported that Mark Penn—the most influential pollster of the Clinton era, who became a pariah among Democrats after Hillary Clinton’s 2008 defeat—had visited the White House to give Trump political advice. Penn, 65—who now appears regularly on Fox News and depicts Trump as a victim of the “deep state”—is “finally being talked about again,” according to Politico.

That figures. Speaking of which, why hasn’t Dick Morris been able to get a foothold? The last I heard he was the “political editor” of the National Inquirer.

Beinert spoke with a psychologist who studies fame and she said this:

When I asked Rockwell what allows the once famous to reconcile themselves to comparative obscurity, she said the transition was hard. There’s a “lot more amygdala activation when you’re famous,” she said, adding, “It takes the neurology a really long time to work through that, to reframe it as a graceful end to a beautiful career.” The people who manage the process best, she has written, focus on “becoming part of something larger than oneself,” thus “countering fame’s natural tendency toward narcissism,” and “dedicating all one’s drives and ambitions into making a real difference, in a meaningful way, in the world.”

It’s a lovely sentiment. But Giuliani’s approach—which he summed up in his December interview with Nuzzi as “My attitude about my legacy is Fuck it”—is much more likely to get you on Fox News.

Trump has been chasing fame since he was a teenager. And he will never have enough of it. Even now he whines when someone other than him is given credit for anything. No wonder he’s surrounded by all these pathetic fame whores. They all understand each other.

Trump to attend the March for Life

Published by digby on January 23, 2020

Trump is a huge hero in the anti-abortion right. They apparently think he’s sincere in his newfound reverence for their cause. Desperate to keep them in the fold, he’s going the extra mile:

President Trump plans to address an annual rally of anti-abortion demonstrators on Friday in Washington, in what would be the first appearance by a sitting president at the March for Life, one of the movement’s marquee events.

Mr. Trump’s surprise announcement, made on Twitter on Wednesday as the Senate began hearing opening arguments in his impeachment trial, is his latest gesture of support for a cause dear to evangelical Christians who are a core part of his conservative base.

No president has personally attended the march in its 47-year history. Past Republican presidents might have been inclined to attend, but either on the advice of staff or their own instincts saw it as a step too far and instead showed their support in less visible ways, like through remote messages or by meeting with activists.

He isn’t sincere:

Slate points out:

This pro-life president … was famously pro-choice before deciding that he wanted to be the Republican nominee. In 2016, he refused to answer Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s question about whether he’d ever paid for or been otherwise involved in the procurement of an abortion. And above is an MSNBC clip of a 2003 Trump appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show in which he laughs about being talked into not aborting a surprise pregnancy. (It’d seem, given the timing of Trump’s children’s births, that he’s talking about Marla Maples, who’s said the conception of their daughter, Tiffany, was a surprise, and MSNBC asserts as much. But no one says Maples’ name in the clip.)

Also of note: The context of the discussion above is that Trump is talking about how pleased he is that his then-girlfriend Melania has been consistently taking birth control pills.

These right-to lifers don’t care for the birth control either.:

The organization that runs the March for Life successfully sued the Obama administration to be exempted from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirements.

Sure Trump is doing what they want. But they can’t be sure he’ll stick with it once he’s re-elected and doesn’t need their votes anymore because he clearly doesn’t believe a word he says on the subject. Do they care? I’m not sure anymore.

58% now think Trump committed an impeachable offense

Published by digby on January 23, 2020

538 has a new poll:

[I]n our latest survey, we did see that among people who’ve responded to all five waves of our survey, there’s been an ever-so-slight (but statistically significant) uptick in the share of respondents who think Trump committed an impeachable offense (from 55 percent in November to 58 percent now). ..

But Fox is getting the job done with Republicans:

We also found that Republicans in our panel are increasingly supportive of Trump and skeptical of key elements of the Democrats’ case against him. For example, the share of Republicans who strongly approve of the way Trump is handling the impeachment process has risen since November, from 27 percent to 36 percent. And a smaller share of Republicans now say that it would be inappropriate to withhold military aid from Ukraine while demanding an investigation into the Bidens, or for Trump to cover up his actions relating to Ukraine — signaling that Republicans may increasingly be on Trump’s side.

As in our previous survey, we found that a majority (59 percent) of Americans still support hearing new witnesses and testimony, while 37 percent want to keep the focus solely on the evidence introduced in the House hearings. But although the top line number hasn’t really shifted, Democrats and Republicans have become much more polarized over the past couple of weeks on this issue. In late December, 65 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of Republicans supported bringing in new witnesses. But now the share of Democrats who want new witnesses has risen to 74 percent, while the share of Republicans who say the same has fallen to 41 percent.

I’m not surprised. Fox and talk radio are pounding the message that there should be no new witnesses like a drum. Republicans will rally around this I’m sure. And as we’ve seen, if they’re watching their favorite network, they aren’t hearing the evidence either.

The GOP is a huge problem and I don’t even want to think about what all this says about their voters. It’s too depressing to contemplate. But the central problem in all of this the right-wing propaganda machine. People used to think it was dedicated to the ideology of the conservative movement. But Trump has exploded that myth. It is solely dedicated to maintaining political power. Its agenda is no different than it ever was in some respects. It cares about protecting wealthy plutocrats from all government interference and any attempts at redistribution for the common good.

Its paeans to freedom, liberty, the constitution, “the shining city on a hill” or whatever were all bullshit. They believe in nothing. And they have trained their blind followers over many years to believe in nothing except what they tell them to believe in. Right now it’s Donald Trump. Tomorrow, who knows?

By the way, 58% is an interesting number:

Take a look at those numbers for Nixon just before he resigned. Look familiar?

People keep saying that Nixon should have destroyed the tapes and he could have survived. That’s probably true. The difference now is that the Republicans would back him even if they heard the tapes. They’d say it was fine and that all president do it and that it’s a witch hunt and hoax. And they’d complain and whine about the process and tell their followers that they should ignore all that “fruit of the poisoned tree.”

If Trump tapes like Nixon’s were revealed tomorrow, they would sound much like his twitter feed. And the stuff we didn’t already know would be much like the stuff we’re reading in the news and all these books which prove he is an unfit, corrupt, unpatriotic moron who has no business being anywhere near the White House. And his people would love him for it.