Month: February 2020

“This is not a warning. The dark days aren’t coming. The dark days are here.”
–Rachel Maddow. Feb 21, 2020

Rachel Maddow believed that the heroic thing was to sound the alarm and warn people of the direction the country is heading. But last week she realized we are past that. She tells journalists to stop describing what is happening with timid phrases like “the appearance of impropriety.”

The media must acknowledge what is happening, “The rules are gone. They will do what they want. The government will be turned against you if you stand against this President.” Trump has set democracy on fire. Now it’s a 4-alarm blaze and we need to act.  Watch the whole video here. (link)

Trump Set Democracy On Fire. McConnell Spread It

Grass truck on fire. Santa Rosa de Lima, El Salvador Vía Kenni Bolaños

Shown here is Mitch McConnell driving our burning Democracy though town to spread it. The media recorded the fire but they didn’t stop it. Citizens need to save Democracy and put out the fire themselves.( In part two of the video a group of citizens put out the fire)

Democracy is burning. Maddow has ideas on what to do but she’s not an activist or politician. She identifies first as  a journalist. Their job is to report on the news, not make it. In the middle of the fire it’s hard for a reporter to say, “Hey, all you people standing there watching? Jump in and help put this out!” She’s not an expert at putting out fires but sees that the people whose job it is aren’t doing it.

Last week she said we need to run in and put out the fire.

When journalists see a fire their first instinct is to pull out their cameras, take photos and write up the story while the firefighters battle the blaze. When it’s over they’ll write the parts of story they could see in real time, like the brave firefighter who ran into the building to save children.

But what if half of the firefighters stood around instead of fighting the fire? A reporter won’t run in to put it out. They ask why it happened.  “Chief Red, why didn’t your firefighters do anything? Why did they block Chief Blue’s firefighters’ access to the water that would have put out the fire?” She might ask Chief Red, “Don’t you care about the community? What about the children who were in the building?” Chief Red will give reasons and will imply that since she’s not a firefighter so she wouldn’t understand. “I had to let it burn, I couldn’t risk the lives of my firefighters.”

It’s hard for people to imaging people robbing others while a fire is happening. But it turns out if you don’t get punished for the theft, it’s a great distraction.

But what if she found out that Chief Red’s firefighters were getting money from the mobsters who owned the building that burned? Everyone in the department knew it was arson, but the investigation was shut down. The mobsters would collect the insurance. The insurance money would be kicked back to Red’s firefighters as pay off for not acting.

The story about a group of fire chiefs who allowed a building to burn and how they benefited would take months to complete. It would come out as a Sunday magazine feature. The journalists would expect the rest of the community to act. The legal system is supposed to arrest people, politicians connected to the crime are supposed to resign or lose their re-election bids. The general public is expected to be outraged and call for Chief Red and all his corrupt firefighters to be fired.

But what Maddow is saying is we did that story but the responses didn’t play out the way they are supposed to in a democracy in America. So this time she’s telling everyone, “Run in and put out the fire! Save our democracy!”

 

This is … bad.

One of the less reported aspects of Grenell’s placement as acting DNI is his demand to see all the “raw intelligence” behind the assessment that Russia is working to sabotage US elections. This has serious national security implications. 1/3

— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) February 24, 2020

Worse, raw intel will include sources and methods. Grenell will pass that to Trump who could share it with the Russians. Cambone never would have shared intel with our enemies, but Trump and Grenell don’t see Russia as an adversary, but an ally. 3/3

— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) February 24, 2020

Trump has shared closely guarded intel with Russia before so we know he’s capable of it.

*In case you’re confused by the stovepipe reference it was what they called Cheney’s intelligence interference.

Trump is in India right now, soaking up the adulation of the huge crowd its president Modie turned out for him. He’s ready to go the extra mile to reward him any way he can. Trump is very, very pleased.

“You have done a great honor to our country. We will remember you forever, from this day onwards India will always hold a special place in our hearts,” Trump said to thunderous applause.

India is one of the few big countries in world where Trump’s personal approval rating is above 50%. It has built up ties with the United States in recent years as Washington’s relationship has become strained with India’s foe Pakistan.

“As we continue to build our defense cooperation, the United States looks forward to providing India with some of the best and most feared military equipment on the planet,” Trump said.

Trump said the two countries will sign deals on Tuesday to sell military helicopters worth $3 billion and that the United States must become the premier defense partner of India, which relied on Russian equipment during the Cold War. Reuters reported earlier that India has cleared the purchase of 24 helicopters from Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) worth $2.6 billion.

But in a sign of the underlying political tensions in India, violent protests broke out in Delhi – where Trump is due on Tuesday – over a new citizenship law that critics say discriminates against Muslims and is a further attempt to undermine the secular foundations of India’s democracy.

Vehicles were set on fire in the eastern part of Delhi, metal barricades torn down, and thick smoke billowed through the air as thousands of those who are supporting the new law clashed with those opposing it.U.S. President Donald

In his speech Trump extolled India’s rise as a stable and prosperous democracy as one of the achievements of the century. “You have done it as a tolerant country. And you have done it as a great, free country,” he said.

Treating Trump as a King doesn’t honor our country although Trump believes it does. He only wishes he could be as openly authoritarian as Modi. A second term may offer that opportunity.

He knows nothing about India. Recall this:

As they met during the president’s first visit to Asia in October 2017, Narendra Modi spelled out his concerns about China’s ambitions in the region, which Trump replied to by saying, “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.”

In their book, A Very Stable Genius, two Washington Post reporters detail how “Modi’s eyes bulged out in surprise” at Trump’s apparent failure to understand that his country did indeed share a border with China, a line that extends some 2,500 miles.

The US has always had to play a delicate balancing act in the region between Indian, Pakistan and China, all of which are powerful nuclear-armed nations with shifting alliances and specific agendas. Trump is too stupid to understand anything that delicate. Modi realized he was dealing with an imbecile and adjusted his strategy. He flatters and fetes Trump like a pampered potentate to get what he wants and it’s working.

Now that Trump has nothing but hacks working on foreign policy and national security, nobody will tell him any different.

I don’t know what to make of this story. But the fact that it is actually believable is what makes it newsworthy.

It’s after 2 a.m. in Club 38, a nightspot in an old railway shed in Beirut. The DJ is in the cab of a rusty train. Lights sweep across a dense crowd below. My host is Andy Khawaja, a Lebanese-American businessman. We’re sitting at the club’s VIP table and he’s scrolling through photographs on his phone. Here he is with Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser. Here, he’s shaking hands with President Trump in the Oval Office.

The men he’s with in the club have shaved heads, bushy beards, tattoos. I wonder if they’re mafia, militia, or mukhabarat (secret police). When I get up and walk to the restroom, a burly minder with a Glock in his waistband follows a step behind. He turns on the tap and hands me a towel. Back at the table, a line of men in fezzes stamp out the dabka, an Arab folk dance, in tribute to Khawaja. He’s delighted. One of the fez dancers is banging a huge drum. The music is deafening and we have to scream to be heard.

‘They fucked me, Paul, they fucked me. First, they destroyed my business. Now they’re coming after me.’ Andy Khawaja believes he’s being persecuted because of what he knows. And what he knows, he tells me, is that Saudi Arabia and the Emirate of Abu Dhabi bought the 2016 election for Donald Trump.

Over the past year, we’ve met at his palatial home high in the Hollywood Hills, at the Kempinski hotel in Qatar and at the cigar bar of the Mayfair Arts Club in London. One minute, he’s showing me a picture of himself with the Pope (he gives huge sums to charity); the next he’s on a video call with what seems to be an official in Tehran, trying to free an American hostage. There’s always a touch of the fantastical, even the impossible, about Khawaja’s life and his stories. I’ve come to Beirut to get him to go on the record about something he’s been talking about privately to me for many months: what happened in the 2016 elections.

Khawaja claims the Saudis and the Emiratis illegally paid tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump campaign in 2016. He says that to keep it secret, they disguised the money as small donations from Americans, using stolen identities and ‘virtual credit cards’ or gift cards — donations of less than $200 do not have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission and made public. He claims the Saudis and the Emiratis were able to make thousands of such small donations at a time using the latest payment processing technology. Khawaja knows this, he says, because he sold the know-how to their middleman, George Nader, who will be the central character in this story.

All those supposedly involved in this have issued denials or preferred not to comment. They include Nader’s lawyers; the Saudi and Emirati embassies in Washington, DC; the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee; and Stripe, the company that took credit card payments for them both during the election. Khawaja says he’s tried and failed to get the FBI to investigate. The Bureau isn’t saying what it makes of his story. Khawaja also says he has spoken to a National Security Council member, a congressman, a senator and a former general. Nothing has come of that, either. Meanwhile, his life has been shattered, his company wrecked. But he believes he will be vindicated in the end.

Let’s just say that if we didn’t have a pathologically narcissistic president who inexplicably has a very special spot in his heart for Saudi Arabia and UAE in a way , it would be easy to just dismiss it as another crank. It might be. But it’s all too believable that it isn’t.

You can read the whole thing here. It may very well be bullshit. But it’s a good read anyway.

New reporting from CNN:

President Donald Trump has told aides he wants fewer people working for him in the White House and only loyalists installed in key administration positions, several people familiar with the matter say. Trump’s allies have provided him lists — not always solicited — of people they’ve identified as disloyal and of names they say would work better toward advancing his agenda.

The lists have been generated over the past three years, but some are being dusted off in the post-impeachment purge.

It’s not clear how seriously Trump takes the recommendations. But after hearing for three years from acquaintances and confidants about various people deemed disloyal, his efforts seem to have newfound urgency.

Trump told people recently he wants to take action on removing some people who he’s been “warned about,” according to one person who’s spoken to him.

They are referring to the Axios story I wrote about yesterday. But there’s more:

Trump has honed [sic] in on the size of the federal government, one officials said, insisting there are too many people working for him both at the White House and at outside agencies. Trump has said in recent days that more people with access to sensitive information increases the risk of leaks.

Last week, the National Security Council announced the departure of deputy national security adviser Victoria Coates, who was transferred to the Energy Department. Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, had been leading the charge inside the West Wing that Coates is the author of the book “Anonymous,” according to three people familiar with the situation.

In announcing her departure, the White House strenuously denied that Coates was the anonymous author. Even after the unsubstantiated rumor began circulating inside the West Wing, forcing the book’s publishers to deny Coates was the author, Navarro continued to insist it was her, two people said. “Suspects are everywhere,” Navarro told CNN on Friday, going on to rail against reporting from “so-called senior administration officials.

He just “knows.” Meanwhile:

John McEntee, the President’s former body man who was elevated to run the presidential personnel office, made it clear in a meeting last week with agency officials that his office will be on the lookout for staffers across the bureaucracy who are seen as disloyal to Trump.

Another official said McEntee indicated he plans to first focus his efforts on personnel at the State Department and Defense Department. He also told the liaisons that promotions and significant staff changes should not occur without prior approval from the presidential personnel office.In his role, McEntee focuses on political appointees at various agencies, not career staff. Hiring and firing of career government employees are typically handled at the agency level.

McEntee, you’ll recall, was Trump’s body man and then was fired for being a degenerate gambler. He’s back now to do this dity work for the Big Boss.

One administration official said McEntee indicated his office would spend the next week or two reviewing past processes and how they will change them moving forward. McEntee’s overtures to the Cabinet officials — whose job is to liaise with the White House to ensure agencies are working in concert with the rest of the administration — weren’t universally seen as helpful. “Not a good idea on his part,” one of the White House officials said. “Going to get himself and a lot of people in trouble.”

But some aides and allies have expressed concern about getting qualified people to join the administration in an election year. One White House aide described a sense that some jobs simply won’t be filled or will be filled only temporarily until after the President wins reelection, as high-level hires will likely be reluctant to take posts that at this point may not last longer than eight months.

Ya think? But hey, nothing major is going to happen before then anyway, right? It’s not like there’s any possibility of a global pandemic or a war or anything.

Others have noted the bench of competent people who have also never criticized Trump is virtually nonexistent.

What decent, competent person would want to be a part of this?

And it has little to do with Bernie Sanders

The presidential campaign is heating up and Democratic voters are wringing their hands trying to figure out which of their candidates is more likely to beat President Trump. Pundits have talked themselves in circles while strategists try to figure out which demographic mixture and turnout models will lead to victory as the number-crunchers slice and dice the polls to discover the most likely path to 270 votes in the Electoral College.

This isn’t unusual but it is especially intense this time because most Democrats understand that Donald Trump is an existential crisis. Because of the nature of his implausible victory in 2016 and the surreal character of the last three years, they have lost confidence in their ability to understand politics at all.

On the surface, Trump is not in a good position to win re-election. His approval ratings have been mired in the low 40s his entire term. He’s been the subject of one scandal after another, to the point that the nation is exhausted with the drama. Despite the fact that people give him credit for the good economic numbers, that doesn’t help his overall favorability. He was impeached for doing something that his supporters knew perfectly well was wrong, but now see as a legitimate form of partisan warfare.

Nonetheless, there isn’t a Democrat in the land, no matter who he or she supports for president, who isn’t worried on some level that Trump will somehow pull it off again. They aren’t wrong to worry. He cheats.

Vote-suppression tactics have been a conservative mainstay, of course, from the Jim Crow era through “Operation Eagle Eye” in the 1960s to today’s voter-roll purges. That sort of thing will continue. But Trump is something else entirely.

On the most mundane level, his incessant lying is a form of cheating. He lies about everything, but the lies that will have the greatest effect on his chances of re-election are the bold and blatant lies about his record. He says he is “saving pre-existing conditions” when his administration, as we speak, is arguing in federal court to end Obamacare, which is the law that bans insurance companies from denying insurance to people with pre-existing conditions.

Trump claims he will protect Medicare and Medicaid (“and the Democrats won’t”) when his budget actually cut them. He says he’s built hundreds of miles of new wall along the Mexican border when he’s actually only replaced existing barriers and added one new mile. He says he’s passed numerous bills — and was the only one who could do it! — which were actually passed by his predecessors. And of course he says the nation is making vast sums of money from his trade war when, in reality, it’s Americans who pay for the tariffs while Trump is handing out millions of dollars in bailouts to farmers who are hurt by them.

The entire premise of his “promises made, promises kept” mantra is built on the most bald-faced flagrant lie. He has actually accomplished almost nothing during his term aside from tax cuts for the wealthy. But with the help of the right-wing propaganda media, he’s managed to convince his followers that everything good in their lives is directly attributable to him.

We know Trump will cheat again, in an even more insidious way, because he already did. While he was cleared of criminal conspiracy charges for his eagerness to accept help from the Russian government in 2016, only a month ago he was impeached for trying to extort another government into doing the same thing for him in 2020. His acquittal by his accomplices in the Senate doesn’t change those facts.

We don’t really know the full extent of the cheating foreign adversaries are preparing to do on his behalf, and with his blessing, but we know for sure that it is happening. Indeed, we’ve known for more than three years that the Russian government has developed sophisticated propaganda and hacking capability designed to interfere in our elections. This is not really in dispute, although events of the last few days have shown us that the president and his henchmen are prepared to lie to our faces about that as well.

Various media reported late last week that someone from the office of the director of national intelligence had conducted a standard briefing for the House Intelligence Committee, warning of more Russian interference in the upcoming campaign. When pressed, the briefer gave her expert analysis that the purpose was to help the Trump campaign as well as to create chaos. She also said they had evidence that the Russians were trying to aid Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the Democratic primary.

No one is surprised by this. And no one is surprised that Trump would refuse to admit that it’s happening. But now he’s taken steps to foreclose anyone saying such a thing again. He pushed out the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, and installed a couple of partisan stooges with an order to clean house. It wasn’t long before the acting deputy director, a 20-year veteran, was out, along with the general counsel. The word has clearly gone forth that there is to be no more discussion of the Russians wanting Donald Trump to win the election.

Instead, the president’s national security adviser, which is normally a serious, non-political role, offered a different story:

National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien politicizes intelligence on ABC: "There are these reports that [Russia] wants Bernie Sanders to get elected. But that's no surprise. He honeymooned in Moscow… I haven't seen any intel that Russia is doing anything to get Trump reelected" pic.twitter.com/NPcxyrZkFV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 23, 2020

"What I've heard is Russia would like Bernie Sanders to win the nomination. They'd probably like him to be POTUS because he wants to spend money on social programs, and probably would have to take it out of the military" — Robert O'Brien's logic here makes absolutely no sense pic.twitter.com/EbPFI8JOdR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 23, 2020

I think you can see where that’s heading.

Perhaps the most lethal form of cheating can be seen in the way Trump mirrors the Russian strategy. GQ’s Julia Ioffe spoke with a former CIA agent, Marc Polymeropoulos, who explained why the Russians favor Trump:

“Russian active measures thrive on chaos, and this is what a second Trump term delivers,” says Polymeropoulos. “America is at war with itself politically for another four years. Advantage: Russia. Second, while it’s true that the Trump administration has at times been very tough on Russia with respect to sanctions, strategically, under the Trump administration, Russians have regained a foothold in the Middle East, NATO is weakened by a more disengaged America, and Trump’s disdain for Ukraine is a huge boon for Russia.”

The chaos is an advantage for Donald Trump in the upcoming campaign as well. It keeps the Democrats off balance and never fully sure how to defeat him, particularly now that he has total control of the Republican establishment as well as a cultish following that simply cannot be moved. All of this has emboldened him to act in even more unpredictable ways.

This, more than anything, is what has Democratic voters tying themselves in knots over the election. Nobody has any real idea how to counter such a profoundly dishonest and amoral character. All anyone can know for sure is that he is prepared to win by any means necessary. Democrats are right to be nervous.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

America and the world are having a moment. Donald Trump is unbound. Establishment Democrats are unhinged. The Russians are gleeful. A dozen towns in northern Italy are in lockdown to halt the spread of the coronavirus. The New York Times now is updating pandemic fears in Chinese.

It’s a lot to process. Especially with purveyors of propaganda working overtime to make sure you cannot. “Russia’s ultimate goal,” writes Brian Barrett at Wired, “has always been to find democracy’s loose seams, and pull.”

Sunday morning on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” Anand Giridharadas called Bernie Sanders’s Nevada claim to front-runner status in the Democrats’ nominating process “a wake-up” moment for the Democrats now in control of their party. “Something is happening in America right now that actually does not fit our mental models.”

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1231622488204959744

“The people who are stuck in an old way of thinking, in twentieth-century frameworks, in gulag thinking, are missing what is going on,” he explained. “It is time for all of us to step up, rethink and understand the dawn of what may be, frankly, a new era in American life.”

MSNBC gave airtime to Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville on Saturday to defend those old ways of thinking. Carville called nominating Sanders political suicide. If you want to vote for him because you like his policies, that’s legitimate, Carville said. But the notion that Sanders will win by expanding the electorate “is the equivalent of climate denying,” he said. Political science and research make that “not even a debatable question.”

“If you’re voting for him because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize heretofore sleepy parts of an electorate, then politically, you’re a fool.”

Carville is defending the Democratic establishment some in Sanders’s camp want burned to the ground the way similar sentiments made Donald Trump Russia’s “wrecking ball.” Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann tells GQ’s Julia Ioffe, “Let them all fight each other while we lay another gas pipeline somewhere!” Either way, chaos. It’s all good for Moscow.

Giridharadas is a trenchant observer of this American moment. He has addressed the way what I’ve described as metastasized capitalism and the grotesque economic inequality it has produced has corroded faith in American democracy and the economic system on which it is built.

But this American moment is not happening in a lab isolated from events going on elsewhere. The new era of which Giridharadas speaks could as easily be a Dark Age as a progressive Renaissance. Hanging over all of it is climate change and concomitant sea level rise. A pandemic could kill millions and disrupt the economy Trump credits to Himself, changing this morning’s election calculus before November. If Sanders is riding the wrecking ball in the next cycle, it’s all the same to Vladimir Putin.

The confluence of world events plus changing U.S. demographics means Carville’s conventional wisdom about what political science tells him is out of date. But then, so is Sanders’ talk of political revolution. After he won the 2016 New Hampshire, he promised his victory represented “nothing short of the beginning of a political revolution.” It wasn’t then. Whether his win in Nevada is now remains to be seen.

Democrats will need to get out their voters en masse in November regardless of who leads the ticket. Whether they can overturn conventional wisdom about expanding the electorate will depend on whether the game has indeed changed, as Giridharadas believes.

But again, all that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I remind Democrats here who get giddy about early voting numbers that routinely favor Democrats: Republicans bat last.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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Via Axios:

The Trump White House and its allies, over the past 18 months, assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them — according to more than a dozen sources familiar with the effort who spoke to Axios.

By the time President Trump instructed his 29-year-old former body man and new head of presidential personnel to rid his government of anti-Trump officials, he’d gathered reams of material to support his suspicions.

[…]

In reporting this story, I have been briefed on, or reviewed, memos and lists the president received since 2018 suggesting whom he should hire and fire. Most of these details have never been published.

• A well-connected network of conservative activists with close ties to Trump and top administration officials is quietly helping develop these “Never Trump”/pro-Trump lists, and some sent memos to Trump to shape his views, per sources with direct knowledge.
• Members of this network include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.

The big picture: Since Trump’s Senate acquittal, aides say the president has crossed a psychological line regarding what he calls the “Deep State.” He feels his government — from Justice to State to Defense to Homeland Security — is filled with “snakes.” He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.

[…]

Shortly before withdrawing the nomination of the former D.C. U.S. attorney for a top Treasury role, the president reviewed a memo on Liu’s alleged misdeeds, according to a source with direct knowledge.

• Ledeen wrote the memo, and its findings left a striking impression on Trump, per sources with direct knowledge. Ledeen declined to comment.
• A source with direct knowledge of the memo’s contents said it contained 14 sections building a case for why Liu was unfit for the job for which Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin selected her, including:
  • Not acting on criminal referrals of some of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers.
  • Signing “the sentencing filing asking for jail time” for Gen. Michael Flynn (a friend of Ledeen’s).
  • Holding a leadership role in a women’s lawyers networking group that Ledeen criticized as “pro-choice and anti-Alito.”
  • Not indicting former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe.
  • Dismissing charges against “violent inauguration protesters who plotted to disrupt the inauguration.”
• Neither Liu nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

Between the The Liu memo is not the first such memo to reach the president’s desk — and there’s a common thread in Groundswell, a conservative activist network that’s headed by Thomas and whose members include Ledeen.

[…]

Thomas has spent a significant amount of time and energy urging Trump administration officials to change the personnel inside his government. This came to a head early last year.

• Members of Groundswell, whose members earlier led the successful campaign to remove McMaster as national security adviser, meet on Wednesdays in the D.C. offices of Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has led the fight against the Mueller probe.
• Judicial Watch’s president is Tom Fitton. He’s a regular on Fox News, and Trump regularly retweets his commentary on the “Deep State.”
• Conservative activists who attend Groundswell meetings funneled names to Thomas, and she compiled those recommendations and passed them along to the president, according to a source close to her.
• She handed a memo of names directly to the president in early 2019. (The New York Times reported on her group’s meeting with Trump at the time.)

The presidential personnel office reviewed Thomas’ memo and determined that some names she passed along for jobs were not appropriate candidates. Trump may revisit some given his current mood.

Potential hires she offered to Trump, per sources with direct knowledge:

• Sheriff David Clarke for a senior Homeland Security role.
• Fox News regular and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino for a Homeland Security or counterterrorism adviser role.
• Devin Nunes aide Derek Harvey for the National Security Council (where he served before McMaster pushed him out).
• Radio talk show host Chris Plante for press secretary.
• Federalist contributor Ben Weingarten for the National Security Council.

[…]

As the New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote on Saturday, “in some of the most critical corners of the Trump administration, officials show up for work now never entirely sure who will be there by the end of the evening — themselves included.”

• Groundswell is an influential driver of that uncertainty. Its members have been working toward this moment for three years. They have lists. They have memos. And they have the president’s ear.

Groundswell has been around for a long time. And they are the looniest of right wing loons. The wife of a Supreme Court Justice involving herself in this kind of “activism” is outrageous. And Ledeen is a hard-core character assassin from way back. These people are always crawling around in the dark, scurrying when the lights come on.

If you think these particular nuts have been running the asylum, just wait until the second term.

Margaret Sullivan has some urgent advice for the News media. She points out that they have done some adjustments to their covering in the age of Trump such as serious fact-checking and using the word “lie.” But now we are in a new era, post impeachment:

Call it Trump Unbound.

In this new era, Trump has declared himself the nation’s chief law enforcement official. He has pardoned a raft of corrupt officials. He has exacted revenge on those he sees as his impeachment enemies — Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the decorated military veteran and national security staffer; and Gordon Sondland, Trump’s own handpicked ambassador to the European Union — simply because they testified under subpoena to what they knew about the White House’s dealings with Ukraine.

In other words, we are in entirely new territory now. Should the news media continue as usual? Should it retain its own traditions as the nation slides toward autocracy? Should it treat the Trump presidency as pretty much the usual thing, with a few more fact-checks and the occasional use of a word like “lie”?AD

No. We need a new and better approach if we’re going to do our jobs adequately.

First, we need to abandon neutrality-at-all-costs journalism, to replace it with something more suited to the moment. Call it Fairness First. I’m talking about the kind of fairness that serves the public by describing the world we report on in honest and direct terms — not the phony kind of fairness that tries to duck out of difficult decisions by giving “both sides” of an argument equal time, regardless of their truth or merit.

Now more than ever, with a president feeling empowered and vindictive after his acquittal, we need to apply more scrutiny and less credulity to his increasingly extreme actions and statements.

Second, we need to be far more direct in the way stories are put together and presented. I often talk to news consumers — citizens by another name — who insist that they want “just the facts” reporting. They’re understandably frustrated that they can’t seem to find that when so many news organizations, especially cable news, seem to have chosen political sides for commercial purposes. They want news that is unbiased — that doesn’t come with a side helping of opinion. Just tell me what happened, they say. I’ll make my own decisions about what it means.

That sounds good in theory. In practice, every piece of reporting on national politics is unavoidably the product of choices: What’s the angle? Who is quoted? What’s the headline? How much historical context is there? How prominent is it on a front page, a home page, an app? It’s in these small but crucial decisions that mainstream media often fails its audience: We simply are not getting across the big picture or the urgency. This happens, in part, because those news organizations that haven’t chosen up sides — those that want to serve all Americans — fear being charged with bias.

And so they soften the language. They blunt the impact. Take the story of Trump’s angry reaction to the warning that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election to help his reelection. After hearing this, he reportedly moved to dump the acting director of national intelligence. That’s big news that ought to be told with real urgency, right?

But not all of mainstream journalism saw it that way. On Friday morning, I searched and scrolled the home page of ABC News, whose evening news show attracts millions every night, the most-watched program of its kind. There were stories about the coronavirus, about the “mom of Idaho kids arrested in Hawaii,” and even a breathless in-case-you-missed-it piece about new fish sandwiches at Arby’s and Bojangles as Lent approaches. I could find the story in question only after a search for the term “Russia.”

And even those news organizations that did emphasize the story were using words that failed to get the importance across — headline after headline used the word “meddling” to describe the reported Russian intrusions into America democracy. Meddling sounds like your nosy neighbor getting involved, over the backyard fence, in your family’s squabble.

The Daily Beast was more straightforward: “Russia Is Helping Elect Trump Again, Intel Official Says.”

There are dozens of examples every day. Too often, news organizations are cautious to a fault, afraid of their own shadows, and worried about being labeled anti-Trump or biased.

In this new era, my prescription is less false equivalence, more high-impact language and more willingness to take a stand for democracy.

With Trump unbound, the news media need to change. Yes, radically. The stakes are too high not to.

I so wish I believed they were going to do that. But I don’t. Scroll down to the post below this one to see just how unlikely that is. They are being spun and lied to and they really don’t know what to do. Their sources are terrified, everything is compromised and nobody believes they are empowered to tell the truth anymore. I just don’t see the news media being brave enough to take that on.

We just have to hope that enough voters have the common sense to see through the chaos of the next few months and put Trump out of office. Then maybe we can demand a reckoning.

But I doubt it. After all, they’ve never accounted for this:

CNN reports:

Earlier this week, Grenell quickly forced out the number two intelligence official in the US government, Andrew Hallman, a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed to CNN. Hallman was an intelligence veteran and well respected in the intelligence community.CNN reported earlier this week that Hallman was leaving. The New York Times first reported Grenell ousted him.

There are fears within the intelligence community that Hallman may not be the only top official forced out. Career intelligence professionals worry that Shelby Pierson, the person in charge of evaluating intelligence regarding election security with the ODNI, will be moved out of her position, according to a former top intelligence official.

Pierson is highly regarded and viewed as not partisan by intelligence community colleagues who know her to be confident and well versed in the work she does. She isn’t afraid of making tough calls and fiercely defending her analysis when challenged, colleagues say.

Pierson has done briefings for senior leaders for years and her experience and preparation shows, said one former intelligence official who worked with her.

Here’s “Republican strategist” Sara Fagen on “This Week” this morning:

FAGEN: Look, this is such a political — this has become such a politicized issue, and every opportunity Democrats get to put out the notion that Russians are trying to help Trump, they do it. And that’s not helpful either.

You know, it’s been reported that the woman doing the briefing in the House did not put any information out about Trump, and then when pressed repeatedly by Democrats gave her opinion that, in fact, the Russians did want…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, her analysis.

FAGEN: Her analysis of reports. But it was her opinion. And so, you know, I think that’s what you heard the national security adviser responding to.

I do think, though, that Trump would be well served to remind people of some of the things that he has done to support fighting these foreign governments trying to interfere in our elections. You know, he signed — he did an executive order to put sanctions in place on anybody caught interfering. Now is the time to look at that again.

There was $425 million in this last spending bill, allocated to states to improve their security. There’s been a lot that has happened. That’s what I think Republicans should be talking about.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We should just say, this official is not just any official, she’s in charge of election security for the intelligence community and was being asked by the members of the House Intelligence Committee what her analysis is of the situation.

She was speaking for the intelligence community when she gave that analysis.

FAGEN: Fair, but it has been reported on cable news, not exactly Trump-friendly territory, speaking about how she was pushed repeatedly by Democrats, and then she put her thumb on the scale. That’s how it’s been reported.

When she says “it’s been reported” she’s talking about that very same CNN article I quoted above which had this:

During the recent House briefing, she faced a series of questions from lawmakers who were trying to pin her down on whether the intelligence showed a Russian preference for Trump, and she finally relented to provide her view of what the intelligence showed, one source familiar with the matter said.

It’s the type of situation intelligence briefers are prepped to avoid, the source said, in part so as not to wade into partisan controversy. The answer she gave has been misconstrued because it’s missing the context and nuance, the source said.

She’s cooked. I’ll bet she’s out within the week.

Now we have this from CNN:

The US intelligence community’s top election security official appears to have overstated the intelligence community’s formal assessment of Russian interference in the 2020 election, omitting important nuance during a briefing with lawmakers earlier this month, three national security officials told CNN.

The official, Shelby Pierson, told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump get reelected.

The US intelligence community has assessed that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election and has separately assessed that Russia views Trump as a leader they can work with. But the US does not have evidence that Russia’s interference this cycle is aimed at reelecting Trump, the officials said.”

The intelligence doesn’t say that,” one senior national security official told CNN. “A more reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that they have a preference, it’s a step short of that. It’s more that they understand the President is someone they can work with, he’s a dealmaker.”

Who said that? Grenell?

Trump is not a “dealmaker.” He’s an idiot. They want him because he’s blindly tearing up the post-war world order in a chaotic, ignorant way that benefits them.

They know he can be manipulated. They know he is a moron. And they know he is destroying us from within.

Of course they prefer him. There isn’t any doubt. And CNN accepting this obvious bullshit from Intelligence sources just shows how truly fucked we are.

Update:

https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1231706656461008898