Month: May 2020

One of Trump’s Ukraine legal henchman shares his views on right wing radio. This is the crazed evel of febrile frenzy in Trumpland these days:

VINCE COGLIANESE (CO-HOST): Mary McCord, a former assistant attorney general, is now saying that William Barr misinterpreted the legal basis for her approving the FBI agents to go speak to Michael Flynn at the White House, in this New York Times, I’ll be polite, defense of her actions that resulted in the Mike Flynn interview, and she’s saying that the underlying facts are not accurate. What do you — I know what I make of this but what do you make of this, to me, a guilty tell from Mary McCord in The New York Times on this issue?

JOSEPH DIGENOVA: Well this is part of the continuing travesty against Gen. Flynn. Ms. McCord is a hack.

COGLIANESE: Right.

DIGENOVA: She is a political hack, she’s working for Lawfare, she went to work on the impeachment inquiry from Lawfare, which is part of the Brookings Institution. She is a Democratic hack, and what they are doing is they are fighting like hell, because they know that Bill Barr has found them out. And they are developing along with John Durham, Bill Barr is, a massive conspiracy case against a host of people in the Obama, the FBI, and the DOJ. And when you put together the last 24 hours, the comments by former President Obama that this is a threat to the rule of law, which is an utter joke coming out of his mouth. And when you put together Mary McCord’s op-ed, and then some of the statements from people associated with Mueller, you realize that the Mueller probe was from the very beginning nothing more than a pretext to try and get the president impeached.

COGLIANESE: Right.

DIGENOVA: And you realize that everybody at the senior FBI and DOJ levels was in on it. And what’s really fascinating is when you go back and you look at that January 5th meeting, 2017, in the Oval Office with all the intelligence community leaders — the vice president, Sally Yates, Comey, Brennan, and Susan Rice, the president of the United States at that meeting, Barack Obama, is discussing the ongoing investigations into the Trump campaign, the interregnum, the transition, and the upcoming presidency. And says in that meeting according to Susan Rice, he wants to be kept informed so he can help decide whether or not they’re going to withhold classified information from the incoming administration involving Russia. That is sedition.

COGLIANESE: Yes!

DIGENOVA: That is beyond anything we’ve ever heard about a president leaving office, doing to his successor. What Obama did in that office was sedition on that day. And I must say, these people are ballsy. McCord and others, screaming about the ways their actions are being misinterpreted.

COGLIANESE: Ha!

DIGENOVA: And do you know why they’re screaming? Because there’s a conspiracy indictment coming down the track. I don’t mean that Mary McCord is going to be indicted, but if you read the motion to dismiss, which the government filed, it reads like an indictment. And the reason it reads like an indictment is that it’s going to be part of an indictment.

COGLIANESE: Excellent.

…

DIGENOVA: President Obama’s hands are dirty. They are beyond dirty. He has — he has judicial blood on his hands. He is responsible for this injustice. He could have stopped it. He could’ve said “What are you idiots doing? This man’s been duly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump. How — why are you doing this?” He didn’t. He encouraged it.

And he had the brazen — talk about a brazen plot — how brazen they are, sitting in the Oval Office on January 5th, and saying they might not share intelligence with the incoming administration? And you know what that means? That means they didn’t want to give it to General Flynn, the incoming National Security adviser, because if they did give it to him, he would discover Crossfire Hurricane —

COGLIANESE: Of course!

DIGENOVA: He would blow the whistle, fire a bunch of people, and so they decided to take him out with an illegal, corrupt investigation.

And as far as Mary McCord is concerned, I’d like to see her in an orange jumpsuit.

COGLIANESE: Me too!

And another woman gets an orange jumpsuit in a Trumpian fever dream.

Is any of this true? Uhm. No. It is 100% bullshit.

Mary McCord, former Assistant AG for national security, explained her position, here.

Joe DiGenova is a political assassin, so he’s just doing his job. But I think you can sense the hysteria in his words. They are this close to speaking in tongues.

NEW: Here is the directive that went out to staff about the new mask policy in the West Wing this afternoon –> Reporting w/ @Santucci pic.twitter.com/FIaCptdwgh

— Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) May 11, 2020

As Jamison Foser tweeted, “This is a good timely measure measure that shows the White House is taking this seriously.

If today is March 11th.

This piece by Branko Milanovic in Foreign Affairs makes an interesting observation about the responses to the virus in China and the US. I know we are supposed to assume that China was just lying about everything but the truth is more complicated. This article sorts out the question of why both countries downplaying the virus in the early days — and where that ended up:

The Chinese government’s greatest asset in the management of the crisis has been the centralization of its power and its ability to control vast resources. Because of this top-down structure, China was able to impose draconian policies extraordinarily quickly and to shift assets (including human assets, such as doctors and nurses) to the areas where they were needed most. Without these measures, China could not have achieved such remarkable results: Shanghai, a city 24 million strong, experienced coronavirus deaths only in two digits, and just three months after its quarantine was imposed, Wuhan is now mostly free of new infections.

But a centralized political system also has vulnerabilities. The economist Xu Chenggang has described the Chinese system as one of regionally decentralized authoritarianism, in which provincial authorities have broad powers, so long as they deploy them in the pursuit of objectives determined by the center. The central government’s priorities include maximizing economic growth, attracting foreign investors, and, sometimes, controlling pollution. The system is efficient in allowing provincial and local authorities to pursue these objectives using the means they know best and deem most appropriate. But central authorities reward local ones based on how they perceive their management, so local authorities also have an incentive to hide undesirable developments.

The fateful response of the local authorities in Hubei Province to the first cases of COVID-19 was not an anomaly, then, but part and parcel of the Chinese system of regionally decentralized authoritarianism. The provincial authorities reacted with hesitation—and even denial—because they did not want to create an impression of lack of control or of poor management. They relayed as little information as possible to the center about the mysterious infections, even as the seeds of the pandemic were sown. Only when the problem was too obvious to conceal was the truth allowed to flow upstream. At that point, China’s central government responded with an efficiency and professionalism that made up for some lost ground.

The American political system has reacted to the virus in a manner exactly opposite to that of China. The central authorities—the U.S. federal government and its agencies—have presented a picture of disarray and amateurism. In the pandemic’s first moments, the federal government was absent altogether, and so it has more or less remained. But American federalism assigns a role to the states that has helped compensate for the weakness of the center.

When the U.S. federal government disappeared, consumed by meaningless press conferences, the states took over management of the crisis. In doing so, they showcased the power and resilience of federalism, which, unlike “regionally decentralized authoritarianism,” devolves real powers to the states even when they may conflict with federal priorities. States, variously, adopted social-distancing measures, ordered closures, shored up health-care systems, procured personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses, and developed their own regimes of testing and contact tracing. Some took these measures even against the advice or the timetable issued by the federal government.

Whether the resilience of American federalism alone can overcome the pandemic—or whether the cacophony of approaches and priorities among the different state governments will contribute to its continuation—remains to be seen. The nature of contagion is such that in an integrated country such as the United States, the very best efforts by one state can be undermined by bad decisions or irresponsible behavior next door.

The lesson is that when people lie about these things, whether from the top or bottom up, the results can be disastrous. So far, the Chinese system has worked out for the better. However, that’s not necessarily going to be where this ends up:

[If the US] chooses to tap into its significant advantages, such as flexibility of decision-making, accountability of local governments, and transparency. The benefit of the latter is reflected, for example, in the fact that Americans have access to several alternative counts of casualties, whereas only one, of dubious credibility, exists in China. These U.S. advantages closely match the differences in the internal organization of the two countries—namely, whether the state-level or provincial powers are granted by the center or naturally belong to the second-tier administrative units

It’s an interesting question. But I would feel a lot more confident in the US system being more succesful if it weren’t the case that the Republican Party is batshit insane and more than half the states are being run by them. It seems to me that we have the worst of both worlds.

Of course:

Accidental poisonings in the country from disinfectants and bleach increased in April, the month when President Trump mused that people might be able to fight the novel coronavirus by injecting themselves with disinfectant, new data show.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers reported a 121 percent increase in poisonings from disinfectants and a 77 percent spike in bleach poisonings in April, compared with the same month last year. The April 2020 data included the seven days that followed Trump’s false and dangerous comment about disinfectant, which he made April 23.

Duly noted: correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But still…

Sometimes it just hits you:

It’s been 111 days since the first reported case of the coronavirus in the United States. It’s been 57 days since President Trump issued social-distancing guidelines, and 12 days since they expired.

Yet the Trump administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.

Echoing his breezy language in the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump has in recent days returned to a blithe faith that the disease will simply disappear of its own accord, without a major government response.

“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests: This is going to go away without a vaccine,” Trump said Friday. “It’s going to go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”

And because he has a cult following, we now have to be as afraid of many of our fellow Americans as we do of the virus.

The story of Ahmaud Arbery’s lynching and the story of Elon Musk daring the police to arrest him for flouting lockdown — they’re the same story, the story of a country that is no republic but merely a monarchy (and a pretty crummy monarchy at that).

Due solely to their connections to power and the race of their victim, the two vigilantes escaped arrest. Musk, too, despite his flagrant violation of the law, will also escape arrest. He, too, has all the connections he needs to escape justice.

In the dreadful Arbery case, only a leaked video forced the state, 74 days later, into action. But then (of course!), a prosecutor, in his recusal, muddled the case, making it harder to prosecute. As for Musk, being a billionaire and a celebrity, it will take a lot more than video evidence of a shooting to get him into a jail, even if, by defying the lockdown, his facility could likely serve as a vector for countless numbers of infections and deaths.

The Arbery killers and Musk demonstrate that we are, and have been for a very long time, a nation of men. Those men are invariably white, invariably connected to power, and many of those white men are richer than anyone can rationally imagine. As for law? What law protected Arbery? What law will protect Tesla’s workers, or those in the meat plants? There’s actually a law empowering vigilantes in Georgia — oh, excuse me, I meant Georgia’s got a “citizen’s arrest” law. And Trump and his cronies are doing all they can to indemnify companies from liability during the pandemic.

These men, not us, can do whatever the fuck they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want. And barring the occasional random video, they will get away scot free with lynchings, spreading contagions, and other heinous crimes.

There’s just one problem. The US does not have what you call a sustainable model of governance. Any country this unjust, this unequal, this corrupt and this goddamm stupid is headed for a reckoning. Unless things change course very soon (November, if not sooner). I’m deeply afraid that as bad as it is, the US response to the pandemic is not even close to the reckoning all of us, the pawns of these few despicable men, will have to endure.

Fergawdsakes:

On Fox & Friends, TX salon owner Shelley Luther acknowledges that she did receive PPP funds two days before her court date, but she was too confused about what it was, where it came from, or how to spend it." pic.twitter.com/VD95L3TOL1

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) May 12, 2020

Yeah, that happens a lot. People apply for loans and when they get the money they don’t know where it came from.

This is a perfect example of someone being happy to play Russian Roulette with their own lives and put others’ lives in danger in order to own the libs.

A little fact check on Trump’s little “victory” lap yesterday:

It had all the trappings of a “Mission Accomplished” moment: the banner, the presidential pomp, and a message that wasn’t true. 

But what President Donald Trump wanted Monday to be a show of strength over his administration’s coronavirus testing push, complete with a banner touting “AMERICA leads the world in testing,” ended under tough questioning by reporters, causing the president to storm off abruptly. 

When CBS reporter Weijia Jiang asked Trump why it was a competition to the president with those around the globe as the death toll climbs and cases increase, the president used his answer to go on the attack. 

“Well, they’re losing their lives everywhere in the world,” Trump said. “And maybe that’s a question you should ask China. Don’t ask me, ask China that question, OK? When you ask them that question, you may get a very unusual answer.” 

When another female reporter, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, tried to ask a question, the president got into a brief exchange before ending the event. 

Trump declared Monday that the United States had “prevailed” on testing, saying the nation will “transition into greatness.”

“We have met the moment and we have prevailed,” Trump said. Just two weeks ago, in another press conference, the president said that while his administration had made significant progress in scaling testing, it still had work to do. Monday’s announcement seems to indicate that the president thinks his team did all it needed to on testing in the last 14 days.

On Monday night, the nation’s coronavirus death toll had surpassed 80,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. 

The United States trails countries like Denmark, Italy, and New Zealand for the total number of COVID-19 tests per 1,000 people, according to Our World in Data, as well as the daily number of tests per 1,000 people. While the U.S. is testing a great many people, according to Vox, it is also a large country, with a great many people to test.

In other words, the U.S. is hardly the global testing leader Trump portrayed it to be. 

And the testing number touted by Trump on Monday evening is also behind schedule. In March, Vice President Mike Pence told reporters that by the middle of the month the administration would have shipped 4 million tests. He suggested that the country would, too, test that many people by the end of the month. “Before the end of this week, another 4 million tests will be distributed,” he said. That never happened. 

When pressed by reporters at a press conference last month, Pence said the media was confused—that he meant the administration would facilitate the shipment of those tests and it was up to the states to administer them. It was yet another indication that the administration’s promises on testing fell short of expectations.

Testing for the virus has continued to be a sore spot for Trump during the pandemic, as the public’s ability to actually get tested for the virus has proven to be difficult. 

For the past two months, state and local officials have pleaded with the federal government for assistance on testing, claiming they simply did not have enough tests or supplies to administer them to safely and completely reopen their economies. Trump has deflected criticism, claiming the federal government has gone above and beyond to help states get back on their feet. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, earlier this month even called the federal government’s response a “success story.” 

But that rosy picture is a far cry from the reality on the ground in local communities, especially those in hot spot areas. In Jersey City, New Jersey, the mayor and his team fought the state and the federal government for additional testing resources before settling on the idea that they would never have enough tests no matter how much they asked for help. And in other communities officials say that they do not have the staff or supplies to administer the tests they have on hand.

These anecdotes seem to have blowon past officials in the White House, including the president and Kushner, who have spent the majority of the last two weeks publicly praising each other. 

States across the country have continued to reopen, despite concerns from some local officials about the speed of restrictions being eased and testing shortage worries. 

Slides used by officials during the briefing touted the “historic scaling of testing,” along with the administration’s announcement that $11 billion was being sent to the states, via the CARES Act legislation, to be “devoted to testing capability.” 

Trump also struggled to strike a balance at times during Monday’s briefing. 

To one reporter’s question, Trump said, “If somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested.” 

Minutes later, Trump echoed again that “if people want to get tested, they get tested,” before bragging about the nation’s testing capacity. 

“If people want to get tested, they get tested,” Trump said. “But for the most part, they shouldn’t want to get tested. There’s no reason. They feel good, they don’t have sniffles, they don’t have sore throats. They don’t have any problem.” 

So, he lied. Of course. In fact, he was brittle and testy and he acted like a child, as usual. And demonstrated once again that he simply doesn’t understand this pandemic or the economic challenges and he’s making it worse.

The issues are complex but go to the heart of the constitution’s separation of powers. This morning’s remote U.S. Supreme Court arguments in Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank et al. could finally lead to unraveling just what the acting president is so desperate to hide in his financial records. The arguments will be heard remotely (and broadcast live) via C-Span and NPR beginning at 10 a.m. EDT.

Not since the Nixon tapes case has a separation of powers issue of this significance reached the high court.

There are actually three cases to be heard this morning. Two involve whether the acting president’s agents must produce financial records and tax returns subpoenaed by Democrat-controlled House committees. The third, Mazars, could determine whether the state of New York will receive subpoenaed Trump tax records it seeks in its investigation of hush-money payments made to two women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs, writes CNN’s Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor:

Legally, this shouldn’t be particularly close or difficult. Exhibit A: In total, six different federal courts — three district courts and three courts of appeals panels — have heard these cases, and all six have ruled against Trump. It’s no fluke that Trump has a batting average of exactly .000 thus far in trying to block disclosure of his tax returns, and it would take a stunning reversal by the Supreme Court — essentially deciding that all six lower courts got it wrong — to save Trump’s cause now.

The primary issue in the cases involving House subpoenas is whether Congress had some legitimate legislative purpose for requesting the tax returns. Courts traditionally interpret this requirement broadly in favor of Congress, sensibly deferring to the legislative branch to decide its own legislative purposes in all but the most egregious cases. In both cases involving House subpoenas, the district courts and courts of appeals ruled that the House was well within its authority to seek Trump’s financial information, which could inform various legitimate legislative purposes. The Supreme Court would have to twist itself into a legal pretzel — essentially substituting its own legislative preferences for those of Congress — to reach a contrary conclusion now.

The Supreme Court recently threw an unexpected twist into the proceedings when it requested additional briefings on whether the case presents a “political question unfit for judicial resolution.” This could signal that the court is looking for some off-ramp, some way to rule, in essence, that it cannot rule. However, federal courts — including all of the lower courts in the Trump tax returns cases — routinely rule on the enforceability of congressional subpoenas. It would be an unconscionable cop-out by the court to suddenly change this precedent, essentially rendering the Judicial Branch an ineffectual bystander to core constitutional disputes between Congress and the Executive Branch.

The court dodged ruling on the legality of partisan gerrymandering in 2019, claiming it was “beyond the reach of the federal courts,” so the Roberts court finding a way to avoid getting involved is not without precedent.

The argument in Mazars takes up the second hour of argument:

If Trump’s argument against the congressional subpoenas is weak, then his effort to block a prosecutorial subpoena from the Manhattan DA is downright monarchical. One district court judge rightly lambasted Trump’s argument that he is immune from even being investigated while in office as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” Indeed, Trump’s argument, if accepted, would place the President beyond almost any accountability, and would render law enforcement unable to even gather facts relating to potential crimes committed by the President while in office. Under Trump’s reading, if he in fact shot somebody on Fifth Avenue (to use his own hypothetical), the police could not even investigate the crime scene as long as he held the presidency.

Exposure of Trump’s New York tax records could expose Trump and his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, to legal action. The New York Times in its 2018 exploration of Fred Trump’s taxes revealed apparent tax fraud. While the statute of limitations is past for Donald’s and Maryanne’s part in that, they could be subject to large civil penalties in New York. Maryanne’s retirement in the wake of that report quashed an ethics probe into her role.

Exposure of Deutsche Bank’s and his accountants’ records threatens to reveal to whom Trump has financial commitments and, potentially, that he is worth far less than he claimed in loan applications. Rumors that Trump owes what liquidity he has to Russian oligarchs and banned Russian banks, if confirmed by his taxes and bank and accountants’ records, could expose him to “a whirlwind of problems,” Forensic News suggests, including criminal charges when he leaves office. Trump has fought tooth and nail over any efforts to pry into his financial ties. He has something to hide.

Question his actions as acting president and Donald J. Trump grabs his phone to launch a string of mean tweets. Question the size and sources of his wealth and he uses it to call his lawyers (as this humble blog discovered last August).

Rulings in Trump’s favor could destroy the balance of powers and neuter congressional oversight of the sort of criminal actions that brought down Richard Nixon. No less than whether Trump and the “unitary executive” crew have managed to restore the monarchy is at stake.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

You can’t make this stuff up. After years of screeching about FISA abuse and “The Deep State” look what they’re up to now:

Days after the Justice Department controversially dropped charges against Mike Flynn, Senate GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is set to expand a highly politicized Justice Department’s surveillance authority during a vote this week to renew the 2001 PATRIOT Act. 

Under cover of redressing what President Donald Trump and his allies call the FBI’s “witch hunt” over collusion with the Kremlin, McConnell, via an amendment to the PATRIOT Act, will expressly permit the FBI to warrantlessly collect records on Americans’ web browsing and search histories. In a different amendment, McConnell also proposes giving the attorney general visibility into the “accuracy and completeness” of FBI surveillance submissions to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. Versions of the amendments circulating Monday were shared with The Daily Beast. ADVERTISEMENT

Taken together, privacy advocates consider McConnell’s moves an alarming expansion of Attorney General Bill Barr’s powers under FISA, a four-decade-old process that already places the attorney general at the center of national-security surveillance. It also doesn’t escape their notice that McConnell is increasing Barr’s oversight of surveillance on political candidates while expanding surveillance authorities on every other American. One privacy activist called McConnell’s efforts “two of the most cynical attempts to undermine surveillance reform I’ve ever seen.”

I think it’s pretty clear by now that the only rights Barr and the rest of the right wing henchmen care about are the rights of powerful GOP politicians.

I’m sure this will come a big surprise to all those who’ve been defending Trump against the intrusion of an overzealous law enforcement, right? It can’t be that they were so naive as to believe that the authoritarian right was operating out of some sort of principle.