Month: June 2020

Check this out:

The Trump administration has been sitting on nearly $14 billion in funding that Congress passed for coronavirus testing and contact tracing, according to Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Patty Murray of Washington.

The top Democrats said in a letter Sunday to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar that the Trump administration has “still failed” to distribute more than $8 billion out of $25 billion appropriated by Congress to expand testing and contact tracing. The letter indicated that Congress passed these funds as part of a coronavirus relief bill in April.

There might be a reasonable explanation for this. But in light of the president’s braindead belief that too much testing means we have more cases, it wouldn’t be surprising if the sniveling sycophant Alex Azar was withholding the fund in order to “slow it down.”

Here’s Trump’s latest babble on the subject, proving once again that he’s got serious cognitive impairment. He simply cannot understand that we would have the COVID cases even if we didn’t test for them and probably a lot more sickness and death since the epidemic would be even more out of hand. Nonetheless, it’s clear he’s done everything he can to stop testing to “keep his numbers down.”

REPORTER: Did you really ask to slow down coronavirus testing?

TRUMP: “If it did slow down, frankly, I think we’re way ahead of ourselves, if you wanna know the truth. We’ve done too good of a job.” pic.twitter.com/zy4LAWcCii

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 22, 2020

“Too good of a job.”

120,000 people are dead, hundreds of thousands more have become extremely ill and may have permanent damage to their health. The lack of testing early is how we got here. It’s still inadequate.

Trump simply does not understand that this is a life and death issue for average Americans. He sees it as a competition and the winner is the one with the lowest number of cases. Because he is corrupt to his core, he believes he will win if he rigs the numbers and the economy will rebound and everyone will think he is a hero.

He is demented.

In any other administration, this favoritism for Trump’s most energetic little British bootlicker would be a scandal all by itself. TPM reports:

Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K.’s Brexit party, gained entry to the United States to attend President Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally despite the current ban on Britons entering the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Per the Department of Homeland Security, Farage was able to skirt the ban after his visit was designated to be “in the national interest.”

“On June 19, Mr. Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Brexit Party, was denied boarding while attempting to fly from the United Kingdom to the United States,” a DHS spokesperson told TPM in a statement. “The initial denial of boarding was made pursuant to a March 14 Presidential Proclamation that, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, suspends the entry into the United States of certain foreign nationals who recently have been present in the United Kingdom.”

“After conducting a thorough review of the relevant facts and circumstances, DHS determined Mr. Farage’s travel to be permissible under Section 2 (a)(xi) of the Presidential Proclamation: any alien whose entry would be in the national interest, as determined by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their designees authorizing Mr. Farage to board his flight,” the spokesperson added.

DHS did not answer TPM’s questions about why attending a Trump rally is in the national interest, or who designated it as such.

The idea that anyone at that rally even knew who Farage is ridiculous. The idea that he needed to be here because it’s in “the national interest” is just one more corrupt use of the US Government for political purposes.

That was a campaign rally.

In the annals of Trump corruption, this is small potatoes. But that’s why it’s worth noting. This stuff is completely normalized.

I suspect that we will go back to previous norms with more fervor than ever during a Biden administration should he win. But the door will still be there for the next Republican. And they will almost certainly open it just a widely. Why wouldn’t they?

Meanwhile:

President Trump will sign an executive order to suspend the issuance of certain temporary worker visas through the end of 2020, cracking down further on immigration after signing a more narrow measure in April, officials said Monday.

The order applies to H-1B visas, H-2B visas, H-4 visas, L-1 visas and certain J-1 visas. It is the latest effort by the Trump administration to satisfy immigration hawks and groups that argue American workers should be prioritized, especially amid the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

H-1B visas are used for skilled workers and are used widely in the tech industry. H-2B visas apply to seasonal workers. H-4 visas are given to spouses of H-1B visa holders.

J-1 visas are given to researchers and scholars, while L-1 visas are used for executives transferring to the United States from positions abroad with the same employer.

Sure, who needs skilled workers, researchers and scholars in the middle of a pandemic and economic disaster? That certainly isn’t “in the national interest.”

But good old Nige? He’s in, no problem.

It appears this surge is centered among younger people, probably because olds like me are still staying home. But it’s a mistake to think that’s good news. A lot of these younger people are ending up in the hospital:

More of these hospitalizations are younger people, reflecting that Florida's epidemic is centered in a younger demographic, but also indicating that younger Floridians are developing Covid symptoms severe enough to require hospital admission. https://t.co/F7z4Y9UqQ8

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) June 22, 2020

“The scary thing is, we don’t know how far this is going to climb,” said Baker. “This is just week one of the resurge. So we don’t know what this will do.”

And June Ellis, associate chief nursing officer at Jackson’s flagship hospital, said the patients in this influx are much younger than in the first.

“”This time we’re starting to see younger patients coming in,” Ellis said. “So more of 30-, 40-year-old patients coming in, late 20s.”

Jackson is not alone in seeing higher demand.

The state Agency for Healthcare Administration reports intensive care beds are becoming more scarce, with none available at Kendall Regional Medical Center and West Kendall Baptist Hospital.

Countywide, 25% of ICU beds are available, AHCA reports, though the county’s data shows more such beds are available.

“We are starting to open up some of our other areas that we had been able to close for COVID and now we’ve opened them up for additional ICU capacity,” Jackson’s Ellis, the critical care nursing leader, said.

“Their catchment area is very different from ours due to the nursing homes that are around them. So it’s a whole different population,” Ellis said.

Asked where the situation is headed, Ellis paused, then said, “I don’t know, but if it continues, you know, the trend lines tell us we’re going to continue, we’re going.”

Young people need to wear masks and practice social distancing as much as possible right along with the rest of us. They can get very sick too. And we don’t know what long term damage this thing can do to the body.

And needless to say, everyone of any age needs to have a heart and try not to pass this thing along to other people.

The reviews are in and President Trump’s ballyhooed return to the stage this past weekend in Tulsa was a dud. After three months on hiatus, with nothing but the increasingly disastrous coronavirus press briefings to keep him in shape, the president turned in a very shaky performance. Even his greatest hits, like “Lock her up” and “Build that wall,” couldn’t bring the magic.

The campaign and the White House had relentlessly hyped this return, telling the media that they had a million RSVPs for the event and even planned an outdoor overflow venue where the president was slated to make a surprise visit before he entered the main stage. But the huge crowd failed to materialize and the outdoor event was hastily scrapped as it became apparent they wouldn’t even come close to filling the indoor arena. Local fire marshals estimated the crowd at a little over 6,000, less than one-third the arena’s capacity and 40,000 short of the crowd they anticipated outside.

It turns out the hype may actually have resulted from the credulous Trump campaign falling for a TikTok prank in which tons of teenagers RSVPd for the rally, artificially inflating the expected numbers. Campaign chairman Brad Parscale denied that this, of course, fell for it and since online RSVPs aren’t real tickets (the rallies are always first come first serve) it’s true that cannot entirely explain why so few of the faithful showed up for their hero’s big comeback.

NEW: The Trump campaign is blaming tonight’s turnout which has fallen well short of their expectations to protestors “interfering with supporters” attempting to gain access to the Trump events.
FULL STATEMENT from @TimMurtaugh pic.twitter.com/Dm6TuI06da

— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) June 20, 2020

Trump was reportedly discombobulated by the low turnout and seemed to have a hard time finding his rhythm. According to the New York Times he was extremely angry, first because Attorney General Bill Barr’s botched Friday night massacre firing of the U,S. attorney from the Southern District of New York robbed his big rally of oxygen, and then because news leaked out that six members of his campaign advance team had tested positive for COVID-19. Seeing that largely empty arena was the final blow.

During the rally itself, he said many crude and stupid things, as he usually does. He called protesters animals, said that Joe Biden would surrender the country to anarchists, and spent an extraordinary amount of time explaining how he walked down a ramp and drank water at the West Point graduation ceremony. He also defended the Confederate monuments, proposed that people be put in jail for a year for burning the U.S. flag (which has already been declared constitutionally-protected speech), and claimed that if Biden is elected money will be worthless.

And the great populist, man of the people, once more brought his followers to ecstasy by exclaiming:

Someone said the other day, “Sir, the elite are really working hard to destroy you,” and I said, “Why do you call them the elite? I look better than them. Much more handsome. Got better hair than they do. I got nicer properties, I got nicer houses, I got nicer apartments, I got nicer everything.”

I will never understand why his crowds love such puerile self-aggrandizement, but they do. They cheered wildly for it.

Of course the most odious of all was this:

And with testing, you know, testing is a double-edged sword. We’ve tested now 25 million people. It’s probably 20 million people more than anybody else. … Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please.

The White House later said he was joking, ha ha. It was anything but funny. Moreover, Trump has made it clear over and over again from the beginning of this pandemic that he didn’t like all the testing. From that infamous photo-op at the CDC where he said he didn’t want to let people who had tested positive off a stranded cruise ship because it would raise his “numbers” to comments just last week when he said that testing was “overrated” and then total explained that if you don’t test you don’t have cases:

Trump: If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any pic.twitter.com/ipdOf7Yrgi

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 15, 2020

The fact is that he never wanted to test people for the virus because he believed it made him look bad. At that CDC event he also said, “We’re going out and looking for spots. Nobody else is doing that … I don’t even know if I agree with that. You’ll find out those areas just by sitting back and waiting.”

He argued that rural areas didn’t need testing at an April briefing, saying, “You don’t need testing there, you know, where you have a state with a small number of cases, some states with almost none.” In May he made that explicit, saying during a press avail, “If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

He has repeatedly made clear that he doesn’t understand how it’s supposed to work. When Stephanie Miller, an aide to Vice President Pence (and the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller) tested positive, Trump again dismissed tests as unnecessary with this display of sterling logic:

This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great. The tests are perfect, but something can happen between a test — where it’s good, and then something happens, and all of a sudden — she was tested very recently and tested negative. And then today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive.

If he was saying all this in public before the cameras, there can be no doubt that he made clear behind the scenes that he wanted to squelch testing and keep those numbers down. There is ample evidence that he had minions dedicated to fulfilling those desires.

This is consistent with everything I have heard in conversations with folks in the federal government.

A concerted effort to reduce availability of testing for Americans

While ramping up testing White House staff

Its amazing to hear the President publicly admit this policy https://t.co/56qgol9n6o

— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) June 21, 2020

It has become clear that this administration’s botched response to the pandemic has cost many, many lives. A recent study has shown that if the U.S. had responded with the same alacrity as Germany, Australia, South Korea or Singapore, we could have saved 70% to 90% of the lives that have been lost.

That number reached 122,000 people over the weekend. That’s how many people have died in just four months. For some reason, our president doesn’t seem at all concerned about that massive loss of life. He never even mentioned it at the rally.

That event was sparsely attended because this country is still in the middle of this crisis and it isn’t getting much better. It seems that some of his voters know this too and decided to stay home, regardless of his exhortations to get back out there for his sake. He had hoped to spin the pandemic as being in the past and promote an economic boom with his big comeback tour. All those empty seats in that arena showed him that it’s not working. Even his devoted followers aren’t buying it.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

“I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to put 20,000 people in a room with masks optional.” — Steve Doocy

Lol. I’m pretty sure we know exactly who that was. And he was undoubtedly watching.

Meanwhile, Javanka is reportedly pissed:

Jared and Ivanka are pissed at Brad over promising on crowd size,” the source said.

President Donald Trump and his allies had ginned up expectations for a massive crowd in the days leading up to the rally, with campaign officials telling CNN that more than 1 million people had registered to attend and one local official stating they expected 100,000 to show up near the arena. 

I think we all know that Parscale is marked for death. He was trying to give Dear Leader what he wanted and he failed. I don’t think that’s forgivable.

A separate campaign source said Trump also “has every right to be pissed” over the turnout in Tulsa.”They gave adversaries and media a gift. It was overconfidence,” the source said of Parscale and other campaign staffers close to the planning of the event.

Campaign officials should rethink the idea of holding rallies inside arenas and begin contemplating more open-air venues like aircraft hangars, the source continued.

Donors and friends of the President also have been fuming Sunday in the wake of Trump’s poorly-attended rally, a person involved with the reelection effort told CNN.

The person said blame from this camp has focused squarely on Parscale, of whom some had already been skeptical. But some donors and allies feel the rally debacle — in which the campaign made a decision to inflate expectations about enthusiasm for the rally rather than manage them at a reasonable level — threw into sharp relief the existing management problems on the campaign, the person said

.”What happened last night is representative of a much bigger problem,” the person noted.

As CNN has reported, some Republicans working with the campaign had grown concerned that the reelection team has not adapted quickly enough to the shifting political landscape ahead of November — with the global pandemic and national movement for racial justice continuing to tilt the race away from the one campaign aides were initially planning to run. Another campaign adviser summed up the evening by saying “it went poorly.”

Parscale was already under pressure inside the Trump campaign, the adviser said, as the President has occasionally expressed disappointment in his performance over the last several weeks.Parscale is facing a “decline of confidence,” from Trump’s inner circle, the adviser added.” Kellyanne (Conway), (Paul) Manafort and Corey (Lewandowski) never had rally size issues,” the adviser said of Trump’s former campaign managers.This story has been updated with additional developments.

Say what you will about Manafort, Conway and Lewandowski, they didn’t try to kill Trump supporters.

Parscale decision to do that was bold, pushed hard by the president himself. It turns out voters may not care for that. Go figure.

The New York Police Department suspended one of its officers after a bystander video showed him applying a suspected chokehold to a black man suspected of disorderly conduct. Four officers piled atop a man with a history of mental illness on a Rockaway Park boardwalk Sunday morning after reports of a man yelling at people.

By the end of the incident, 35-year-old Ricky Bellevue was unconscious with a bloody scalp, reports the Washington Post. Bellevue was also charged with “obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest” (being choked). The city and state of New York passed laws banning chokeholds after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis.

It is another in a chain of events allowing white America a view into what U.S. criminal justice is for their minority neighbors. If many whites seem panicked over a future with them having less than a controlling majority of the U.S. population, perhaps it is because they know too well how this country treats its minorities. White people, after all, have been the ones doing most of the treating for 400 years.

Slate’s William Saletan finds public opinion shifting rapidly in the wake of Floyd killing toward the view that racism is systemic and away from Donald Trump’s law-and-order message:

That’s good news for America. But it’s bad news for Trump and his party, because the GOP relies on white voters. In 2010, 2012, and 2014, about 60 percent of them voted Republican. In 2016, that number fell to 57 percent. In 2018, it fell to 54 percent. As this number has fallen, so has the GOP’s share of the overall vote. In 2016, Trump won enough states to take the Electoral College, but he lost the popular vote by 2 percentage points. In 2018, Republicans lost the popular vote for the House of Representatives by more than 8 percentage points.

The GOP isn’t just losing white voters on issues such as health care and education. It’s also losing them on race. In this month’s polls, most white Americans say “the deaths of African Americans during encounters with police” are “signs of a broader problem,” not isolated incidents. They say police and the “criminal justice system” are treating “white people better than black people.” They acknowledge “a problem with systemic racism in America.” They classify racism as a “big problem,” a “very serious problem,” and “a major threat to the stability of the United States.” They endorse the statement, “Racism is built into American society. The assumption of white superiority pervades schools, business, housing, and government.”

Perhaps they are just telling pollsters what they want to hear, Saletan offers, but answers to identical questions have shifted dramatically in five years. Agreement that there is a broad pattern of police mistreatment of black suspects and a higher likeliness to use deadly force against them has increased roughly 20 points since 2015.

The public no longer buys police abuse as isolated incidents by a few “bad apples.”

In 2011, only 21 percent of white Americans said “racism in our society” was a big problem. By 2015, that number had climbed to 43. Now it’s 60. In 2016, only 26 percent of white respondents expressed a favorable opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement. Two years later, 36 percent did. Now 51 percent do. In 2015, 45 percent of white respondents said “racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States” was a big problem. By 2016, the number had risen to 64. Now it’s 71. Last fall, 42 percent of white respondents said white people were treated more fairly than black people in applying for jobs. Now that percentage has reached 50.

When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 made same-sex marriage a right in Obergefell v. Hodges, public opinion had already shifted. In a sense, the court simply ratified that. President Obama’s position on that subject shifted slowly over the course of 20 years. But when public opinion finally moved toward supporting LGBTQ rights. it moved quickly. What Saletan’s collection of polls suggests is public opinion may be shifting rapidly again.

Trump barely won the presidency in 2016 as an outsider stoking white racial fears. Four years later, his market for that message is shrinking fast. Sixty-three percent of white Americans (PDF pg. 13) say his response to the George Floyd demonstrations has increased tensions. His law-and-order, wedge messaging is falling as flat as his Tulsa rally. White respondents asked in Yahoo! News’ June 11 Race and Politics poll (PDF pg. 18) whether a “law and order” approach or “bringing people together” was more likely to “get things under control” chose “bringing people together” by 61 percent to 39 percent.

The public has now seen too many isolated incidents of police violence against unarmed black neighbors. Yet, Trump is still running on white resentment. As the incumbent, he is the one increasingly isolated.

“If he loses the election, one reason will be that he alienated nonwhite America,” Saletan writes. “Another reason will be that the GOP lost its grip on white America, too.”

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

The firing of Geoffrey Berman may be strictly legal but like so much else in the Trump presidency, it violated core democratic values. Perry Bacon at 538 wrote something about this that I thought was pretty good:

Equal justice under the law:

Under Berman’s leadership, the Southern District was reportedly investigating Trump lawyer and ally Rudy Giuliani, including Giuliani’s dealings with Ukranian officials that were scrutinized as part of the impeachment inquiry against Trump. We don’t know the status of that investigation, whether Giuliani was likely to face criminal charges or even whether that investigation was a factor in the decision to oust Berman. There is some logic to the idea that Department of Justice prosecutors should avoid making decisions close to the election that might influence its outcome — indicting the president’s attorney is arguably such an example. In fact, Democrats in 2016 criticized then-FBI Director James Comey on these grounds, when he announced less than two weeks before Election Day that he was reviewing new evidence involving Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

That said, if Trump and Barr were trying to protect Giuliani (and therefore Trump), it fits a pattern of Barr’s Justice Department seeming to extend special treatment to Trump allies. In February, DOJ officials overruled career prosecutors and asked for a significantly lighter sentence for longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. All four prosecutors withdrew from the case — and one resigned — in protest of the decision. Even more unusual was the decision in May by a Barr-appointed U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., to drop charges against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, even though Flynn had already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Not only did a career prosecutor quit that case as well, but federal appeals judges are considering not allowing the Justice Department to drop the charges.

The democratic value at play here is equal justice under the law — a person should not get unusually lenient treatment by the Justice Department if he or she is an ally of the president’s. Arguably, previous presidents have violated this value — for example, as he was leaving office, Bill Clinton pardoned the ex-husband of a major Democratic Party donor.

Independence of law enforcement

The most alarming potential explanation of what happened to Berman is that Barr tried to fire him specifically for investigating Giuliani. A milder version may be that the Southern District, under Berman’s leadership, demonstrated that it did not care about Trump’s preferences and would investigate whichever crimes it deemed important, no matter the potential ramifications for Trump. Two years ago, the Southern District persuaded onetime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to plead guilty to a number of crimes, including violating campaign finance law, with Cohen suggesting his illegal behavior came at Trump’s behest. (It’s worth noting that Berman recused himself from that case.)

So Barr and Trump may consider Berman insufficiently loyal to their interests and fear he would bring charges that would reflect badly on Trump or Republicans, even if Berman didn’t bring forward a case clearly linked to the president.

Indeed, the Trump administration has a long record of demoting, reassigning, firing or otherwise sidelining law enforcement officials who show independence from the White House: Comey, former FBI general counsel James Baker, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump or his allies often hinted that Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller would be fired during their tenures as FBI deputy director and DOJ special counsel, respectively, in a manner seemingly designed to intimidate them. Trump has also recently complained about current FBI Director Christopher Wray and hinted that he could be fired.

And Barr has implied that the Justice Department will seek to bring charges against those involved with initiating the investigations of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia — in effect, criminalizing efforts that bring scrutiny to the president.

Again, it is not unprecedented for presidents to replace law enforcement officials. Presidents in both parties traditionally replace with their own choices all the U.S. attorneys appointed by the previous administration, which often results in a wide partisan swap. As president, Clinton fired the FBI director, and most notably, in what came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” then-President Richard Nixon purged the senior leadership of the Justice Department for refusing to quash an investigation of him — he was impeached and forced to resign in part because of these moves.

The democratic value at stake here is the independence of law enforcement. That ideal, that their decisions should be divorced from politics, is hard to maintain if key law enforcement officials are constantly worried about being fired by the president, attorney general or anyone else for political reasons.

Accountability and oversight

It’s worth thinking about the initial bid to fire Berman on Friday night, because that is in part what made this move so problematic at first glance. It appeared to be an attempt by Barr and Trump to install at the top of an important law enforcement agency (the Southern District of New York) someone more likely to be friendly to their interests. Generally, when a political appointee like a U.S. attorney leaves, he or she is replaced by the No. 2 person in that office, usually a career civil service employee not formally aligned with either party. But on Friday Barr announced that Berman would be temporarily replaced by Craig Carpenito, a U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, a close ally of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another Trump loyalist.

This is a pattern for Trump: removing the leaders of various government agencies or departments, ignoring normal succession procedures and passing over the people who would normally step in, and instead replacing them with Trump allies. The temporary replacement’s role is essentially to do Trump’s bidding in a way that the removed person would not. The most prominent example of this was when, after the 2018 midterm elections, Trump replaced Sessions with his chief of staff at the time, Matt Whitaker. Often, as in the case of Berman, Trump has removed someone appointed in a process he did not totally control (usually Senate confirmation — in Berman’s case, he was installed by the judges of the Southern District) with someone chosen solely by Trump for that particular role.

Trump’s controlling the executive branch in this way — minimizing the oversight of other branches — weakens checks on his executive power. In this instance, however, Berman’s own chief deputy, Audrey Strauss, stepped into the role.

That said, that Carpenito never actually made it into Berman’s former position doesn’t mean the move wasn’t still problematic in terms of oversight. In indicting one Trump lawyer (Cohen) and investigating another (Giuliani), the Southern District under Berman’s leadership was effectively conducting oversight of the president, since Giuliani in particular was basically executing Trump’s policy goals with Ukraine (pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden). Berman’s firing suggests Trump was unhappy with that oversight and wants to limit it.

Trump’s attempts to stop oversight of his policy moves is also part of a pattern. He has essentially refused to comply with any congressional investigations into his administration. And over the past few months, he has fired a number of the inspectors general at federal agencies, the people formally charged with scrutinizing the executive branch. The intelligence community inspector general played a key role in bringing forward the whistleblower’s complaints about the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine, leading to the president’s impeachment. Trump seems to now view all inspectors general as threats to his administration.

The democratic value at play here is oversight of the executive branch. The Senate’s role in confirming executive branch appointees and the presence of inspectors general are ways in which a president in theory is not able to do whatever he wants with the executive branch. Trump seems unwilling to abide by these constraints. Having his personal lawyer conduct foreign policy puts that person out of the purview of the Senate or inspectors general. Firing the U.S. attorney whose office was investigating the president’s lawyer signals that the president’s lawyer and the sphere of policy he is implementing is off limits.

He has more at the link.

This is yet another example of the weakness of our system being exposed under Trump and his henchmen. There’s always been a certain expectation that the people who rise to that level in the government have at least a modicum of allegiance to the constitution and the spirit of democracy. I mean, even Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace when the Senate got enough votes to impeach him. Neither of those things could ever happen today.

And, by the way, the lesson Barr took from all of that was that Nixon didn’t fight hard enough.

Trump, of course, is simply a corrupt imbecile.

Considering the looong disquisition about this at his rally last night, it’s pretty clear it’s gotten under his skin.

Jennifer Rubin on the Lincoln Project:

The ads are devastating for several reasons: They are produced with lightning speed, and thereby catch the public debate at just the right moment; they hammer Trump where he is personally most vulnerable (e.g., concerns about his vigor, concerns about foreign corruption); and they rely to a large extent on Trump himself — his words and actions. Put it all together, and they manage to “say the quiet part out loud” — that is, to make public what many Americans already think about Trump. As a result, they are creating some of the most devastating ads of this or any presidential election cycle.

Trump has felt compelled to respond to some the ads, as he did on Twitter during the week to make excuses for his feeble appearance at West Point. Plainly, the Lincoln Project has struck a nerve. He wound up devoting a good chunk of his meandering remarks at his Tulsa rally to explaining why he needed two hands to drink a glass of water. He bizarrely reenacted his baby-step descent on the ramp after his West Point speech. The group’s communications director Keith Edwards tells me the group “lives in Donald Trump’s head rent free.” And it is not like there is any shortage of material for the ad-makers. “We’ve only just begun to prosecute,” John Weaver told me. “We won’t let up until Joe Biden is sworn in at noon on January 20th.

I am on the wrong side of my progressive activist pals on this subject. Never Trumpers out there positively agitating for Joe Biden is a good thing in my opinion. I don’t know how many people they can persuade but it doesn’t take very many.

Moreover, judging from their twitter feeds and various writings, a good number of them have been seriously alienated from the GOP, and not just because of Trump. The supine cowardice of Republican officials and the grotesque opportunism of many of their erstwhile political allies in the Republican coalition have made them see their party a little bit more clearly. Some of them even seem to have been truly repulsed by the racism they can no longer ignore. Better late than never.

This is not to say they will be joining up with the progressives any time soon. Their antipathy toward some of the leftier reaches of the Democratic Party is pretty obvious. But they pretty closely mirror the mainstream center of the party which has problems but is still better than being part of the nihilist right. In any case, today there are a whole lot more progressives in the coalition than there used to be. So let the games begin.

And for the record, I know they have much to answer for. But I’m not one who requires hairshirts and self-flagellation for apostates who see the light. Life is short and there are bigger monsters to slay than people who have voluntarily moved in my direction. (But I don’t trust them either. ..)

"You guys were so far off that you had planned an outdoor rally, and there wasn't an overflow crowd … the fact is, people didn't show up" — Chris Wallace grills Trump campaign spokesperson Mercedes Schlapp on Trump's underwhelming Tulsa crowd pic.twitter.com/1wdWK7Cpta

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 21, 2020

Fox News isn’t having it:

As Wallace pointed out, the president frequently touts crowd sizes at his rallies as an indicator of enthusiasm and support. The Trump campaign planned for a massive crowd by setting up an outdoor overflow section for supporters who were shut out of the city’s BOK Center, which has a total capacity of 19,200.

• The attendance ended up clocking at just under 6,200, according to the Tulsa Fire Department, and the campaign canceled the outdoor portion of the event.
• Schlapp blamed the underwhelming turnout on “protesters,” claiming that supporters who wanted to attend were “worried about the protesters who were coming in.” Tulsa World reported that police only arrested one protester for trespassing in a secure area.

SCHLAPP: “I’d love to see a Joe Biden rally. Let’s bring it on, because there is no comparison. The phenomenon of the rally came because of President Trump, and people came out. Those people that knew that they wanted to be there physically present with the president. They joined us, and they’re family-oriented individuals who wanted to come out and be with us.”

WALLACE: “Mercedes, please don’t filibuster. We’re showing pictures here and it shows big, empty areas. Frankly, it makes you guys look silly when you deny the reality of what happened.”

continued to deflect from the crowd size and attack Biden, calling him a “failed politician” and stating that Trump used the rally to “talk about the failed record of Joe Biden.”

• “Joe Biden has been a career politician that has done nothing but supported failed institutions.”
• “There were empty seats there,” Wallace said. “You’re shifting to a campaign speech which has nothing to do with the attendance of the rally.”

Wallace is as tough on the Trumpers as anyone. Tougher than many. And this means that at least a few Trump voters are able to hear the truth as unpleasant as it is for him.

Bill Barr clearly believes he’s the smartest man in the world. But I’m going to guess that some of these lawyers in the DOJ are pretty smart themselves. It certainly appears that SDNY US Attorney Geoffrey Berman is no fool. When Barr tried his little gambit on him, offering up some plum job at DOJ in order to replace him with a Trump crony on Friday night, he balked, very publicly and forced Barr to back off and follow the normal procedures.

The DOJ put out a phony story that this was all just because Trump wanted to put someone else into the job and since all US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president so doesn’t matter why he did that.

Emptywheel dispatches that nonsense:

Can we have a rule that reporters like Pete Williams who do supine interviews parroting the Attorney General are not trusted when they rely on anonymous DOJ sources?

We've SEEN what access journalism looks like, no reason to trust the secret sources. https://t.co/hlINZr9tyS

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) June 21, 2020

This is such BS. Bolton’s book has a passage bout Trump promising Turkish president Edogan that he would get rid of the current leadership of SDNY because they are all “Obama people” (Berman was a Trump appointee) and then they’d “take care of it.” This is what he does and since the office is currently investigating a whole bunch of Trump associates, not the least of whom is Rudy Giuliani, it’s quite obvious what this is about.

And Berman obviously understood this because Trump and Barr just did the same thing in the DC office. This piece by Paul Rosensweig in the Atlantic spells it out:

Late Friday evening, Attorney General Bill Barr claimed that the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York had resigned, and announced his replacement on an interim basis by the current U.S. attorney for New Jersey—a man who served as Chris Christie’s defense attorney in the Bridgegate scandal and who seems ill-equipped to handle the Manhattan caseload.

That was a lie. A few hours later, the SDNY attorney, Geoffrey Berman, issued a public statement saying that he had not resigned, had no intention of doing so, and was staying on the job. Then, Saturday, Barr sent Berman a letter telling him that Barr had asked President Donald Trump to fire Berman—and that Trump had done so. That letter, too, may have been a lie. Shortly after it was published, Trump said that he was “not involved” in the Berman firing and that it was up to Barr. In something of a bind, Barr is allowing the SDNY deputy, an experienced prosecutor, to step into Berman’s role until the Senate can confirm a permanent replacement; Trump intends to nominate Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

One supposes that, eventually, Barr and Trump will get their stories straightened out. And Berman has now left, so the main goal has been achieved.

But the real question is: Why? Why replace Berman now, just five months before the election?

The answer lies in the firing earlier this year of Jessie Liu, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. By firing Liu, Barr and his team took control of the Washington, D.C., U.S. attorney’s office. Until they did that, the office was following up on various indictments and charges that had been brought against Trump’s associates. Once they seized control, Barr’s team intervened to short-circuit that process. They interceded in the sentencing of Roger Stone, and more recently, they have made an effort to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn. In both circumstances, career prosecutors were so outraged that they withdrew from the case, and some resigned from the Department of Justice altogether.

This is how an authoritarian works to subvert justice. He purports to uphold the forms of justice (in this case, the formal rule that the attorney general and the president exercise hierarchical control over the U.S. attorneys) while undermining the substance of justice. In the Flynn case, for example, Barr has asserted an absolute, unreviewable authority to bring and dismiss cases at will—a power that, even if legally well founded, is a subversion of justice when misused.

That may be the game plan for New York as well. Barr may want Berman out so that he can use his newly enhanced control to dismiss or short-circuit all of the pending cases in Manhattan that implicate Trump or his associates.

We know those are many. We know that Trump’s various organizations, including his inauguration committee, are under investigation. We know that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is under investigation. We know that Trump’s bank, Deutsche Bank, is under investigation.

Since taking office, Barr has repeatedly intervened to protect Trump. In addition to the behavior already mentioned, we might identify his attempt to protect Trump’s tax records from disclosure, or the way he distorted the true contents of the Mueller report. Barr’s actions are more like those of a consigliere to Don Trump than those of an attorney general of the United States, working for the American people.

Even that characterization is too kind to Barr. The attorney general’s apparent goal is to turn the Department of Justice into an arm of the president’s personal interests. He seems to have no regard for the department’s independence, and is doing long-term damage to the fabric of American justice.

Given the authoritarian structure of what Barr is attempting to achieve—preserving the forms of liberty while destroying their substantive content—we might call this the Orbánification of the American system of governance. Like strongmen everywhere, Barr (and Trump) seek to exalt their interests over those of the nation. And this latest effort—seemingly to short-circuit the ongoing criminal investigation of Trump’s affiliates and associates—is only the most recent evidence. As he continues down this road, Barr is doing his best to make John Mitchell, President Richard Nixon’s disgraced attorney general, look like a man of principle.

The good news is that Berman is now gone and he is free to testify before the Judiciary Committee next week should he decide to do so.

I wouldn’t necessarily hold my breath on that. He may not be willing to cover for Trump’s cronies but there’s little evidence that he’s political enough to want to testify publicly about Trump. And even if he does, it’s unlikely he would say anything about the ongoing investigations.