Month: August 2020

Just some bureaucrats trying to figure out how to implement a policy, amirite?

In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president’s most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.

Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, led the meeting and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

It had been nearly a month since then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had launched the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay.

Those invited included Sessions, Nielsen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to documents obtained by NBC News.

Nielsen told those at the meeting that there were simply not enough resources at DHS, nor at the other agencies that would be involved, to be able to separate parents, prosecute them for crossing the border and return them to their children in a timely manner, according to the two officials who were present. Without a swift process, the children would enter into the custody of Health and Human Services, which was already operating at near capacity.

Two officials involved in the planning of zero tolerance said the Justice Department acknowledged on multiple occasions that U.S. attorneys would not be able to prosecute all parents expeditiously, so sending children to HHS was the most likely outcome.

As Nielsen had said repeatedly to other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get messy and children could get lost in an already clogged system.

Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct, but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.

Nobody even bothered to raise the fundamental moral objection to this grotesque practice and frankly, I can see why. It was pointless. The only moral thing to do would have been to walk out and submit their resignations.

At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” said Miller, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like this, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.

No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument regarding immigration “fell on deaf ears” inside the White House, said one of the officials.

“Miller was tired of hearing about logistical problems,” said one of the officials. “It was just, ‘Let’s move forward and staff will figure this out.'”

Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and then demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward, he asked?

A sea of hands went up. Nielsen kept hers down. It was clear she had been outvoted, according to the officials.

[…]

According to an invitation list obtained by NBC News, those expected to be in attendance at the meeting included: Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, Pompeo, Azar, Under Secretary of Defense John Rood, then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell, then-White House counsel Don McGahn, and Marc Short, who was then director of legislative affairs and is now chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence.

Every last one of them is a monster. There’s no other way to describe them. They willingly voted to punish children as a deterrence to immigration. It doesn’t get any lower than that.

This is a nightmare:

"The Democrats should do what's right for the country. They know they should open" — Trump calls on Democratic governors to fully reopen state economies despite the still-raging pandemic pic.twitter.com/loG1TIbwa7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2020

I hate to sound too hyperbolic but I think we have to start admitting that our president is a mass murderer of his own people. He’s not the first in history. But he’s the most recent. And he’s ours.

This piece by the LA Times looks at mask compliance in three neighborhoods in southern California. The most compliant of the happens to be a neighborhood very close to me. And it’s not that great, which I can attest to from my own forays out to get some exercise every day:

To reduce the spread of the coronavirus, all Californians are required to wear a mask in crowded outdoor spaces. Failure to do so is a misdemeanor under an order issued in June by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Enforcement has been lax, and many people have resisted. It’s unknown how widely the public adheres to the rule, so The Times decided to find out.

Last month, over the course of a week, our reporters observed passersby in three locations in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Each person’s compliance with the mask order was classified into one of these three categories:

Correct

Wearing a mask that covers both the nose and mouth.

Incorrect

Wearing a mask that fails to cover both the nose and mouth.

No mask

Not wearing a mask at all.

We visited a trendy Venice shopping district, Main Street in Huntington Beach, and a leafy public park in north Long Beach. We monitored each location six times between July 23 and July 28, tracking a total of 3,026 passersby in two-hour shifts.

While our results are limited to a small selection of locations in the populous and diverse region of Southern California, it is modeled on studies conducted by academics to offer a more scientific answer to the question of how residents are responding to the pandemic. Here’s what we found.

Only 42% of the people we tracked were wearing masks correctly, 10% were wearing masks incorrectly and 47% were not wearing masks at all.

These results are in contrast with recent polls where, when asked by researchers, large majorities said that they wear masks in public always or very often. A recent survey by USC found that most Americans say they believe mask-wearing is important and can slow the spread of the virus. Unlike The Times, those studies did not directly observe the behavior of people in public, but instead were limited to asking questions online and over the telephone.

We found different results at different locations. In Venice, nearly 60% of people were wearing a mask correctly.

Forty miles south in Huntington Beach, less than 30% of people were wearing a mask.

Long Beach fell in between, with 40% of people wearing a mask.

Huntington Beach is in Orange Country which is the most conservative of the three neighborhoods they observed. But plenty of people

Far too many Americans just cannot or will not, for whatever reason, do this one simple thing. And it is one of the main reasons why people are dying from COVID in large numbers every day in this country. I will never understand this kind of nonsense:

Anti-masker in Tucson, AZ throws a tantrum and has to be carried out by his own son pic.twitter.com/ggo4I968aL

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) August 11, 2020

And for every one like him, there are 20 who don’t have a tantrum but just refuse to wear one and spread it around. Why?

You’ve undoubtedly heard about this, right?

President Donald Trump distanced himself Thursday from Steve Bannon’s efforts to crowdsource private funds for a border wall, saying it was “done for showboating reasons” and “inappropriate.”

Trump made the remarks after Bannon, his former senior adviser, was arrested Thursday morning for allegedly swindling donors on the project, run by the non-profit group “We Build the Wall.” A federal grand jury in New York indicted Bannon on charges of money laundering and wire fraud, alleging he and his partners diverted $1 million away from the group and that he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his personal expenses.

The website, which is still up, is full of pictures of Trump and the project is endorsed by Trump Jr.

And while Trump can run, he can’t hide. He’s in this up to his eyeballs.

He pimped for the contractor that built this wall for months. From May 2019:

President Trump has personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News, according to four administration officials.

In phone calls, White House meetings and conversations aboard Air Force One during the past several months, Trump has aggressively pushed Dickinson, N.D.-based Fisher Industries to Department of Homeland Security leaders and Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commanding general of the Army Corps, according to the administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal discussions. The push for a specific company has alarmed military commanders and DHS officials.

Semonite was summoned to the White House again Thursday, after the president’s aides told Pentagon officials — including Gen. Mark Milley, the Army’s chief of staff — that the president wanted to discuss the border barrier. According to an administration official with knowledge of the Oval Office meeting, Trump immediately brought up Fisher, a company that sued the U.S. government last month after the Army Corps did not accept its bid to install barriers along the southern border, a contract potentially worth billions of dollars.

Trump has latched on to the company’s public claims that a new weathered steel design and innovative construction method would vastly speed up the project — and deliver it at far less cost to taxpayers. White House officials said Trump wants to go with the best and most cost-effective option to build the wall quickly.

“The President is one of the country’s most successful builders and knows better than anyone how to negotiate the best deals,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in an email. “He wants to make sure we get the job done under budget and ahead of schedule.”

Fisher’s chief executive, Tommy Fisher, has gone on conservative television and radio, claiming that his company could build more than 200 miles of barrier in less than a year. And he has courted Washington directly, meeting in congressional offices and inviting officials to the Southwest desert to see barrier prototypes.

Even as Trump pushes for his firm, Fisher already has started building a section of fencing in Sunland Park, N.M. We Build the Wall, a nonprofit that includes prominent conservatives who support the president — its associates and advisory board include former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, ex-congressman Tom Tancredo and former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach — has guided an effort to build portions of the border barrier on private land with private funds.

The first section is expected to be unveiled soon. Fisher-branded equipment and workers were visible this week preparing the site outside El Paso, within feet of the International Boundary Monument No. 1, placed in 1855 at the beginning of the effort to delineate the Mexican border. The stretch, part of which is on private land owned by a brick company, is the only area in the region without a barrier, in part because it crosses rugged terrain.

Scott Sleight, an attorney for Fisher, said in a statement Thursday that Fisher Industries is committed to working with the federal government to secure the border and has developed a patent-pending installation system that allows the company to build fencing “faster than any contractor using common construction methods.”

“Fisher has invited officials of many agencies and members of Congress to demonstrate what we believe are vastly superior construction methods and capabilities,” Sleight said. “Consistent with the goals President Trump has also outlined, Fisher’s goal is to, as expeditiously as possible, provide the best quality border protection at the best price for the American people at our Nation’s border.”

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, has joined in the campaign for Fisher Industries, along with Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), an ardent promoter of the company and the recipient of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Fisher and his family members, according to campaign finance records. Cramer, in an interview Thursday, said the Trump administration has shown a great deal of interest in his constituent’s company.

“He always brings them up,” Cramer said, noting that he spoke with Trump about Fisher twice — once in February and again on Thursday. Each time, Trump said he wanted Fisher to build some of the barrier, Cramer said.

[…]

Trump’s repeated attempts to influence the Army Corps’ contracting decisions show the degree to which the president is willing to insert himself into what is normally a staid legal and regulatory process designed to protect the U.S. government from accusations of favoritism. They also show how a private company can appeal to the president using well-placed publicity and personal connections to his allies — and the president’s willingness to dive into the minutiae of specific projects.

But Trump’s personal intervention risks the perception of improper influence on decades-old procurement rules that require government agencies to seek competitive bids, free of political interference.

[…]

The president ordered the reassignment of defense funds to the barrier project after Democrats denied his request for $5 billion. Instead, the agreement to end the government shutdown included $1.4 billion for the barrier. Since then, with Trump promising to build 400 miles of fencing by next year, the Pentagon has pledged to provide at least $2.5 billion more.

Fisher Industries was one of the six companies that built border wall prototypes outside San Diego in 2017, but the company’s concrete design did not afford the see-through visibility that DHS officials wanted. While many of the companies declined to discuss their prototypes with reporters, Tommy Fisher was an eager booster for his plan, criticizing the steel bollard design and professing that a more expensive concrete version would be better.

When Fisher began promoting a steel version of the barrier that he said could be installed faster and cheaper, the Army Corps said the design did not meet its requirements and lacked regulatory approvals.

“The system he is proposing does not meet the operational requirements of U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” an official said. DHS officials also told the Army Corps in March that Fisher’s work on a barrier project in San Diego came in late and over budget.

Fisher Industries has alleged improprieties with the border wall procurement process and sued the government on April 25.

Fisher this week told radio listeners in North Dakota that he was using private donations to build a section of border wall to show off his superior construction methods, which involve using heavy equipment to hold steel panels in place as they are anchored into the ground. He said he knows Trump will be impressed.

“The Corps said it couldn’t be done, but now the Border Patrol has seen it,” Fisher said of his construction project in an interview Wednesday on “The Flag,” a show on North Dakota’s WZFG News. “They’ve been out each day, and the proof’s in the pudding, and after that, it’s going to open up a whole new narrative about how border security should be handled, who should construct it, and the border agents will finally get what they deserve. And we’ll prove it in a half-mile stretch where they said it couldn’t be done.”

Collecting private donations, We Build the Wall has raised $22 million for the cause. The group has announced a raffle for a “wall reveal ceremony” it said will be attended by its “MAGA All Star board of advisors.”

“Witness history made on completion of the first privately funded section of the border wall!” it says. Cramer said Fisher is working with We Build the Wall. The group did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has repeatedly brought up Fisher Industries after hearing about the company in early 2019, administration officials said.

In an earlier meeting with military and DHS officials in the Oval Office, Trump said that the government was getting ripped off by current contractors — and that Fisher could do it for less than half the price and with concrete. “The president got very spun up about it,” said one person with direct knowledge of the meeting.

Officials from the Army Corps and DHS then met with Kushner several times to explain why Fisher wasn’t the best deal. Kushner was intimately interested in the cost of the wall and why other companies were being chosen over Fisher, administration officials said. Trump repeatedly told advisers that Fisher should be the company, administration officials said, and he has remained focused on the cost of the wall and how slow its progress has been.

Army Corps of Engineers officials evaluated Fisher’s proposal and said that it didn’t meet the requirements of the project — and that the proposal was cheaper because it wasn’t as high-quality, or as sophisticated, in their view.

Finally, officials, including then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, went into the Oval Office this spring and explained that Fisher could bid but that the company’s proposal needed to change.

Nielsen and Semonite separately explained that the president could not just pick a company. Nielsen did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump remained frustrated, saying that Fisher said it could build the barrier cheaper and faster. “He said these other guys were full of s—,” an official said.

Fisher was added to a pool of competitors after the Army Corps came under pressure from the White House, administration officials said.

On Tuesday, after Semonite was called to a meeting with Cramer on Capitol Hill, the senator posted a photograph of the encounter to Twitter, saying he had “discussed border wall construction” with Army Corps leaders.

Here’s Trump trying to back away after it was shown that this contractor doesn’t know what it’s doing. And also likely because his buddy Barr revealed that the SDNY was investigating:

I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads. It was only done to make me look bad, and perhsps it now doesn’t even work. Should have been built like rest of Wall, 500 plus miles. https://t.co/L8RUPCAhqc

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2020

Trump is a criminal and virtually everyone he surrounded himself with is corrupt as well. Add this to the list of criminal schemes that have to be investigated by the Truth Commission in 2021.

Update:

Kris Kobach: I talked with the president, and the “We Build the Wall Effort’’ came up. The president said ‘the project has my blessing, and you can tell the media that.’

Obama: "Trump has not grown into the job because he can't. And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 dead. Millions of jobs, gone. Those at the top have taken more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed. Our proud reputation around the world badly diminished." pic.twitter.com/20loURp8yq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2020

It was a great speech, conveying the urgency of the moment. If you didn’t watch the whole thing, take the time and watch it. I would never have expected to see him do this. It’s not his normal style at all. The urgency of the moment is clear. He is worried:

Judging by online comments, observers of the Democratic nominating convention hope Democrats never return to the old format. Noise. Hoopla. Press. Crowds. Stupid hats. Press interviews of people in crowds of stupid hats. Politicians shouting speeches and trying to tell a compelling story over all of it.

Perhaps the coronavirus death count and economic tragedy make all that seem even more tasteless. Real people telling their stories from their homes, announcing delegate counts with their far-flung states and territories as backdrops feels less contrived, more personal and more intimate, even knowing how much technology is behind it. It’s a big, diverse country. This format reminds us of that just when we need reminding.

We get to think about that and feel it without pundits interrupting to tell us what we should think and feel.

The intimacy gave viewers space to choke up at how much work went into former Rep. Gabby Giffords delivering her message against gun violence through her gunshot-damaged brain.

The quiet made room for eleven-year-old Estella’s story of having her world torn apart by Donald Trump’s jihad against immigrants. Her small voice drew tears from those who have any left.

Friends in the business of storytelling complained for years that Democrats are fools to leave that to political flacks instead of Hollywood professionals. Someone tweeted that the Republican convention will make even clearer where writers and filmmakers find their political home. Whether it is the right format or the right talent (finally), the difference in this Democratic convention is stark.

So is the choice this November, assuming democracy still exists here by then. We should “expect a president to be the custodian of this democracy,” former President Barack Obama said last night. The acting president is not only not up to that job, he has no interest in it.

Obama ‘s speech Wednesday night he delivered from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. He did not have to shout it into a microphone. There was no crowd he needed to stoke. No pauses for applause, no cutaway shots of the arena. It was a fireside chat without the fireplace. More than that, it was a presidential version of “the talk” black parents have with their children about the stark realities of navigating a white-dominated world. For that is the old world Trump wants to remake by guile or by force or by theft.

After pitching Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Obama celebrated the life of John Lewis and Civil Rights Movement activists. He recalled their struggles to make America, “somehow, some way,” live up to its myths of freedom and equality. To finally “include the voices of those who’d once been left out,” in the original Constitution. Now that work falls to a new generation:

I’ve seen that same spirit rising these past few years. Folks of every age and background who packed city centers and airports and rural roads so that families wouldn’t be separated. So that another classroom wouldn’t get shot up. So that our kids won’t grow up on an uninhabitable planet. Americans of all races joining together to declare, in the face of injustice and brutality at the hands of the state, that Black Lives Matter, no more, but no less, so that no child in this country feels the continuing sting of racism.

To the young people who led us this summer, telling us we need to be better — in so many ways, you are this country’s dreams fulfilled. Earlier generations had to be persuaded that everyone has equal worth. For you, it’s a given — a conviction. And what I want you to know is that for all its messiness and frustrations, your system of self-government can be harnessed to help you realize those convictions.

You can give our democracy new meaning. You can take it to a better place. You’re the missing ingredient — the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed.

That work will continue long after this election. But any chance of success depends entirely on the outcome of this election. This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win. So we have to get busy building it up — by pouring all our effort into these 76 days, and by voting like never before — for Joe and Kamala, and candidates up and down the ticket, so that we leave no doubt about what this country we love stands for — today and for all our days to come.

Stay safe. God bless.

It was the only time last night I missed having an audience to shout, “Amen!”

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

President Trump endorses conspiracy theory cult (Qanon) which predicts he will round up and murder his political rivals. pic.twitter.com/ijYVFrq06w

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 19, 2020

Yes, he did endorse them:

“I don’t know much about the movement, other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate. But I don’t know much about the movement butI have heard that it is gaining in popularity and from what I hear these are people that when they watch the streets of Portland, when they watch what happened in New York City in just he last six or seven months , but this was starting even four years ago when I came here. Almost four years, can you believe it? These are people who don’t like seeing what’s going on in places like Portland and places like Chicago and New York and other cities and states and I’ve heard these are people who love our country and they just don’t like seeing it.

So I just don’t know anything about it other than they do supposedly like me very much and they would also like to see problems in these areas, especially the areas we’re talking about go away. Because there’s no reason the Democrats can’t run acity and if they can’t we will send in all of the federal whether it’s troops or law enforcement, whatever they’d like. We’ll straighten out their problems in 24 hours or less, ok?

Reporter: The crux of the theory is this belief that you are saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Does that sound like something you’re behind?

Trump: Well, I haven’t heard that. But uh, is that supposed to be a bad thing? Or a good thing? If I can help save the world from problems I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.

And we are actually. We are saving the world from the radical left philosophy that will destroy this country and when this country is gone, the rest of the world would follow.

I don’t know what to say. He was told that QAnon believes he’s saving the world from a satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals and he asked if that’s supposed to be a bad thing. He believes they are fine people who love our country. Honestly, if Charlie Manson were alive and he endorsed Trump, Trump would call him a good guy who disdained Hollywood elites.

By the way, as far as I can tell, no Republican officials have anything to say, other than congratulating all the QAnon candidates that are winning their party primaries.

We won’t know if the convention gave the Democratic ticket a bounce until the weekend at the earliest. But it does appear that Biden’s choice of Harris has had some good effects already:

[P]olls for the Voter Participation Center, administered by the African American Research Collaborative (AARC) and Latino Decisions, were conducted in a half-dozen battleground states in the days surrounding Harris’s Aug. 11 pick.

“The survey was in the field almost an equal number of days before and after the announcement of Sen. Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential candidate,” wrote Matt Barreto, founder of Latino Decisions, in a memo first reviewed by The Hill.

“Looking at the sample, it is balanced before and after the Harris announcement — there are not more Democrats interviewed after, there are not more young people. The data are similar before and after,” Barreto told The Hill. “The only change is that Sen. Harris was named to the ticket, and the data finds large movement towards Biden, well outside the margin of error, among both Blacks and Latinos.”

“This is real movement, this is not a statistical anomaly,” he added.

Harris is the first woman of color to be named a vice presidential candidate for a major political party. She would be the first female vice president if Democrats win the White House in November.

Among Latino voters, Harris’s pick gave Biden a nearly 6 percentage point boost, while cutting into support for President Trump by 9 percentage points, a net boost of 15 points for Biden.

Before the announcement, 59 percent of Hispanic respondents said they would vote or were leaning toward Biden, compared with 26 percent who said the same of Trump.

After the Harris announcement, 65 percent of Hispanic respondents said they supported Biden, while only 17 percent said they supported Trump.

According to an AARC memo on the recent polling, Biden received an 11-point net boost among Black voters when comparing the before and after numbers.

The polls for the Voter Participation Center, administered by the African American Research Collaborative (AARC) and Latino Decisions, were conducted in a half-dozen battleground states in the days surrounding Harris’s Aug. 11 pick.

“The survey was in the field almost an equal number of days before and after the announcement of Sen. Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential candidate,” wrote Matt Barreto, founder of Latino Decisions, in a memo first reviewed by The Hill.

“Looking at the sample, it is balanced before and after the Harris announcement — there are not more Democrats interviewed after, there are not more young people. The data are similar before and after,” Barreto told The Hill. “The only change is that Sen. Harris was named to the ticket, and the data finds large movement towards Biden, well outside the margin of error, among both Blacks and Latinos.”

“This is real movement, this is not a statistical anomaly,” he added.

Harris is the first woman of color to be named a vice presidential candidate for a major political party. She would be the first female vice president if Democrats win the White House in November.

Among Latino voters, Harris’s pick gave Biden a nearly 6 percentage point boost, while cutting into support for President Trump by 9 percentage points, a net boost of 15 points for Biden.

Before the announcement, 59 percent of Hispanic respondents said they would vote or were leaning toward Biden, compared with 26 percent who said the same of Trump.

After the Harris announcement, 65 percent of Hispanic respondents said they supported Biden, while only 17 percent said they supported Trump.

According to an AARC memo on the recent polling, Biden received an 11-point net boost among Black voters when comparing the before and after numbers.

I think her choice made some white Democrats very happy as well, particularly women.

I expect she will give a good speech tonight. She’s a pro and she can be very compelling. If Biden gets a lift from this convention, I expect it will be because of the showcasing of the diversity of the Democratic Party in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, age and even ideology. If you’re watching TV with the sound turned off (as Karl Rove always said was the way politics is really conveyed) the America that Biden and Harris represent is dramatically different than the Trump cult of resentful white people like this:

I suppose it’s possible that many of these embarrassed people will vote for Trump anyway, but I’d guess it’s more likely that only a few die-hard tribalists will do so. Many more will either lay out or cross over:

Nearly 7 in 10 Americans say the US response to the coronavirus outbreak makes them feel embarrassed, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, as 62% of the public says President Donald Trump could be doing more to fight the outbreak.

The new poll finds disapproval of Trump’s handling of the outbreak at a new high, 58%, as the share who say the worst of the pandemic is yet to come has risen to 55% after dropping through the spring. And as the virus has spread from the nation’s cities throughout its countryside, the number who know someone who’s been diagnosed with the virus has jumped dramatically to 67%, up from 40% in early June.

And Americans are angry. About 8 in 10 say they are at least somewhat angry about the way things are going in the country today, including an astonishing 51% who say they are very angry. CNN has asked this question in polling periodically since 2008, and the previous high for the share who said they were “very angry” was 35%, reached in 2008 and 2016.

Some of the angry people are almost certainly Trumpies who are following their angry Dear Leader. But there are a whole lot of angry anti-Trumpers out there too. At this point, with over 170,000 people dead and the economy in ruins I think we can assume that most of them are not fans of the man who is responsible for it.

Following up on my column about the SSCI Russia report this morning, I thought I would excerpt this part of Franklin Foer’s article on the same topic. (He is something of a Manafort whisperer.) He focuses on the failure of the Mueller investigation:

When Mueller’s prosecutors appeared in court, in February 2019, they implied that the most troubling evidence they had uncovered implicated Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman. This wasn’t a surprising admission. Throughout their filings, Mueller’s team referred to Manafort’s Kyiv-based aide-de-camp, Konstantin Kilimnik, as an active Russian agent. Manafort had clearly spoken with Kilimnik during the campaign, and had even passed confidential campaign information to him, with the understanding that the documents would ultimately arrive in the hands of oligarchs close to the Kremlin.

One of the great disappointments of the Mueller Report is that it fails to provide narrative closure after building so much anticipation for the Kilimnik story line. Mueller did not fully explain why Manafort’s relationship with his Ukraine-based adviser so bothered his prosecutors. Why had Manafort passed along the documents? And what did the oligarchs want with them?

The committee fills in the gaps somewhat. It reports that Manafort and Kilimnik talked almost daily during the campaign. They communicated through encrypted technologies set to automatically erase their correspondence; they spoke using code words and shared access to an email account. It’s worth pausing on these facts: The chairman of the Trump campaign was in daily contact with a Russian agent, constantly sharing confidential information with him. That alone makes for one of the worst scandals in American political history.

The significant revelation of the document is that Kilimnik was likely a participant in the Kremlin scheme to hack and leak Clinton campaign emails. Furthermore, Kilimnik kept in close contact with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a former client of Manafort’s. The report also indicates that Deripaska was connected to his government’s hacking efforts. This fact is especially suggestive: Deripaska had accused Manafort of stealing money from him, and Manafort hoped to repair his relationship with the oligarch. Was Manafort passing information to him, through Kilimnik, for the sake of currying favor with an old patron?

As maddeningly elliptical as this section of the report may be—and much of it is redacted—it still makes one wonder why Mueller would cut a deal with an established prevaricator like Manafort before pursuing his investigation of Kilimnik to more concrete conclusions.

When Manafort—with a pardon dangling in front of him—brazenly lied to prosecutors, he helped save Trump from having to confront this damning story. He wasn’t the only Trump associate to obstruct justice. (The committee has referred five Trump aides and supporters to the Justice Department for possibly providing false testimony.) By undermining investigators, Trump’s cronies rendered Mueller’s report a hash lacking a firm conclusion. They helped detonate the charge of collusion, letting it fizzle well ahead of the 2020 election.

Just to reiterate: Trump’s campaign chairman was working hand in glove with a Russian agent who was involved with the Russian interference plot, giving him campaign details, including polling data. The only possible reason for that was to help them with targeting. If that’s not collusion then nothing is. And yet Bill Barr is actually out there saying the FBI had no good reason to investigate! It’s insane.

Mueller’s team apparently didn’t know about some of this:

Andrew Weissmann, one of the lead prosecutors on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and the architect of the case against Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, said there is “definitely new information” in the final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on 2016 Russian interference released Tuesday.

It underscores the degree to which the 996-page report goes further than the Mueller investigation in some of its findings, as well as the explosive nature of some of the revelations about Manafort and other top Trump campaign officials.

 The bipartisan Senate report describes Manafort’s right-hand man Konstantin Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer. “That is much further than he was described publicly by the special counsel’s office,” Weissmann points out.

The committee, like Mueller, found that Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates passed sensitive internal campaign data and strategy to Kilimnik, but it could not determine with whom Kilimnik went on to share it or why he shared it.

The report also found that there was some evidence to suggest that Kilimnik was involved in the Russian operation to hack and leak Democratic emails — which Weissmann described as “substantial new information.”

Mueller obviously severely restricted the scope of the investigation, following Rod Rosenstein’s instructions to the letter and rushing to a conclusion in order not to be accused of being a fishing expedition. (I’ve always thought they were fighting the last war, worrying about what the Starr investigation turned into.) They were accused of being a partisan witch hunt and a hoax anyway, so I don’t know what that bought them. When Bill Barr took over, they were done.

In the end the sad truth is that the Mueller investigation actually became part of the cover-up.

And so is every Republican who had access to this information and failed to convict Trump when they had the chance. They knew what he was. And they knew he did it all over again with Ukraine. And they backed him to the hilt.