Month: August 2020

As I have been discussing here, Michelle Goldberg at the NY Times makes the case for accountability for the GOP and Trump assault on government in the event we get the chance to rescue our democracy this November. She takes a look at some of the ideas that are percolating in Democratic and activist circles:

[A] Biden victory is far from assured, and if he loses, there may be no stopping this country’s slide into a permanent state of oligarchic misrule. But right now, while there’s still hope of cauterizing Trumpism, ideas about post-Trump accountability are percolating in Democratic and activist circles.

Last year Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, of California, said that she believed the Justice Department would have no choice but to pursue criminal charges against Trump for the instances of apparent obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller report. In January, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, called for a Justice Department task force “to investigate violations by Trump administration officials of federal bribery laws, insider trading laws and other anti-corruption and public integrity laws.” The House is discussing post-Trump reforms on issues including abuse of the pardon power, foreign election interference and the independence of inspectors general.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party, recently released a report titled, “How a Future President Can Hold the Trump Administration Accountable.” Protect Democracy, a legal group founded by Ian Bassin, Obama’s former associate White House counsel, also has started to think about what accountability processes should look like, drawing on the experience of countries around the world that have transitioned to democracy from authoritarianism.

“We have just been through a colossal test case in how you corrupt and incapacitate a great democracy,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. “And failing to learn those lessons is a disservice to that democracy.”

Whitehouse was one of the Democrats who, in 2009, called for some sort of Truth Commission to examine the legacy of the last Republican to wreck the country. George W. Bush’s presidency left America “deeply in debt, bleeding jobs overseas, our financial institutions rotten and weakened, an economy in free fall,” Whitehouse said then. His administration took the country to war based on lies and authorized torture. There was a “systematic effort to twist policy to suit political ends; to substitute ideology for science, fact, and law; and to misuse instruments of power.”

“Disclosure and discussion,” the senator said in 2009, would be the difference between this history serving as an instructive lesson or “a blueprint for those darker forces to return and someday do it all over again.”

But once President Barack Obama came into office, his team didn’t want to look back. Ben Rhodes, formerly a senior Obama adviser, told me that the team feared it would have been “incredibly disruptive,” amid an all-consuming financial meltdown, “to launch investigations and prosecutions of your predecessor.” There was the problem of precedent: It can be a sign of democratic breakdown when a new government goes after officials from the old one. Further, said Rhodes, “high-ranking people who were very busy with two wars and a financial crisis” didn’t have the bandwidth to navigate the political complexities of a process that would look, to Republicans, like partisan vengeance.

The Obama administration’s logic then — like Biden’s today — made a certain amount of sense. But it’s clear, 11 years later, that those decisions had a cost. The “lack of accountability that people felt around the financial crisis and around torture didn’t go away,” said Rhodes. “It metastasized.” A generation of Republicans learned that there was no price for flouting the rules.

This time, Rhodes believes some sort of commission is warranted. “If you look at other countries, it’s important that the process be constructed in a way that doesn’t feel politically motivated, that doesn’t feel like revenge,” he said. It should be, he said, a “safe space for people to come forward and share what they know about what happened.”

As Rhodes suggests, any post-Trump rebuilding requires learning as much as possible about the president’s many misdeeds. Right now, we don’t know what we don’t know — for every scandal that a whistle-blower or journalist has brought to the public’s attention, there are likely many more that are still secret.

The administration’s failure to contain the coronavirus — exacerbated, according to reporting in Vanity Fair, by Trump’s hostile indifference to hard-hit blue states — deserves something akin to a 9/11 commission. So does the wholesale corruption of American diplomacy, only a small part of which was addressed by impeachment. Just last month, The New York Times reported that Trump instructed America’s ambassador to Britain to press the British government to hold the British Open golf tournament at Trump Turnberry, the president’s money-losing golf resort in Scotland. But we have little visibility into how fully American foreign policy has been perverted to serve Trump’s personal interests.

This piece by Olivia Nuzzi in New York has an expose of the Trump campaign. It’s delicious.

An excerpt:

It was a sign of impending doom, to some, when earlier this summer Parscale began coming in more often just as the target on his back swelled to carnival proportions. The polls? Trump trailed his almost-invisible challenger by double digits nationally and by a considerable margin in most battleground states. The messaging? Well, you try to “spin” six months in which 160,000 Americans died and at least 5 million more were infected by a virus you first said wouldn’t be much to worry about. Six months in which your best case for reelection — the greatest economy in the world — was destroyed too. The offense? Trump couldn’t even settle on a nickname for Joe Biden. Was he “Sleepy Joe,” or “Creepy Joe,” or “Beijing Biden”? That tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized — which followed weeks of massive hype — preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died. Meanwhile, nationwide, there was civil unrest that Trump, whose political career had begun with a media tour to promote a racist conspiracy theory called birtherism, was unfit to handle. Yet there was an attitude, naïve and cocky, that led Parscale to compare the campaign to the Death Star, ready to fire but with no apparent idea where to aim. What was next? Locusts? How could the circumstances be any worse? The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic — a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced.

Even Trump was finding it more difficult to believe the fiction that everything was going great, and easier and easier to see the nihilistic wisdom of open warfare with the Postal Service in a way that might both cut Democrats’ likely vote-by-mail margins and delegitimize the election more generally. His closest advisers were now telling him that the bad numbers and bad reviews weren’t the fruits of Fake News or a deep-state hoax but a genuine reflection of what could happen in November. Though it took some time for him to accept it. The president recently asked a second senior White House official to review Biden’s performance after watching him speak. “I said, ‘I think if we lose to this guy, we’re really pathetic,’ ” the official told me. “The president said to me, ‘I’m not losing to Joe Biden.’ I said, ‘You’re losing to Joe Biden.’ ”The campaign was spending all this money on silly things. Brad’s businesses kept making money.

It was July before he “saw for the first time” that he could be defeated, according to the official. And he didn’t blame himself. He blamed a cruel world, a crueler media, and the Death Star’s failure to defend him from both. “They thought they were running one campaign: We’re on cruise control for the president who gave us the greatest economy of all time, and all the messaging would flow from there. Which socialist are we running against? Bop, bop, bop. And everything changed, and they didn’t change,” the senior White House official said. “The president started to hate the ads. He hated ‘Beijing Biden’ — he didn’t come up with that name.”

It goes on …

Imagine the self-delusion that had Trump believing that despite the fact he never cracked a 45% approval rating, was the most scandal-ridden president in history, the third one impeached, and without even one piece of notable legislation or achievement that required more than rubber-stamping the Federalist Society court packing plan, he would coast to an easy re-election. With or without the pandemic, he was in trouble.

He still is. These are from this morning:

This came through my email today and it all sounds very sensible to me so I thought I’d pass it along:

I wanted to give a bit more context on what’s going on around the country with election administration and what folks can do in the coming weeks and months to ensure every eligible Americans’ vote will be counted. The bottom-line is that the story about USPS doesn’t change the key goals that we have in the next few months. Ironically, it does create greater public awareness and urgency around many of these pieces, which can actually be helpful.

As it has become clear that Americans will need to vote this November while still in the midst of a pandemic, there have been several interconnected goals:

• Maximize Mail Ballots – Through policy action, administrative changes, and civic engagement, ensure as many Americans as possible are teed up to receive mail ballots to minimize burden on in-person voting.
• Protect Safe In-Person Options – Sufficient locations, PPE, compliance with social distancing will all require intentionality by local administrators and plenty of available poll workers.
• Get Votes Cast as Early As Voters Can – Early mail return and attempts to vote in-person give us plenty of time to correct any issues and ensure those ballots are accurately counted.

The vast majority of state and local election officials (including many in both parties) are doing everything they can to make this election go smoothly, but their offices are underfunded even as they are implementing an historic number of election administration changes in record time. 21 states have expanded access to vote-by-mail for November (NY, notably, has not yet taken action but presumably will). Against this backdrop, we have some risks:

• Late Voter Registration / Vote-by-Mail Forms – Historically, many Americans wait until deadlines to update their voter registration or request mail ballots. In primaries so far, later applications have been fulfilled late and had much lower turnout rates and more challenges voting.
• Insufficient Poll Workers – Election officials report longtime poll workers are declining to work the election this year due to COVID risk. If we don’t replace these workers, polling places will either be closed in advance due to shortfalls or not open on Election Day itself or face long lines to being short staffed.
• Mail Delays – While USPS is typically great and takes election mail seriously, even in states with long histories of VBM, local organizers usually start telling voters to switch to alternatives to mail to return their ballots just to be safe – walk to a dropbox, take to a polling location, etc.

Fortunately, there are things we can do as individuals and as organizations

Individuals

• Request a mail ballot using http://www.vote-absentee.com/ – one step on this tool is confirming your voter registration is up-to-date
• If you’re at low risk of COVID-19 due to age and health factors, I recommend signing up to work the elections using PowerThePolls.org
• Ensuring your family, friends, and colleagues also know about Vote-Absentee.com and PowerThePolls.org by emailing, texting, sharing on social media, etc.
• Make your plan to return your ballot via drop box, at an early vote location, or at your elections office.

Organizations

• Vote-Absentee.com – BallotReady provides the tech powering http://www.vote-absentee.com/ – via The Movement Co-operative, America Votes, or State Voices, I think most progressive organizations should be able to leverage this tech to have an instance of this tool that lives on your own site. Getting the tool live and starting promotion ASAP for folks to sign up for mail ballots should be top priority
• PowerThePolls.org Partnerships – Your org can help sign up election workers and get analytics and data back. Partnership details here
• Save the dates of key activations:
  • Sept 1 – National Poll Worker Recruitment Day – Organized by the US Election Assistance Commission, Power the Polls, and others, this event will attempt to recruit as many people as possible to ensure that all million poll worker positions in the US are filled this year.
  • Sept 22 – National Voter Registration Day – A great excuse to remind everyone to update their voter registration information. Any organization can sign up to be a partner here. Historically, over 4,000 community orgs, companies, election administrators celebrate.
  • Oct 9 – Kentucky’s Online Mail Ballot Request Portal Closes – This is the first of the official deadlines to request a mail ballot. That also makes it a helpful time to have mail ballot request pushes wrap and pivot to promotion of in-person early voting options. Kentucky has set this date to ensure that election officials
  • Oct 24 – Vote Early Day – A new event planned for the first time for 2020. While plans started before COVID, this event is more critical than we could have known. To be ready, folks should be encouraged to request mail ballots well in advance, but October 24th is after all presidential debates and should be a good time to chase all voters to return ballots or go to an in-person early vote location.

Here’s the good news – over 53 million Americans are already signed up to receive mail ballots, either due to state policy of mailing ballots to all voters or due to opting in. States like Michigan and Pennsylvania have created online portals to request mail ballots.

I’ve been voting by mail for years in California. This year I’ll be filling in my ballot and dropping it off at a vote center the day after I receive it. Everyone should think through what they’re going to do to ensure their ballot arrives in time and gets counted. It’s ridiculous that we have to worry about this but we do.

If you even wondered what Trump was talking about when he said, “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about,” this scary report from CBS may explain it:

The power of the president is enormous – and this president is not bashful in describing powers that go well beyond simple declarations. 

In April, when discussing guidelines to be issued to governors about reopening states during the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump said, “When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be – it’s total.”

There are, it’s true, some restraints on most presidential authority, but those might not apply to all the president’s powers.

As Mr. Trump stated in March, “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.”

We can’t know for sure, but what the president appears to have been referring to are his presidential emergency action documents, often referred to as PEADs.

“Even though I’ve had security clearances for the better part of 50 years and been in and out of national security matters during that half-century, I had never heard of these ‘secret powers,'” said former Senator Gary Hart.

“Sunday Morning” special contributor Ted Koppel asked, “Do you know what they are, now that you’ve heard of them?”

“Only vaguely, due to research done at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School,” Hart said. “What these secret powers are, apparently, based on the research, is suspension of the Constitution, basically. And that’s what’s worrying, particularly on the eve of a national election.”

The Brennan Center research that Senator Hart referred to has been spearheaded by Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of its national security program, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

“These are essentially presidential orders that are drafted in anticipation of a range of hypothetical, worst-case scenarios,” Goitein said.

Koppel asked, “Several times during his administration, President Trump has made allusions to secret powers that he has that we don’t know about. Is he making that up?”

“Well, not exactly,” Goitein replied. “And what’s alarming about that is that no one really knows what the limits of those claimed authorities might be, because they are often developed and kept in secret.”

Goitein says what little we do know about PEADs comes from references to them in other documents, some of which are now declassified.

“They originated in the Eisenhower administration as part of an effort to try to plan for a potential Soviet nuclear attack,” Goitein said. “But since then, they’ve expanded to address other types of emergencies as well. No presidential emergency action document has even been released, or even leaked. Not even Congress has access to them, which is really pretty extraordinary when you consider that even the most highly-classified covert military and intelligence operations have to be reported to at least eight Members of Congress, the ‘Gang of Eight.'”

“You’re saying they are not consulting with Congress?” Koppel asked.

“Exactly,” said Goitein. “Congress is not aware of these documents, and from public sources we know that at least in the past these documents have purported to do things that are not permitted by the Constitution – things like martial law and the suspension of habeas corpus and the roundup and detention of people not suspected of any crime.”

Hart said, “The reason these documents are secret is, for 11 administrations, people in power did not want to frighten the American people, or to demonstrate what might happen to their constitutional rights and liberties.

“Every administration, including Democratic administrations, has revised and updated these powers. I started contacting friends of mine, of both parties, who had been in senior positions, and I got two responses, or one response which is, ‘I’ve never heard of these powers’ (and these are people in senior cabinet positions), or, I got no response at all. And it was the no-response-at-all from people I knew that began to worry me. Because there not only is secrecy around these powers, there is mystery around the secrecy.”

“I think I know as much about the PEADs as any other American citizen, which is almost nothing at all,” said David Cole, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union – and he is concerned about the vast array of presidential emergency powers that we do know about.

Under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 alone, the president can declare a national emergency just by signing a proclamation.

Cole said, “We’ve got a president who, in his first week in office, essentially declared an emergency to ban Muslims from coming into the country. More recently, [he] declared a widely understood to be a fake emergency in order to build a border wall when Congress told him they would not give him the funds to create a border wall.  

“And most recently, [he] has declared that he may need to delay the election, which would be an emergency authority that doesn’t even exist. So, I think you have to be very concerned.”

Which brings us back to those mysterious Presidential Emergency Action Documents:

Get ready:

John Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. While serving at the Justice Department after 9/11, Yoo drafted the memo that justified the use of “enhanced interrogation” of terrorism suspects.

Yoo was asked by Koppel, “Just to reassure our viewers a little bit, John, you’ve seen these PEADs?”

“I am not allowed to say whether I have or not,” he laughed.

“Let me put it this way: You were at the Justice Department. Presumably the Justice Department would’ve had to deal with these PEADs if a president wanted to implement one?”

“Yes, that’s fair to say,” Yoo replied. “The Justice Department and the office I worked in would review the legality of the PEADs because they would draw on presidential powers and Congressional powers delegated to them.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, Yoo was at the White House discussing executive power with President Trump.

“‘Cause you never know what the emergency is gonna be,” said Yoo. “So, these PEADs and similar contingency planning documents, when we look back historically at them, sometimes they seem comic.”

“The notion that there are executive powers based on something that has never been vetted by Congress, giving the president almost limitless powers to do what he needs to do in the event of a crisis, that’s not funny to me; that’s scary,” Koppel said.

“Oh, forgive me. I don’t mean this whole question is comic,” Yoo said. “And you are right, Ted.  There’s dangers to that, and we’ve seen in our history where presidents have gone too far. I guess there’s a balance, and I guess the founders, they balanced in favor of giving the president that kind of ability to face emergencies, even understanding that a badly-intentioned president might abuse those powers.”

Goitein said, “These PEADs undergo periodic revision. And we know that the Department of Justice is in the middle of one of these periodic reviews and revisions. So, we have to imagine what the Trump administration might be doing with these documents and what authorities this administration might be trying to give itself.”

Yoo said, “That’s why the framers created the presidency, was because it could act quickly. I would want President Obama or President Biden to have the power to respond quickly to a hurricane or a terrorist attack, just as I would want President Trump to.”

“That’s fairly benign, John,” said Koppel. “But what if what the president was planning to do was the suspension of habeas corpus? How would you feel about it then?”

“I’d be the first to admit that, in emergencies, the executive branch can make mistakes, and that’s sometimes the price of swift action,” Yoo replied. “Congress is more likely to get things right. The founders thought that. But Congress is too large and too slow to act decisively.”

Having said that, Yoo would be comfortable giving a few select Members of Congress classified access to the secret PEADs.

Gary Hart doesn’t think that goes far enough: “I want them public, because they affect the freedom and liberty and rights of every American citizen,” he said. “I can’t say it any better. This is a blueprint for dictatorship. Now, I think the more attention it gets, the less likely those in power are going to use them.”

Koppel said, “We have so much publicity, Senator Hart, we have so many different voices being raised in anger, in outrage, in fury, I’m not sure what a few more voices raising an issue like this, what impact that’s going to have.”

Hart replied, “This goes to the core of our country and our founding. And if there is what amounts to the capability to suspend our Constitution, that’s not just another issue. That’s serious. Keep in mind, the current, incumbent president has declared seven national emergencies. And he has stated repeatedly that he has more power than most people know about.”

“And you find that frightening?” asked Koppel.

“I will not reverse the question,” Hart replied.

There are plenty of people like John Yo propping up Donald Trump. In fact, the entire Republican establishment is doing it. We can’t expect them to wave him off if he decides to declare an emergency either before or after the election.

Trump brags all the time that he’s accomplished more than any president in history which is, of course, so ridiculous it’s not even worth talking about. But one thing he can’t boast of is legislative or foreign policy achievements. The greatest deal-maker the world has never known can’t seem to make a deal.

So, he’s going to try to stage a big “statesman” moment before the election. And guess who he’s chosen to stage it with. You can’t make this stuff up…

President Donald Trump has told aides he’d like to hold an in-person meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the November election, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

Administration officials have explored various times and locations for another Trump-Putin summit, including potentially next month in New York, these people said.

The goal of a summit would be for the two leaders to announce progress towards a new nuclear arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia, the people familiar with the discussions said. One option under consideration is for the two leaders to sign a blueprint for a way forward in negotiations on extending New START, a nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia that expires next year, three of the people familiar with the discussions said.

They said Trump sees a summit as an opportunity to be presidential and demonstrate he’s able to negotiate agreements.

“He wants it to show his deal-maker abilities,” one of them said. “It’s just a big stage.”

I could be wrong but I don’t think palling around with Putin will give Trump quite the boost he thinks it will. It just reminds everyone that this guy seems to be the favorite of the Russian president for some unknown reason, and that Trump has embarrassed the country on the international stage over and over again.

Candidate Donald Trump four years ago told Republican convention delegates and the world, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But the inveterate con man always “projects his own sins and crimes onto others,” writes his former personal attorney Michael Cohen. Trump meant “fix” the criminal sense. It is what he is trying to do to the fall election right before our eyes.

The acting president began his administration by trying to fix reporting on the size of his inauguration crowd. Now he is trying to fix the U.S. Postal Service so it cannot serve the public during an election in a pandemic. Naturally, he was lying when he said “I alone.” Like Special Guest Villains on TV’s “Batman,” he surrounds himself with dopey henchmen. As president, he has almost a political party’s worth. Ron Brownstein wrote last week, Trump is “waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage” — the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and more. He has installed henchmen everywhere.

Donald Trump is a bad American and a worse president. Everything with him is a scam. He, even more then the party he leads, does not believe in public service. The Post Office he is trying to destroy was conceived from an egalitarian impulse as as a public service, a way to bind together “every far-flung, culturally disparate settlement within the early republic,” writes Eric Levitz:

At that time, Western European states ran their postal services as revenue-generating enterprises, and therefore denied mail delivery to communities that could not be served at a profit. America’s post office, by contrast, was conceived as a “service to the public and to national unification,” and thus provided mail to Americans in remote, rural areas as an entitlement. Over the ensuing centuries, the agency would become a vital source of middle-class employment — particularly for African-Americans and other marginalized groups locked out of remunerative roles in the private labor market — while remaining one of the few overwhelmingly popular public institutions in the United States.

The demographic headwinds Republicans face and the legal threats facing Trump upon leaving office have surfaced the party’s royalist underpinnings. Small-d democratic pretexts are falling away as Republicans express “open hostility toward popular sovereignty.” They are no longer trying to hide efforts to suppress the vote and preserve minority rule.

Donald Trump expresses the movement’s contempt for democracy in unusually forthright and vulgar terms. But Mitch McConnell has argued that “voting is a privilege” from the floor of the U.S. Senate, and Republicans in statehouses across the country have unabashedly endorsed the principle that the votes of Democratic regions should count for less than those of Republican ones. For all the American right’s populist affectations, none of its stratagems for targeted voter suppression induce much cognitive dissonance: The notion that the preservation of natural hierarchies (whether dictated by God or market forces) takes precedence over democracy is deeply rooted in the white Evangelical and libertarian intellectual traditions.

Trump’s henchmen, well-tailored and not, will leap to cover his backside and maintain a social order that is anything but egalitarian. It is why Black Lives Matter is threatening enough that they would deploy troops, tear gas, and agent provocateurs.

There are non-election-related reasons, Levitz suggests, for why Trump’s postmaster general would be undercutting the agency he was appointed to run. Royalists’ natural antipathy to any government service that subordinates profit to serving commoners and providing them upward mobility, for example.

But the goals of Trump and his henchmen are by now fundamentally at odds with the espoused goals of the original American project, however imperfectly conceived. We are in another revolutionary fight for freedom, this time to defeat the zombie return of rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry supported by willing if not gullible henchmen-subjects. Democrats had best treat it as such.

Levitz concludes:

At the time of its creation, the post office embodied the American republic’s progressive potential. It was a force of national unification and democratization that testified to the government’s capacity to expedite and guide economic development with an eye towards the citizenry’s collective benefit. But our settler-colonial society harbored other potentialities. And 244 years into the American experiment, the forces of reaction have brought us to a place where the U.S. Postal Service threatens to deliver democratic decline — if not disunion. In the days and weeks ahead, Democrats in Congress, and small-d democrats nationwide, must defend the USPS as if our democracy depends on it.

When George W. Bush ran for president, Molly Ivins warned readers not to let “Shrub” and his gang of vigilantes anywhere near Washington, D.C. He would do to the country what he did to Texas. Trump and his henchmen are doing to it what he did to his casinos in Atlantic City.

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I don’t know what they’ve decided Harris will be doing if the Democrats win the White House but I think this would be something she’d be quite adept at heading up.

I enjoyed this from the Jewish site Kvelling about Kamala Harris and her Jewish in-laws. It was written when she started her presidential campaign but they re-upped it this week:

Apparently, Kamala Harris, Democratic presidential candidate and stepmother (or rather, step-mamaleh) to two Jewish children, has a hidden talent: She’s great — like, really great — at imitating her Jewish mother-in-law.

Seriously, it is both hilarious and uncanny!

First off, when author Cleo Wade asks Harris whether her Jewish in-laws still live in New Jersey, Harris replies, hilariously, “They are in California now, but New Jersey is very much in them.”

Then, Harris says, the first time she met Brooklyn native Barbara Emhoff, her future mother-in-law put her face in her hands and exclaimed, “Oh, look at you! You’re prettier than you are on television!”

And then, she calls for her husband: “Mike, look at her!”

Harris’s imitation is spot-on, as it comes complete with adorable gesticulations and a loud Brooklyn accent. We love it.

In a recent interview, the couple made roast chicken together (Kamala once told NowThis about her husband: “He is funny. He is kind. He is patient. He loves my cooking. He’s just a really great guy.”). After they’re done, they proudly lift their chicken up in the air and high five.

Love the high-five over the chicken…

Update:

Here’s another one. I like to cook Indian too so this is fun for me:

The question that will probably never be answered:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has sent a bipartisan letter to the Justice Department asking federal prosecutors to investigate Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump confidante, for potentially lying to lawmakers during its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The Times, was signed by the panel’s then-chairman, Republican Sen. Richard M. Burr, and its ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner.

It also raised concerns about testimony provided by family members and confidants of President Trump that appeared to contradict information provided by a former deputy campaign chairman to Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Those it identified as providing such conflicting testimony were the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks.

The letter, which has not before been made public, was sent July 19, 2019, to Deborah Curtis, a top prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. It is not clear what action the Justice Department has taken on the referral. Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Oh, it’s clear. They’ve taken no action whatsoever. Trumpie wouldn’t like it, not one bit.

“As you are aware, the Committee is conducting an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election,” the letter states. “As part of that inquiry, and as a result of witness interviews and document production, we now have reason to believe that the following individuals may have committed a criminal act.”

The letter then names Bannon, the chief executive of the 2016 Trump campaign and later a top White House strategist, and two other men — Erik Prince, a private security contractor, and Sam Clovis, who served as co-chairman of Trump’s campaign.

Criminal referrals from Capitol Hill have been somewhat common since Trump took office in 2017. But this one is rare because it involves the bipartisan leaders of a Senate panel that conducted its own probe without devolving into the partisan bickering that consumed its counterpart in the House of Representatives.

Disclosure of the letter comes as the Senate Intelligence Committee is close to releasing its final report on the panel’s own investigation into Russian election meddling.

Volatile days and weeks can make any investor stop and think. See how to weather the market’s ups and downs.

“The Committee will not discuss referrals,” said a spokesman for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the acting chairman of the committee. “And those who in order to score cheap political points are speculating on or claim to know the identities of those referred are committing a grotesque injustice.”

Rubio took over the chairmanship after Burr stepped down amid an investigation into insider trading ahead of the pandemic.

A spokeswoman for Warner declined to comment.

According to the letter, the committee believed Bannon may have lied about his interactions with Erik Prince, a private security contractor; Rick Gerson, a hedge fund manager; and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian sovereign fund.

All were involved in closely scrutinized meetings in the Seychelles before Trump’s inauguration.

The committee also believed Prince, best known as the founder of the former mercenary company Blackwater and the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, may have lied about his interactions with Dmitriev.

No charges were filed in connection with the meetings. But investigators suspected that the men may have been seeking to arrange a clandestine back-channel between the incoming Trump administration and Moscow. It’s unclear from the committee’s letter what Bannon and Prince might have lied about, but he and Prince have told conflicting stories about the Seychelles meeting.

Prince said he returned to the United States and updated Bannon about his conversations; Bannon said that never happened, according to the special counsel’s office.

“It’s impossible to respond to something I’ve never heard about before,” said William Burck, a lawyer for Bannon. Burck said he never heard from the U.S. attorney’s office about his client.

Matthew L. Schwartz, a lawyer for Prince, defended his client’s cooperation with Capitol Hill and Mueller’s office.

“There is nothing new for the Department of Justice to consider, nor is there any reason to question the Special Counsel’s decision to credit Mr. Prince and rely on him in drafting its report,” he said.

The committee also asked the Justice Department to investigate Sam Clovis, a former co-chairman of the Trump campaign, for possibly lying about his interactions with Peter W. Smith, a Republican donor who led a secret effort to obtain former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

Clovis could not be reached.

In the two page-letter, the committee raised concerns that testimony given to it by the president’s family and advisors contradicted what Rick Gates, the former deputy campaign chairman, told the Special Counsel about when people within the Trump campaign knew about a June 9 meeting at Trump tower with a Russian lawyer.

When the meeting became public, Trump Jr. initially claimed it was about Russian adoptions, but emails written by Trump Jr. that were later made public showed he had agreed to the meeting, but because he had been assured that the Russian lawyer had “official documents and information” that would “incriminate” Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president. The email said the information would “be very useful to your father.”

The music promoter who arranged the meeting, Rob Goldstone, told Trump Jr. that the damaging information on Clinton was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. replied: “If it’s what you say, I love it.”

Gates, a longtime deputy to Manafort, was one of the highest-ranking Trump campaign advisors to “flip” on the president, and he was a foundational witness during the Mueller investigation.

Gates told the special prosecutor that in the days before the June 9, 2016, meeting, Trump Jr. announced at a “regular morning meeting of senior campaign staff and Trump family members that he had a lead on negative information about the Clinton Foundation,” according to the report of the investigation’s findings.

This would be a logical case for the DOJ to follow but I am still betting they won’t do it. But you really do have to wonder why every last one of them lied the way they did.

Why???