Month: September 2020

https://twitter.com/robertjdenault/status/1304083467601313794

Another one gets nailed:

The president’s personal lawyer has been working closely with “an active Russian agent” trying to smear the president’s chief political rival.

That’s the conclusion of the U.S. Treasury Department, which sanctioned on Thursday one of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian allies for interference in the upcoming U.S. elections. Andriy Derkach worked closely with Giuliani—and with the Trump-friendly cable network, OANN—to push accusations of political misconduct against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Derkach, a member of Kyiv’s parliament and son of a former KGB officer, has also been supplying documents to Republicans on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is conducting an election-eve investigation into the Bidens. 

Derkach—described by the Treasury Department as “an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services”—stands accused of orchestrating a “covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives” about the Bidens via “edited audio tapes and other unsupported information,” which launched “corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day.”

This guy has been helping Rudy for quite a while:

As The Daily Beast previously reported, Derkach has been cozying up to team Trump for months—meeting with Giuliani in Kyiv in December of last year to push the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election. (That’s “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services,” Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top aide for Russia policy, told Congress.)

Nevertheless, Trump’s media allies have been quick to run with Derkach’s claims. As The Daily Beast previously reported, John Solomon, the famously Trump-friendly and ethically-compromised former editor at The Hill, published a story mirroring Derkach’s assertions about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Meanwhile, the Russophilic, Trumpy cable channel OANN featured Derkach prominently in its series promising to “negate the Democrat impeachment narrative.”

In May, Derkach released edited audio recordings of what he claimed were compromising conversations between Joe Biden and former Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko. In the tapes, Biden praises Poroshenko for appointing a new prosecutor general and promises to sign a $1 billion loan guarantee in return for anti-corruption efforts. Derkach claimed that investigative journalists had leaked the phone calls to him.

Trumpworld figures framed the tapes as evidence of a long-running Republican conspiracy that Biden tried to force out the old prosecutor general to head off an investigation into the Ukraine gas company Burisma, where his son Hunter sat on the board. But Joe Biden’s campaign called the audio recordings a “nothingburger” and his team has denied that the former vice president’s push with Poroshenko had anything to do with Burisma. (Biden did not mention Burisma or Hunter Biden on the leaked tapes, and he has previously acknowledged that U.S. loans to Ukraine were tied to anti-corruption progress.)

Derkach claims that that he sent his information on the Bidens—which the Treasury Department described as “unsubstantiated”—to Sen. Johnson, who has been heading up a Congressional committee to look into the Burisma affair. But Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) continue to insist that they have “neither sought out, relied upon, nor publicly released anything that could even remotely be considered disinformation.” But election security watchers have for months underscored the possibility that Johnson’s committee is laundering Derkach’s disinformation through intermediaries such as Solomon as a way to create some distance between the investigation and the accused “Russian agent.”

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress have hit back at Johnson’s probe and slammed Derkach’s efforts as election meddling. The Director for the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) agreed, citing Derkach and the leaked tapes back in August as an example of Russian-backed interference in the 2020 elections, part of a “range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment.’’ The NCSC notes that Russia and its President Vladimir Putin are still hostile to Biden over the Obama administration’s past support of an independent Ukraine and its backing of anti-Putin opposition leaders.

Three other individuals linked to a Russian troll factory were sanctioned alongside Derkach on Thursday.  The U.S. Treasury singled out Russians Artem Lifshits, Anton Andreyev, and Darya Aslanova as agents of the Internet Research Agency and its “Russian financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin.” (Known as “Putin’s chef,” the fearsome Prigozhin also controls the shadowy Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin was previously sanctioned over funding the IRA to meddle in the 2018 midterms.) Treasury accused Lifshits, Andreyev and Aslanova of using “cryptocurrency to fund activities in furtherance of their  ongoing malign influence operations around the world.”

Derkach’s sanctions come on the same day that Microsoft revealed it had thwarted Kremlin-backed attempts to hack into a public relations firm with deep ties to the Biden campaign.

No collusion? Really?

The new twist is that they’ve got Republican Senators in on it now. Actually, when you consider the impeachment acquittal, they’ve all been in on it ever since then.

Here’s the man I hear people (who should know better) praising for his bold criticism of the Military Industrial Complex in Woodward’s book, talking about Mohammed bin Salman:

Woodward wrote that Trump called him on January 22 shortly after attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. During the conversation, Woodward pressed the president about Khashoggi’s gruesome murder.

The longtime Washington Post columnist was known for his criticism of the Saudi kingdom. The 59-year-old journalist was assassinated and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, after going there to get paperwork for his upcoming marriage.

The CIA concluded a little over a month later that MBS had personally ordered Khashoggi’s murder.

“The people at the Post are upset about the Khashoggi killing,” Woodward told Trump on January 22, according to his book. “That is one of the most gruesome things. You yourself have said.”

“Yeah, but Iran is killing 36 people a day, so —” Trump began, before Woodward redirected the conversation to Khashoggi’s murder.

Woodward wrote that he continued pressing Trump about MBS’s role in ordering Khashoggi’s killing, which has been widely reported on.

“I saved his a–,” Trump said in 2018, amid the US outcry following Khashoggi’s murder, according to the book. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”

During his January 22 conversation with Woodward, the president said, “Well, I understand what you’re saying, and I’ve gotten involved very much. I know everything about the whole situation.”

Trump added that Saudi Arabia spends billions of dollars on US products. He also stressed MBS’s claim of innocence, despite the fact that US intelligence and other foreign intelligence agencies have concluded otherwise.

“He will always say that he didn’t do it,” Trump said of MBS. “He says that to everybody, and frankly I’m happy that he says that. But he will say that to you, he will say that to Congress, and he will say that to everybody. He’s never said he did it.”ADVERTISINGAds by Teads

“Do you believe that he did it?” Woodward asked.

“No, he says that he didn’t do it,” Trump replied.

“I know, but do you really believe —” Woodward began before Trump cut him off.

“He says very strongly that he didn’t do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time,” the president said. “And you know, they’re in the Middle East. You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion.”

“They wouldn’t last a week if we’re not there, and they know it,” he added.

Trump repeatedly used executive power to block or bypass congressional efforts to cut ties with Riyadh after Khashoggi’s murder.

He vetoed a bipartisan bill to end US support for the Saudis in Yemen. The war in Yemen has fostered a devastating humanitarian crisis, and the Saudi-led coalition has killed civilians using US-made bombs.

The president also bypassed Congress to push through an arms sale of roughly $8 billion to the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, and he later vetoed several resolutions blocking the sale. 

More recently, Trump has moved to circumvent a decades-old arms control pact in order to sell weaponized drones to the Saudis and other countries in the region, which sparked backlash from Democrats and Republicans in Congress. 

Save your praise of this monster’s alleged objection to “forever wars.” The only reason he opposes them is because America pays for them, they were started by his predecessors and we haven’t used overwhelming force to bomb them back into the stone age.

He is not a pacifist. He has no morals. Let’s be serious.

I think he had already decided to just "let it wash over the country." https://t.co/5sJYQ837OY

— digby (@digby56) September 10, 2020

“We don’t want to instill panic. We don’t want to jump up and down and start shouting that we have a problem that is a tremendous problem and scare everybody.” — Trump on Hannity last night

Today:

The Democrats never even mentioned the words LAW & ORDER at their National Convention. That’s where they are coming from. If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, “Friendly Protesters”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2020

A Trump ad that ran all over the country this summer:

I find it hard to believe that anyone’s buying his excuse that he didn’t want to panic anyone. Fearmongering is the Trump brand.

He’s schmaht as a whip:

For weeks leading up to the publication of Bob Woodward’s latest book, West Wing aides were chatting about how damaging some of President Donald Trump’s quotes would be. In the past couple weeks, two senior Trump administration officials told The Daily Beast they were quietly gaming out how to combat or downplay what they’d heard was going to appear in the published work, and attempting to ferret out what other big tidbits would be in there as well.

“It’s been known for a while that this was going to be something that… needed some dealing-with,” one of the officials said. “The anticipation was that it would probably be worse than the other [earlier] Woodward book.”

That sense of impending dread stood in contrast to how the president initially felt about Woodward’s Rage, which deals with Trump’s handling of a range of high-stakes national security issues in addition to the coronavirus pandemic. President Trump was “ecstatic” about the prospect of sitting for interviews with Woodward, according to a White House official, and relished some of his conversations with the famous Washington Post journalist. 

Ultimately, Trump spoke with Woodward 18 times for the book. And at some point along the way, he had a change of heart, becoming convinced that Woodward was using him. Trump then began rage-tweeting the very reporter with whom he was so psyched to go on the record.

“The Bob Woodward book will be a FAKE, as always, just as many of the others have been,” the president tweeted, seemingly out of the blue, last month. Later that month, Trump logged back on to blast the veteran reporter as a “social pretender” who “never has anything good to say.”

It is unclear when, exactly, Trump decided that the Woodward book could prove harmful. According to a person with direct knowledge, Trump privately said before sitting for interviews with Woodward, that one reason he was looking forward to doing so was because of how “fair” the journalist was to him on the issue of “Russian collusion.” However, late last month this source recalled the president complaining unprompted that the then-upcoming Woodward book would be filled with “fake stories,” and that the author was a “big phony.” The source did not recall Trump bringing up any of the stories or quotes he directly gave Woodward.

The damage done by Rage’s release was apparent mere moments after the first stories about the book were published, with the White House scrambling to lay out a defense and struggling to find a coherent one.

In a briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump “never downplayed the virus” despite Wooward quoting Trump saying he had done just that having known in early February that it was deadly and airborne. Less than an hour later, Trump himself admitted that he had indeed downplayed the pandemic, believing keeping people calm outweighed expressing alarm to Americans about the disease. 

“Well, as you said, in order to reduce panic, perhaps that’s so,” Trump said when asked if he downplayed the severity of the pandemic. “The fact is, I’m a cheerleader for this country. I love our country, and I don’t want people to be frightened. I don’t want to create panic, as you say. Certainly I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy.”

… says the guy who has spent every day pf the last four years screeching at the tops of his lungs about caravans and Mexican gangs and terrorists and Antifa and Black people coming to kill all the Real Americans in their beds.

The remarks were part of a string of dizzying moments on Wednesday with White House aides casting blame over who had convinced the president it was a good idea to sit down with Woodward. Among those pinpointed for the decision was Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a close Trump confidant who acknowledged in a brief interview with The Daily Beast that he had recommended to the president that he talk to the longtime Washington Post scribe.

“Yeah. The last book Woodward wrote, Trump said he didn’t know that he had wanted to be interviewed,” Graham recalled. “So I said, well, the guy is a well-known presidential author. And, you know, you got a chance to tell your side of the story. The president agreed and there you go.”

Graham went on to dismiss the idea that Trump was wrong to have downplayed the pandemic publicly. “The idea,” he said, “of the president saying we’re not all going to die seems smart to me.”

Oh Huckleberry. “Cheerleading” and “downplaying” a deadly threat that has left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead wasn’t smart. It really, really wasn’t.

But the public reaction to the Woodward book was yet another example of how the president and his team are often operating on vastly different planes, with Trump supremely confident in his ability to BS his way through any crisis and his aides often left to pick up the mess. 

They aren’t very smart either if they cant see they’re working for an immoral ignoramus by now.

Adam Serwer beat me to it.

I doubt if “you wanted to stop me from letting all these people die you should have done it in february” is the compelling pitch Trump thinks it is.

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) September 10, 2020

That Trump finds validation in a fellow huckster's self-serving decision to hide life-saving information from the American people is very on brand (for both of them). https://t.co/e21oQ8gZfz

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) September 10, 2020

“Calm, no panic!” tweets the guy whose TV commercials stoke fears about caravans of antifa coming to the suburbs to murder your family https://t.co/vGkkDLPlKn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 10, 2020

It’s like having Bart Simpson for president.

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It reads like an indictment. It is an indictment. Of white male supremacy and of Trumpism as its latest point-infinity revision. “Adherents of Trumpism think they are facing a choice,” Ibram X. Kendi begins at The Atlantic, “between white male supremacy and ‘anarchy.’”

Kendi, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, considers the summer of 2020 one for the history books, one that began and ended early. It began in late May with the police killing in Minneapolis, Minnesota of George Floyd. It ended during an anti-police-violence protest in late August in Kenosha, Wisconsin when Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, allegedly shot at multiple person, killing two and maiming one.

The two events bookend a summer of anti-racist protests across the country. The Black Lives Matter movement may be the largest in U.S. history and the greatest threat ever to a prevailing power structure that has existed pretty much everywhere pretty much forever. As many as 26 million took part across 50 states (as well as in other countries). About 93 percent of the protests remained peaceful. The percent that were not gave rise to a right-wing narrative of cities lawless and ablaze from coast to coast, despite the fact that in some cases it was police who initiated the wilding. Police in Kenosha and elsewhere treated armed vigilantes as allies in the defense of white male supremacy, as Kendi sees it and as we all did.

His indictment of white male supremacy is brief, but its concentration makes it that much more potent. Here is a sampling:

White male supremacy has granted the president the power to accost women and “grab ’em by the pussy”; the power to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters; the power to call the first female major-party nominee for president “such a nasty woman” on live television and still win more white women’s votes than she did; the power to say the first Black president was not born in the United States and still have Black men say at his convention that he is “not racist.” White male supremacy has allowed the president to have a foreign power intercede in a presidential election on his behalf, to call neo-Nazis “very fine people,” to urge his supporters to vote twice, to build a monument of lies, to obstruct justice while freeing friends and punishing foes, to describe Americans who died at war as “suckers” and “losers,” and to look away as hundreds of thousands of American COVID-19 victims’ bodies pile up at cemeteries—and not face any consequences.

And Trump does not want his white male supporters facing any consequences either. Like him, they are always innocent. They are always the victims. Even violent strongmen like Vladimir Putin get a pass.

So do heavily armed groups of white male supremacists in the United States. According to a Politico report, the first draft of a recent Department of Homeland Security “State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020” named “White supremacist extremists” as “the most persistent and lethal [terrorist] threat” to the American people. But Trump refuses to acknowledge, let alone protect Americans from, the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time. Instead he incites carnage, and the victims include people of color demonstrating their humanity, and white people demonstrating against racism, like Heather Heyer.

Whiteness comes with the presumption of innocence just as “presumption of guilt is for all practical purposes attached to femininity, to Blackness, to queerness, to Indigenousness, to poverty.” To question that social arrangement, to demand that justice for all mean what it says invites armed insurrection in defense of white male supremacy. The summer just passing suggests it has already begun.

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The Washington Post:

“Rage” includes the first reported excerpts of letters Trump exchanged with Kim, and quotes Trump in his interviews with Woodward using expletives to defend their pen-pal relationship. Even as U.S. intelligence chiefs warn that North Korea is unlikely to ever surrender its nuclear weapons and that Trump’s approach is ineffective, the president told Woodward he is determined to stay the course and dismissively says the CIA has “no idea” how to handle North Korea.

“I met. Big fucking deal,” Trump told Woodward, waving off criticism of his three face-to-face meetings with Kim. “It takes me two days. I met. I gave up nothing.”

Foreign affairs experts say Trump gave up much — including by postponing and then scaling back the U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea that had long angered North Korea, as well as by granting Kim the international stature and legitimacy the North Korean regime has long craved.

And, by the way, he was advised on those decisions by none other than Vladimir Putin.

Trump told Woodward he evaluates Kim and his nuclear arsenal like a real estate target: “It’s really like, you know, somebody that’s in love with a house and they just can’t sell it.”

Kim welcomed Trump’s overtures with over-the-top prose in letters. Kim wrote that he wanted “another historic meeting between myself and Your Excellency reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.” And he said his meetings with Trump were a “precious memory” that underscored how the “deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force.”

In another letter, Kim wrote to Trump, “I feel pleased to have formed good ties with such a powerful and preeminent statesman as Your Excellency.” And in yet another, Kim reflected on “that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honor of that day.”

Trump was taken with Kim’s flattery, Woodward writes, telling the author pridefully that Kim had addressed him as “Excellency.” Trump remarked that he was awestruck meeting Kim for the first time in 2018 in Singapore, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,” and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump also boasted to Woodward that Kim “tells me everything,” including a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed.

Trump did not share his letters to Kim — “Those are so top secret,” the president said — though Woodward writes that Trump sent Kim a copy of the New York Times featuring a picture of the two men on the front page. “Chairman, great picture of you, big time,” Trump wrote on the paper in marker. (Trump falsely boasted to Woodward: “He never smiled before. I’m the only one he smiles with.”)

I’m sure he really loved that graphic account of killing Kim’s uncle. He probably took notes for future reference.

The fact that he kept his own letters private means that they are almost certainly appalling.

And then there’s this:

Trump reflected on his relationships with authoritarian leaders generally, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” he told Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”

That’s not a hard one. All those authoritarians understand that Trump is an infantile, ignorant bully and they know exactly what buttons to push to make him feel like a very big boy. They have had his number from the beginning and he’s given away the store across the board.

On the day all this devastating news came out that makes it very clear that Trump is responsible for many of the 190,000 preventable deaths we’ve had over the past six months, this comes out:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday vigorously promoted the newsthat he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, tweeting at least 17 times in less than a half-hour about his candidacy for the prestigious commendation he has long sought.

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a far-right member of the Norwegian Parliament, revealed his nomination of Trump in a Facebook post citing the “groundbreaking cooperation agreement” the White House announced last month between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Tybring-Gjedde was one of two Norwegian lawmakers who previously submitted Trump’s name for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 after his first summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore — during which Trump and Kim signed a joint agreement committing to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in declared in 2018 that Trump “should win the Nobel Peace Prize” for his efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and his role in talks between Moon and Kim. Trump responded by saying Moon’s suggestion was “very nice” and “very generous.”

Trump claimed last February that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize for his attempts to broker peace between North and South Korea, saying Abe had shown him “the most beautiful five-page letter” recommending Trump’s candidacy. Abe did not comment on whether he had indeed nominated Trump.

Trump celebrated his latest nomination Wednesday morning on Twitter, sharing several congratulatory messages from supporters including conservative radio host Mark Levin, Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs, and Republican congressional candidates Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert — who have both boosted the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also offered praise for the president, telling Fox News that his nomination was a “big deal” and “well-deserved” while misleadingly describing the Israel-UAE agreement as a “peace deal.”

“This president’s created peace around the world, drew down endless wars, and this is a president who is very much deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize,” she said, adding that “you cannot deny what has happened on President Trump’s watch.”

Although Trump was similarly enthusiastic about his nomination, he seemingly thought it to be overdue, retweeting a message asking: “What took so long?”

Can you say delusional?

In Woodward’s book, Jared Kushner is quoted saying that the best way to understand Trump is to read “Alice in Wonderland.”

In the book, Kushner is quoted describing four texts people should “absorb” if they want to truly understand the President. Woodward writes the texts do not paint a flattering picture of someone who is both Kushner’s boss and father-in-law.T

he first text Kushner recommends is a 2018 opinion piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. Noonan’s assessment of Trump: “He’s crazy… and it’s kind of working.” Noonan also calls Trump a “circus act,” and “a living insult.”Woodward writes that Kushner had to know the column was “quite devastating.”

The second text Kushner points to is “Alice in Wonderland.” Kushner is quoted as paraphrasing the Cheshire Cat as a means of understanding Trump: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.”

Woodward writes, “Did Kushner understand how negative this was? Was it possible the best roadmap for the administration was a novel about a young girl who falls through a rabbit hole, and Kushner was willing to acknowledge that Trump’s presidency was on shaky, directionless ground?”

The third text Kushner suggests is from author Chris Whipple’s book “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”Whipple writes, “What seems clear, as of this writing, and almost a year into his presidency, is that Trump will be Trump, no matter his chief of staff.”

The final text Kushner offers is “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter,” by Scott Adams, creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip. According to Adams, Trump employs a technique called “intentional wrongness persuasion,” and “can invent any reality” because “all you will remember is that he provided his reasons, he didn’t apologize, and his opponents called him a liar like they always do.”

It was clear to Woodward that none of this was meant to criticize Trump, just as a way to help understand him.

That said, Woodward was surprised and writes, “when combined, Kushner’s four texts painted President Trump as crazy, aimless, stubborn and manipulative. I could hardly believe anyone would recommend these as ways to understand their father-in-law, much less the president they believed in and served.”

I guess we knew that Jared is just as dumb as Trump. But saying this to Bob Woodward is one of the dumbest things he’s ever done. And I think he’s so dumb he doesn’t know how dumb it is.

This is actually a big deal:

This is good to see. @robkelner is a (still-practicing) very prominent Republican election lawyer. His endorsement of Ben Ginsberg’s column matters a lot and takes courage in this environment. More of this please. https://t.co/iyS6tUSxDo

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) September 9, 2020

Here is that article:

Legions of Republican lawyers have searched in vain over four decades for fraudulent double voting. At long last, they have a blatant example of a major politician urging his supporters to illegally vote twice.

The only hitch is that the candidate is President Trump.

The president, who has been arguing that our elections are “rigged” and “fraudulent,” last week instructed voters to act in a way that would fulfill that prophecy. On Wednesday in North Carolina, he urged supporters to double vote, casting ballots at the polls even if they have already mailed in absentee ballots. A tweet claiming he meant only for people to check that their ballots had been received and counted sounded fine — until Trump renewed his original push on Thursday evening in Pennsylvania and again Friday at a telerally.

The president’s actions — urging his followers to commit an illegal act and seeking to undermine confidence in the credibility of election results — are doubly wrong. They impose an obligation on his campaign and the Republican Party to reevaluate their position in the more than 40 voting cases they’re involved in around the country.

The president’s words make his and the Republican Party’s rhetoric look less like sincere concern — and more like transactional hypocrisy designed to provide an electoral advantage.

And they come as Republicans trying to make their cases in courts must deal with the basic truth that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud.

My emphasis there. Oh my God. 40 years of this stuff and Ginsburg is finally admitting they were full of shit:

These are painful conclusions for me to reach. Before retiring from law practice last month, I spent 38 years in the GOP’s legal trenches. I was part of the 1990s redistricting that ended 40 years of Democratic control and brought 30 years of GOP successes in Congress and state legislatures. I played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount and several dozen Senate, House and state contests. I served as counsel to all three Republican national party committees and represented four of the past six Republican presidential nominees (including, through my law firm, Trump 2020).

Each Election Day since 1984, I’ve been in precincts looking for voting violations, or in Washington helping run the nationwide GOP Election Day operations, overseeing the thousands of Republican lawyers and operatives each election on alert for voting fraud. In every election, Republicans have been in polling places and vote tabulation centers. Republican lawyers in every state have been able to examine mail-in/absentee ballot programs.

The president has said that “the only way we can lose … is if cheating goes on.” He has asserted that mail-in voting is “very dangerous” and that “there is tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality.”

The lack of evidence renders these claims unsustainable. The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged. Absentee ballots use the same process as mail-in ballots — different states use different labels for the same process.

The Trump 2016 campaign, of which I was not a part, could produce no hard evidence of systemic fraud. Trump established a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 to expose all the fraud he maintains permeates our elections. He named the most vociferous hunters of Democratic election fraud to run the commission. It disbanded without finding anything.

The Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database has compiled every instance of any kind of voter fraud it could find since 1982. It contains 1,296 incidents, a minuscule percentage of the votes cast. A study of results in three states where all voters are mailed actual ballots, a practice at the apex of the president’s outrage, found just 372 possible cases of illegal voting of 14.6 million cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections — 0.0025 percent.

The president’s rhetoric has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out. Republicans need to take a hard look before advocating laws that actually do limit the franchise of otherwise qualified voters. Calling elections “fraudulent” and results “rigged” with almost nonexistent evidence is antithetical to being the “rule of law” party.

Many of the GOP’s litigation concerns are meritorious in principle. But the president’s inflammatory language undercuts the claim that Republicans seek merely to uphold statutory safeguards needed to validate the results’ credibility.

Republicans need to rethink their arguments in many of the cases in which they are involved — quickly. Otherwise, they risk harming the fundamental principle of our democracy: that all eligible voters must be allowed to cast their ballots. If that happens, Americans will deservedly render the GOP a minority party for a long, long time.

I’ll admit that this stuns me. Ginsburg has been a top GOP henchman for decades, leading the charge for phony “voter fraud” and helping to create this widespread Republican belief that Democrats have been cheating in elections for years so the GOP could justify measures to suppress their vote.

The GOP lawyers who have fanned out across the country to carry water for Trump may or may not listen to him. If they don’t Ginsburg will make a good witness against them in court. You can bet that after writing this, the Democrats will call him.

This was the golden gate bridge today at around noon. It’s like night up there in the middle of the day from the layer of smoke:

Here’s the sunrise today in LA:

It’s not as bad here as it is in the bay area, but there is white ash all over my garden and we’ve had this weird “overcast” sky for the past couple of days. I’m not smelling smoke but I can see it.

Palm Springs:

Downtown Stockton

It feels like the end of the world …