Month: October 2020

The following isn’t written by some hysterical blogger or a middle-aged Resistance wine-mom. It’s written by Robert Kagan (!) and it’s remarkably clear eyed about what’s really going on.

As American democracy hurtles toward what could be its final crisis, we continue to hope that someone will ultimately rise up to save us, that somehow our institutions will protect us, that people in positions of authority will finally do the right thing. This faith in the resilience of democracy is endearing, but unfortunately all it has done these past four years is blind and paralyze us. Believing that the only problem was President Trump and his authoritarian inclinations, we have looked to those around him — in the White House, in the Justice Department, in Congress and in the courts — to control and contain him, presumably out of some innate love of democracy.

It did not occur to us that men and women with respectable résumés might be just as willing to subvert the democratic system as Trump himself, as if U.S. officials alone were immune from the temptations of power. The consequence of this self-delusion is that we have now almost run out of chances to stop them.

The national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, has set the predicate for charges of foreign interference by overhyping alleged Iranian manipulation before the election. When Ratcliffe finds evidence of Iranian and other foreign interference, as he surely will, Attorney General William P. Barr will call for an investigation. Anyone in the intelligence community who disputes Ratcliffe’s claims will either be silenced or fired. Trump officials are already leaking that FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper might be removed after the election. The claims of Republican state legislatures and the results of the “investigation” into foreign meddling will then come before the Supreme Court, which, with a solid 6-to-3 conservative majority, will put its stamp of legitimacy on the stolen election.AD

We have been told that Trump is too lazy, ignorant and incompetent to pull off this kind of coup. But what of the people who both serve him and benefit from him? We look at people such as Barr and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as engaged in a balancing act, trying to preserve some moral and legal scruples while doing the president’s bidding. That is how we viewed those who came before them, including those former generals who served in the administration: John Kelly, H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis.

This is naive. People enter government out of a blend of conviction and ambition. Few joined the Trump administration out of conviction. To justify their decision, they told themselves, and us, that it was because Trump was dangerous and incompetent that good people had to go in. They would “serve” the nation by protecting us from the man who gave them their job and at whose pleasure they served. We wanted to believe them. We slept better at night knowing that “adults” were in the room. They provided a facade of normalcy and competence, implicitly assuring us with their mere presence that it was safe to go about life as if our democracy was not, in fact, in peril. But it was, of course, and the “adults” did nothing to alert us, much less save us. It took a mid-level official to reveal Trump and his gang’s malfeasance in Ukraine in real time. Had it just been up to the “adults,” and the hundreds of other political appointees, we would never have known.

Now the “adults” have passed from the scene, and our fate is in the hands of Barr and the others — the survivors, for now, in Trump’s “Hunger Games” of loyalty. Some may still want to believe that these individuals are wrestling with their consciences. But it is too late for that, and these people know it. Barr, Ratcliffe, Meadows and others are in too deep. They have probably crossed too many lines by now, and they know what happens if Trump leaves office. In January, they would wake up in Joe Biden’s America, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Minority (or Majority) Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and soon thousands of appointees at the Justice Department, the State Department, the CIA and FBI who served under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton holding the commanding heights of power. No one knows better than Barr how one administration’s alleged sins become the next administration’s criminal investigations.

That leaves the justices of the Supreme Court. We are supposed to believe that a conservative court, particularly Trump’s appointees, will adjudicate the coming election challenges without partisan taint. This is truly the triumph of hope over experience. From Bush v. Gore in 2000 to the recent cases involving ballots in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, justices have cast their decisions along partisan lines with machine-like dependability.

Are we to count on Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, whom the Democrats savaged, to side with them against the man who put him on the court? Kavanaugh’s in a Monday ruling, in which he suggested that counting late-arriving absentee ballots in Wisconsin might “flip the results” of the election, could have been written by Trump himself — as Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, there are no “results” to “flip” until all valid ballots are counted.

As for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, yes, it is theoretically possible that she would break from her Republican colleagues and vote to unseat the man and the party that just put her on the court, that she would put in power the Democrats who did all they could to stop her from achieving her lifelong ambition. But if you can believe that, then you deserve your fate in the new America that awaits us.AD

Let’s be clear about what that America will look like. An administration that steals an election by abusing power must continue abusing that power to keep it. And Trump will have no shortage of excuses to wield power. A stolen election will bring tens of millions into the streets, possibly for weeks and months. The nation will have descended into an extra-constitutional civil conflict, with each side using the tools available to try to prevail.

For Trump, those tools are those of the executive, which the founders entrusted with immense power, from the administration of justice to the defense of the nation by the armed forces. The administration’s opponents, lacking institutional power, will be able to count only on its millions in the streets, and on the democratic consciences of individual judges and justices and federal employees, armed and unarmed, across the country. But consider what they will be asking. They will be counting on federal employees to do the “right thing” by turning against the man whom even the Supreme Court has declared their legitimate president.

Meanwhile, Trump and his minions will purge the federal government of all those deemed disloyal. Barr will open and expand investigations into anyone suspected of conspiring against the president, in 2016, in 2020 and for as long as Trump remains in power. Owners of mainstream media outlets will become targets of investigations by government agencies. Smears against Democratic lawmakers will mount. Trump’s supporters at massive rallies will shout “Lock them up!” And who will come to the rescue of the persecuted? Who in a position of power will have an incentive to reverse the events that kept them in power?

Congressional Republicans will be fighting for their own survival, while Tucker Carlson, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Donald Trump Jr. and others compete to be Trump’s successor in the affections of the masses. Maybe Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the master of glorious but meaningless gestures, will give some more moving speeches.

This may sound like the Sinclair Lewis novel “It Can’t Happen Here.” Perhaps it won’t happen. Maybe Trump and his gang don’t have the skill or steely courage required to pull it off. Perhaps they will just fade away. If so, we will be fortunate, but undeserving. We kept counting on others to save us — our institutions, our political leaders, our courts — but help never arrived. And as we waited for someone, anyone, to do the right thing, we moved closer to the end.

Now all we have left is the people. The voters, for all their failings, may prove more trustworthy than their supposed guardians. They may deliver us by delivering an irrefutable landslide to Biden. Or, failing that, by going out into the streets in an American version of “people power” to foil the plot against their democracy. A republic, if we can save it.

Has the veil finally lifted? I don’t know. But it feels like this latest gambit by Mitch and the Supremes may have finally opened even the staid political establishment’s eyes to what this right wing has become. Better late than never.

I know it’s hard to focus on anything but COVID and the election but there is a lot of other news out there, not the least of which are stories about Trump corruption and criminality that would destroy any other presidency. David Graham of The Atlantic takes the media to task for failing to stick with any of these stories and he’s right. It’s a replay of 2016 in this respect — they are assuming Trump will lose:

You can teach old journalists the occasional new trick, but two? Forget it.

The 2016 election persuaded the press to avoid publicly presuming that Donald Trump will lose and the Democrat will win. The very cautious news coverage about Joe Biden’s chances, despite his formidable advantage in polls, makes this plain.

But even though reporters are loath to say that the president is a serious underdog, they are repeating another 2016 error. Trump is getting off easy for a series of recent scandals, most likely because press outlets have concluded that he is doomed and that coverage is largely pointless. From a radical reorganization of the civil service to sketchy Chinese bank accounts, the president has faced little scrutiny on what should be major topics of concern for voters.

Four years ago, the number of scandals swirling around the Republican nominee was too great for the average reporter, much less the average voter, to track. Yet with the possible exception of the October surprise of the Access Hollywood tape, few of them gained any lasting purchase. Observers who assumed that voters would never accept Trump’s past didn’t reckon with the fact that it would get such short shrift. Meanwhile, in the closing days of the campaign, Hillary Clinton’s emails were extensively covered. In part, that was because many reporters and editors assumed that she would soon be president, and that questions about her term as secretary of state would remain relevant for months or years to come.

Instead, Clinton lost the election—the late-breaking email story may have played a large role in that—and Trump waltzed into office. (The emails quickly moved off front pages, although the president continues to try to make them a topic of conversation.) It became clear within weeks that the same questions about Trump that had been broadly overlooked during the campaign, on his shaky company, for example, and his foreign financial entanglements, would be major issues during his presidency, and indeed, they have been.

In 2020, it’s clear that most of the press is trying to be careful not to count the ballots before they’re cast. That has resulted in more sophisticated horse-race coverage over the closing weeks, even in places where the race doesn’t seem to be particularly close. But as outlets focus on that coverage (as well as the coronavirus pandemic), they are giving insufficient attention to the continued flow of important news coming from the Trump administration.

Last week, for example, Trump issued an executive order that would radically reshape the federal workforce. As The Washington Post explains, the order “strips long-held civil service protections from employees whose work involves policymaking, allowing them to be dismissed with little cause or recourse, much like the political appointees who come and go with each administration.” This sounds dull, but it’s hugely consequential (and, historically, even lethal). Trump has already sought to make the executive branch his wholly owned political subsidiary, and this would extend his control. If you enjoyed the sidelining of Environmental Protection Agency scientists and the extortion of Ukraine via the State Department, you’ll love this.

The order requires agencies to determine which jobs are subject to the new rule by January 19, but as the Post dryly notes, “That’s a day before the next presidential inauguration. An administration under Democratic nominee Joe Biden would be unlikely to allow the changes to proceed.” If Biden doesn’t win, however? It will be a massive reorganization that voters hardly heard about before casting their ballot.

The president’s personal finances continue to be an elephant in the room that, somehow, gets ignored. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that Trump has directed $8.1 million from U.S. taxpayers and from political donors into his own coffers. That’s the latest in a string of astonishing figures turned up by David Fahrenthold and several colleagues, which have gone largely unremarked. The New York Times has produced a series of huge scoops on Trump’s taxes, including the revelation on October 20 that the president possesses a bank account in China and has paid substantially more taxes there than he has in the United States.

Yet despite the dogged reporting from these outlets, these stories have failed to catch much attention elsewhere. During the last presidential debate, Biden challenged Trump to release his tax returns. “First of all, I called my accountants, underwrote it; I’m going to release them as soon as we can. I want to do it,” Trump said.

This is laughable: Trump said this repeatedly during the 2016 race, and he still hasn’t followed through; as usual, he blames the fact that he is under audit, though that is not a legal impediment to their release. (Most likely, he doesn’t want to release them for the same reason he is under audit: Something in there isn’t kosher.) Reporters laughed at his promise, and then moved on. They know it’s nonsense, but who cares? For close watchers, it’s just Trump being Trump (although most people are not regular Trump watchers). Pundits have concluded that nothing will change opinions about the president, and besides, if Trump loses the election, as expected, this will mostly be a dead issue.

But then again, what if he doesn’t? Then the president has more than $400 million in loans, many of them personally guaranteed, hanging over his head in his next term. He has no obvious way to pay them off. If he’s a private citizen, that’s a personal financial catastrophe. If he’s the president, it’s a national-security catastrophe. Would any bank dare crack down on a sitting president? What would it mean if it cut him favors instead?

There are plenty of other examples of scandals that have gotten too little attention, such as Trump’s continued railroading of the Justice Department, his near rejection of disaster-relief funds to California, his attempts to punish blue states for policy choices, and his efforts to convert Voice of America and its siblings into a pro-Trump propaganda network. Even his impeachment has been all but forgotten.

The skimpy coverage isn’t due to the media’s fear of being seen as biased against Trump. Coverage of how the administration botched the coronavirus pandemic has generally been strong and consistent. The disastrous federal response will, however, remain a live story long after the current presidential term ends.

Paradoxically, the press has arguably also been too easy on Biden at times. Trump’s allies overreached with attempted hit jobs on his son Hunter Biden, trying to claim without evidence that Joe Biden was involved in unsavory business schemes. This, along with a fear of overemphasizing the issue, as it did with Clinton’s emails in 2016, has kept the mainstream press far from the story. But as Ross Douthat argues, the business entanglements of a potential first son are not a nonstory, nor are those of Biden’s brother. Biden is plainly not as vigorous as he once was, an issue that has gone largely unexplored. That’s partly due to old-fashioned notions of propriety that have prevented more frank grappling with Trump’s obvious mental unfitness for the presidency, and partly because Trump claimed that Biden was too senile to even run for president, a bar the Democrat easily cleared.

These are real failings by the press, but this is not a question of seeking some false balance: Trump is getting away with more, and receiving less scrutiny, than Biden is. If it is true that he’s getting that pass because the media presume he is an underdog, they are playing a risky game. Glossing over some of Trump’s more dangerous issues on the assumption that he will lose could itself affect the course of the election, and make his winning more likely. It’s happened before.

It is very risky and not just because Trump might win. It’s that by getting away with this stuff, without much scrutiny by the public or the press, means that a good part of this will be swept under the rug and left to be exploited by future politicians.

The level of corruption in this administration has been overwhelming. It’s hard to keep track of it all. But that’s perversely worked for Trump by obscuring the details. In fact, his followers already see him as a victim of an overzealous press because their own media failed to report reality. That could seep into the mainstream if it evolves into a hazy memory of partisan warfare instead of the unprecedented criminal enterprise it was.

And that’s assuming he loses. If he doesn’t, well … we have even bigger problems.

The Washington Post:

Donald Trump Jr. declared on Thursday night that coronavirus deaths had dropped to “almost nothing,” questioning the seriousness of the pandemic on a record-breaking day for new cases in which more than 1,000 Americans died of the virus.

Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump Jr. pointed to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that he suggested show a declining coronavirus death rate.

“I went through the CDC data, because I kept hearing about new infections, but I was like, ‘Why aren’t they talking about deaths?’ ” Trump Jr. said. “Oh, because the number is almost nothing. Because we’ve gotten control of this thing, we understand how it works. They have the therapeutics to be able to deal with this.”

Number one, Junior did NOT “go through the CDC data.” Please. He is less literate than his father and that’s saying something. Also, if he had he would have found that moe than a thousand people died yesterday. Maybe he thinks that’s nothing. But 20,000 to 30,000 preventable deaths a month is monstrous.

Yesterday’s count:

Thank goodness they now understand a little better how to treat the illness so the death rate isn’t what it was in the very beginning. But it is still deadly and with hospitalizations going up the way they are, there are going to be a lot more deaths.

Watch Ingraham’s face. Even she knows he’s completely off the rails:

Jr. claims Coronavirus death numbers are down to “almost nothing” pic.twitter.com/NGMDLYkdsD

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 30, 2020

I don’t know if that breakdown will hold up, of course. If all the GOP voters and independent leaning Republicans are waiting until election day, it will even out somewhat. But if it’s even close to the final it’s hard to see how Trump legitimately wins.

The NY Times reports on what’s happened in Texas:

Texas, a 2020 jump-ball state once considered a layup for Republicans, is shattering turnout records, with the number of early in-person and mail-in ballots now exceeding the total number of votes cast statewide in the 2016 election.

Early-voting turnout has been enormous across the country, spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and one of the most bitterly contested presidential races in history, accelerating a years-in-the-making shift away from Election Day-only voting.

As of Friday morning, more than 83 million votes had been cast, representing more than 60 percent of the total ballots cast four years ago, according to the nonpartisan U.S. Elections Project.

In 11 states, voters have already submitted 80 percent of the ballots cast in those states in 2016, and five of them — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada, along with Texas — are battlegrounds.

Texas, the nation’s second most-populous state, was the second to pass its 2016 threshold. (The first was Hawaii.) The Texas secretary of state’s office reported Friday morning — the last day for early voting in the state — that 9,009,850 people had already voted by mail, dropped ballots in boxes or showed up at polling sites. Four years ago, a record-breaking 8,969,226 Texans voted in the election.

That is amazing. Of course, they’re actually planning to throw out millions of early votes if at all possible so who knows how that works out? I’m very worried about these red states.

We’re starting to get in the final polls. It’s not tightening. If anything it’s ticked up a little bit in the last couple of days:

It is very hard to imagine how anyone could lose a free and fair election with that much of a lead in the polls. But the antediluvian electoral college throws a monkey wrench into that, as we know. And now the vote suppression has moved beyond long lines and Voter ID, to the conservative courts. Anything could happen.

I have written many times about the ongoing vote suppression schemes by the Republican Party and traced the argument that undergirds it all the way back to the founders, one of whom, John Jay, had a favorite maxim: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” Those who believe they “own” the country have wanted to keep the right to vote to themselves from the very beginning and the fight for universal suffrage has never stopped.

Since the civil rights movement finally ended Jim Crow and secured the right to vote for Black citizens throughout the country, the Republican coalition of conservative (mostly) white people who seek to retain their privilege as a higher caste is the faction that seeks to restrict the franchise. It isn’t as easy to do that as it used to be.

As far back as the 1980s, Republicans put together a legal strategy and formed a network of lawyers devoted to suppressing the vote of racial and ethnic minorities as much as possible. They sought to restrict immigration and end birthright citizenship because they believe these people will threaten their “ownership” by voting for the Democratic Party. They went from state to state to try to pass voter ID laws and in recent years they have marshaled the forces of the Department of Justice and the federal judiciary to make voting as difficult as possible.

Much of this has been justified by a supposed need to stop rampant voter fraud, which is nonexistent on any systematic scale. To the extent it happens at all, it’s usually Republicans who profit from it. These are all solutions in search of a problem which only serve one purpose: preventing Democrats, mostly people of color, from voting.

In 2013 when the Supreme Court decided in Shelby v. Holder to gut the Voting Rights Act, ruling that the country “has changed” and Congress should pass new laws to reflect “current conditions,” it was clear that the court under Chief Justice John Roberts was sending a signal to the conservative judiciary that voting rights were back on the agenda, big time.

After all that, it’s a bit much to see establishment Republicans express shock at what’s happening in this election. Politico reports:

“What we have seen this year which is completely unprecedented … is a concerted national Republican effort across the country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it harder for citizens to vote,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns. “There just has been this unrelenting Republican attack on making it easier to vote.”

No kidding.

Nonetheless, I must at least agree that throughout these last few decades of challenges to voting rights, Republicans have always at least upheld the pretense that they were operating in good faith. It was never believable, but the charade of concern about voter fraud or illegal immigrants voting was the tribute o hypocrisy that vice paid to virtue. They acknowledged, however spuriously, that vote suppression for the express purpose of stealing elections was undemocratic.

As with everything else in the Trump era, such adherence to old-fashioned notions of right and wrong are no longer operative. In this election we are seeing a vote suppression effort of unprecedented scale, with no serious attempt to justify it other than an exercise of sheer partisan power.

The Republican standard-bearer has such a big mouth and is so crudely dishonest that they really have little choice in the matter. He openly declared that if he loses it can only be because the election was rigged by the Democrats and he seized upon mail-in voting during the pandemic as the method by which they would do it. Of course he said the same thing in 2016 without even that much explanation, so it’s clear that this is just his all-purpose excuse for any possible defeat. Donald Trump can’t lose, according to him; he can only be cheated out of his win. The effect of this self-serving propaganda has been to make Republicans hold out for Election Day while Democrats have been voting early in large numbers, many of them by mail.

The Republican lawyers and operatives who have fanned out to all the swing states are following Trump’s lead. As Chris Hayes spelled out on MSNBC on Thursday night, they are filing hundreds of lawsuits, challenging voting laws and procedures all over the country to restrict the ability to vote and disqualify legal ballots based upon a variety of contrived rationales.

In one case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh even backed up Donald Trump’s inane demand that the vote count itself must stop on election night so as to avoid the “suspicion of impropriety” if votes counted later should “flip the results,” which is a ridiculous way to frame the legal issue:

Repeat after me: "All votes have never been counted on election night." These graphs show the number of votes that were counted and reported in 2016 after Wednesday morning following E-Day. Even "quick count" states had work to do. pic.twitter.com/3sSpbwNgkF

— Charles Stewart III (@cstewartiii) October 29, 2020

None of this has anything to do with fraud. They can’t possibly know that fraud will have taken place ahead of time. These challenges are solely based upon the assumption that most of these ballots will be votes for Joe Biden and other Democrats. They’re not even trying to hide it.

The Supreme Court has so far kept to the federalist rationale that has always held (with the notable exception of the Bush v Gore decision) that election laws are the purview of the states, with Roberts joining the three liberals (and newly seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett not weighing, in but not recusing herself either.) On the other hand, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, along with Kavanaugh, all appear to be ready to create a federal interest in deciding election cases out of whole cloth.

When Barrett joins post-election cases (as she almost surely will) it is highly likely that the court will vote to throw out massive numbers of ballots that arrive after Election Day — at least if Donald Trump is ahead in the count. Those will number in the tens of thousands, at least.

All this for that unfit reprobate. You’d think Republicans might be willing to sacrifice a few years in the wilderness just to get rid of Trump. But apparently not. Their party seems to be willing to completely delegitimize our democracy on every level on his behalf.

The best hope for saving the country from this disaster is for everyone to get their vote in on or before Election Day and for the media to refrain from naming a winner until the votes are counted. This year everyone will have to be patient and hope that all the legal firepower Republicans throw at us won’t be enough to overcome an insurmountable Biden win. It’s not right that Democrats have to jump through such hoops, particularly in the middle of a lethal pandemic, but the other side is ruthlessly focused on maintaining power by any means necessary and there simply isn’t any other choice.

My Salon column

How many people get to say they saved their country?

https://twitter.com/ericswalwell/status/1322161334696386560?s=20

Close your fingers around the power that’s already yours. Seriously, it’s right there.

NBC has news about Republicans’ October surprise. Some newer, bluer scandal regarding Hunter Biden was supposed to derail Joe Biden’s election. Something to go viral across the internet and light up Fox News chyrons. Documents leaked from son Hunter’s laptop and a secret “intelligence report” or some such. Well, shucks and gol-ly:

The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.

The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen’s profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.

One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.

Aspen is even less substantial than the Trump Foundation. Balding claims a Hong Kong-based tabloid, Apple Daily, commissioned the work.

Balding also promoted the document on podcasts produced by Steve Bannon and The Epoch Times. It flowed across the right-wing web, through Facebook and Twitter and “hyperpartisan and conspiracy sites like ZeroHedge and WorldNetDaily.”

Disinformation researchers told NBC the image of Aspen on the Typhoon Investigations website made them immediately suspicious. His profile photo bore hallmarks of being computer-generated. Aspen’s Facebook page created in August contained pictures of his “new house” (appropriated from TripAdvisor). Typhoon’s logo “was lifted from the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, a digital literacy nonprofit.” Aspen’s Linked-In page claims he worked at Swiss Security Solutions from 2016 to 2020. They’ve never heard of him, he does not appear to exist in Switzerland, and he’s not the first fake account to claim having worked at Swiss Security Solutions, the company finds.

NBC’s Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny add:

Computer-generated faces have become a staple of large-scale disinformation operations in the run-up to the election. In December, Facebook took down a network of fake accounts using computer-created faces tied to The Epoch Times. Facebook removed over 600 accounts tied to the operation, which pushed pro-Trump messages and even served as moderators of some Facebook groups. Stephen Gregory, publisher of the U.S. editions of The Epoch Times, has denied any connection to the accounts.

Last month, Facebook removed another batch of computer-generated profiles originating in China and the Philippines, some of which made anti-Trump posts.

Using a stock photo immediately flags an account as fake. Using an AI-generated image ensures the “person” in question will not appear elsewhere on the internet, i.e., also fake.

Tucker Carlson is posthumorously dropping his story of allegedly damning Hunter Biden documents shipped to him and disappeared by “nefarious plot by Deep State actors,” Daily Beast reports. The documents have been found. Carlson had copies all along. Carlson dropped his Biden story hours after NBC News published its story. Now, says Carlson, he doesn’t want to pile on. That’s “something we don’t want to be involved in.”

Fresh off being punked in the new “Borat” film, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is “still moving down the conservative media food chain, looking for takers” of alleged “damning information” lifted from Hunter Biden’s alleged “laptop from hell,” reports Politico:

“I think we’re seeing a tactic of something like flooding the zone,” said Chris Looft, the senior editor of First Draft, a nonprofit that works to combat disinformation. “And it could be backfiring, in that all of these leads are circulating, but none of them are really getting all the attention that would be required for an outlet like The Wall Street Journal to give them any attention.”

What is receiving attention is yet another obstruction of justice effort by Trump exposed in the New York Times. This time involving Attorney General Bill Barr. Barr (allegedly at Trump’s request) interfered in ongoing federal prosecutions of Turkish nationals tied to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan needed a favor. Trump was eager to oblige a fellow autocrat from a country where he has business ties. “Barr is being very quiet right now, perhaps realizing that Trump is going to lose and he’s going to be hung out to dry. If so, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Digby wrote Thursday.

On top of having no shame, no scruples, and no regard for the rule of law, Trump and his hangers-on have no self-respect.

They say animals can smell fear. Man is an animal. Can you smell it?

Of course he will. How he does it I don’t know, but if he loses this election I know he will. And he’ll still be president for almost three months and he’s populated the government with henchmen and accomplices who are all in.

If I had to guess, I’d wager that he’ll do everything in his power to ensure that people who didn’t for him will be the last to get the COVID vaccine:

State health officials are expressing frustration about a lack of federal financial support as they face orders to prepare to receive and distribute the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine by Nov. 15, even though one is not likely to be approved until later this year. The officials say they don’t have enough money to pay for the enormous and complicated undertaking.

State officials have been planning in earnest in recent weeks to get shots into arms even though no one knows which vaccine will be authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, what special storage and handling may be required and how many doses each state will receive.

Remember who he is:

Watch all the way through. It’s worth it:

vote!
.
.
.
.
.
#2020 #election #vote #biden #trump #kamala #elections #congress #maga #democrats #conservative #aoc #pelosi #liberal #maxinewaters #categoryis #democracy #pence #voguing #vogue #dance #voguedance #ballroom #voguefemme #runway #pride #lgbt #queer #lgbtq #gay pic.twitter.com/QBUwJ7ZXDD

— bellbivdevote (@bellbivdevote) October 22, 2020

Cheers!

Can we really let this go? Is it remotely acceptable to allow Trump and Barr to get away with this?

The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Mr. Berman had traveled to Washington in June 2019 to discuss a particularly delicate case with Attorney General William P. Barr and some of his top aides: a criminal investigation into Halkbank, a state-owned Turkish bank suspected of violating U.S. sanctions law by funneling billions of dollars of gold and cash to Iran.

For months, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey had been pressing President Trump to quash the investigation, which threatened not only the bank but potentially members of Mr. Erdogan’s family and political party. When Mr. Berman sat down with Mr. Barr, he was stunned to be presented with a settlement proposal that would give Mr. Erdogan a key concession.

Mr. Barr pressed Mr. Berman to allow the bank to avoid an indictment by paying a fine and acknowledging some wrongdoing. In addition, the Justice Department would agree to end investigations and criminal cases involving Turkish and bank officials who were allied with Mr. Erdogan and suspected of participating in the sanctions-busting scheme.

Mr. Berman didn’t buy it.

The bank had the right to try to negotiate a settlement. But his prosecutors were still investigating key individuals, including some with ties to Mr. Erdogan, and believed the scheme had helped finance Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

“This is completely wrong,” Mr. Berman later told lawyers in the Justice Department, according to people who were briefed on the proposal and his response. “You don’t grant immunity to individuals unless you are getting something from them — and we wouldn’t be here.”

It was not the first time Mr. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, had fended off attempts by top Justice Department political appointees to disrupt the Halkbank investigation.

Six months earlier, Matthew G. Whitaker, the acting attorney general who ran the department from November 2018 until Mr. Barr arrived in February 2019, rejected a request from Mr. Berman for permission to file criminal charges against the bank, two lawyers involved in the investigation said. Mr. Whitaker blocked the move shortly after Mr. Erdogan repeatedly pressed Mr. Trump in a series of conversations in November and December 2018 to resolve the Halkbank matter.

The president’s apparent eagerness to please Mr. Erdogan has drawn scrutiny for years. So has the scale and intensity of the lobbying effort by Turkey on issues like its demand for the extradition of one of Mr. Erdogan’s political rivals, a Turkish religious leader living in self-imposed exile in the United States. Mr. Erdogan had a big political stake in the outcome, because the case had become a major embarrassment for him in Turkey.

At the White House, Mr. Trump’s handling of the matter became troubling even to some senior officials at the time.

The president was discussing an active criminal case with the authoritarian leader of a nation in which Mr. Trump does business; he reported receiving at least $2.6 million in net income from operations in Turkey from 2015 through 2018, according to tax records obtained by The New York Times.

And Mr. Trump’s sympathetic response to Mr. Erdogan was especially jarring because it involved accusations that the bank had undercut Mr. Trump’s policy of economically isolating Iran, a centerpiece of his Middle East plan.

Former White House officials said they came to fear that the president was open to swaying the criminal justice system to advance a transactional and ill-defined agenda of his own.

“He would interfere in the regular government process to do something for a foreign leader,” John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, said in a recent interview. “In anticipation of what? In anticipation of another favor from that person down the road.”

In the case of Halkbank, it was only after an intense foreign policy clash between Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan over Syria last fall that the United States would proceed to lodge charges against the bank, though not against any additional individuals. Yet the administration’s bitterness over Mr. Berman’s unwillingness to go along with Mr. Barr’s proposal would linger, and ultimately contribute to Mr. Berman’s dismissal.

[…]

This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Turkish and U.S. government officials, lobbyists and lawyers with direct knowledge of the interactions. Representatives for the Turkish government, Halkbank and the White House declined to comment.

Turkey had mounted an elaborate influence campaign in Washington to deal with Halkbank. It predated Mr. Trump’s election but came to encompass a broad cast of players, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor; Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser; and Brian D. Ballard, a lobbyist and fund-raiser for the president.

After senior Turkish government officials lobbied Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Mr. Trump, Mr. Mnuchin pressed the Justice Department not to impose too large a fine on Halkbank because Turkey could not afford it, two federal officials said. Mr. Mnuchin’s office declined to comment on Halkbank but added that the Treasury and Justice Departments “routinely consult and coordinate” on sanctions cases and fines.

Mr. Bolton and others said they could not fully explain why Mr. Trump seemed so determined to please Mr. Erdogan.

“This was a relationship that was really important for the United States to handle,” said Fiona Hill, who oversaw policy on Turkey and Europe for the National Security Council under Mr. Trump. “And at every turn, the president kept leaping in, and he wasn’t following the strategic threads of the relationship.”

Trump doesn’t have any awareness of “strategic threads” of a relationship. He only knows if a strongman leader is someone he wants to impress and whether or not he has business interests that need protecting. That’s it. He is corrupt to the core and is too stupid to grasp what America’s national security interests might be and that’s assuming he would care if he did.

Bill Barr is something else. He repeatedly agreed to interfere in prosecutions and push partisan investigations on behalf of Trump. He knew exactly what he was doing. This story sheds some light on what happened with Berman in New York and explains why he refused to go quietly when Barr fired him. There’s obviously more that we don’t know there.

I expect that we only see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what went on at the DOJ during Trump’s tenure. The new AG is going to have his or her hands full to get the place cleaned up.

Barr is being very quiet right now, perhaps realizing that Trump is going to lose and he’s going to be hung out to dry. If so, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.