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Month: November 2020

Durham Bull

Published by digby on November 3, 2020

Murray Waas has some interesting info on the Durham Investigation. Trumpie’s going to be very disappointed:

On September 10, Nora Dannehy resigned as the deputy to John Durham, the federal prosecutor investigating the government’s probe into the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Dannehy left her post and the Justice Department in part because of Attorney General William Barr’s pressure on Durham to release a report on his investigation’s findings before Election Day, according to a person familiar with her thinking. Trump had long been hoping a report out this fall would damage Democrats, including Joe Biden, and help him win reelection. In Trump’s terminology, Durham’s report would reveal an “attempted overthrow” of his administration by Democratic insiders. But Justice Department guidelines restrict prosecutors from taking such actions within 60 days of an election because they might affect the outcome of the election. Both Durham and Dannehy believed that if they complied with Barr’s demands they would be violating this doctrine, according to two people familiar with their thinking.

Durham, who is the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, and Dannehy were also troubled that Barr had purposely misrepresented their work in numerous public comments, the two people said. According to two sources familiar with the probe, there has been no evidence found, after 18 months of investigation, to support Barr’s claims that Trump was targeted by politically biased Obama officials to prevent his election. (The probe remains ongoing.) In fact, the sources said, the Durham investigation has so far uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or Barack Obama, or that they were even involved with the Russia investigation. There “was no evidence … not even remotely … indicating Obama or Biden did anything wrong,” as one person put it.

… the Durham investigation has so far uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or Barack Obama, or that they were even involved with the Russia investigation. There “was no evidence … not even remotely … indicating Obama or Biden did anything wrong,” as one person put it.

This is what Trump has been saying on a loop for months:

He was, of course, full of shit:

Shortly after the resignation of his prized deputy and with the election looming on the horizon, Durham phoned Barr. He forcefully told the attorney general that his office would not be releasing a report or taking any other significant public actions before Election Day, according to a person with knowledge of the phone call. Dannehy’s resignation constituted an implied but unspoken threat to Barr that Durham or others on his team might resign if the attorney general attempted to force the issue, according to a person familiar with Durham’s thinking.

After hearing from Durham in September, Barr informed the president and allies that there would be no October surprise, causing Trump to lash out. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crimes in the history of our country — then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win,” he told Fox Business last month. “[These] people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama and it includes Biden.”

For his part, Barr was hyping what the Durham investigation would find since at least the spring and suggested it would be bad for Democrats. “There is a difference between an abuse of power and a federal crime. Not every abuse of power, no matter how outrageous, is a federal crime,” Barr told reporters in May. “As to President Obama and Vice-President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others.” One person familiar with the Durham investigation called Barr’s comments a backhanded attempt to insinuate that Obama and Biden had abused their powers. Barr’s ongoing commentary regarding Durham’s investigation appears to have violated Justice Department policy that officials should “not confirm the existence or otherwise comment about ongoing investigations.”

While discussing Durham’s investigation, Barr’s rhetoric also increasingly paralleled Trump’s. In contrast to the president, Barr delivered his comments in a measured and restrained manner, while Trump’s claims have been coarse and hyperbolic. Barr has suggested that the DOJ and FBI’s investigations of the president was “one of the greatest travesties” in American history and a “bogus scandal,” whereas Trump simply called the investigations a “hoax.”

Trump and Barr — they must both be tied to the mast of the ship as it sinks beneath the waves.

Begun the vote count has

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 3, 2020

Voting continues across the country this Election Day morning. But early and absentee votes are counted and locked away at boards of elections as well. After all the Republican lawsuits over states extending deadlines for accepting mailed ballots, in many places those votes are just waiting to be posted once polls close. In North Carolina, that’s shortly after 7:30 p.m. EST:

The North Carolina State Board of Elections says it expects that it will have processed 97% or more of all ballots cast in the general election on Nov. 3 and that the unofficial results will be reported by the end of election night.

The announcement is in line with election watchers’ predictions about which states will release their results earliest. North Carolina is one of the states where mail-in ballots can be processed as the state receives them, easing the burden of tallying votes on Election Day.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/27/upshot/election-results-timing.html

Vote counting in North Carolina will be done except for late-arriving absentee ballots. The early vote here in the Cesspool of Sin was a record 68% and could reach 75% turnout by tonight. Word on the street is that a “Count Every Vote” rally scheduled here for Wednesday has been cancelled.

Seven of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, however, will not count mail-in ballots until Wednesday:

Pennsylvania allows for counties to begin processing mail-in ballots the morning of Election Day, but officials in Beaver, Cumberland, Franklin, Greene, Juniata, Mercer and Montour — all counties which voted for Donald Trump in 2016 — said that concerns over staffing and resources led them to delay when they will count mail ballots.

It is unclear what impact this could have on the timing of the results. The counties range in population size, but roughly a combined 150,000 voters in these areas have requested mail-in ballots according to state data.

None of this will keep the scammer-in-chief from declaring his eternal rule tonight:

Grifter Donald Trump is determined to try to con his way into serving a second term in office or, more likely, attempt to make it appear as though he was robbed of another four years if he is defeated when all of the votes are counted.

According to three Axios sources, the president has told some in his inner circle that he plans to declare victory come Tuesday night if it looks like he’s “ahead.” The report goes on to explain that the president’s plan, which has been in the works “for weeks,” relies on Trump being ahead in several swing states and then declaring victory before states like Pennslyvania count their mail-in ballots.

The report says that the Trump campaign will make the false claim that mail-in ballots counted after election day are illegitimate and “are evidence of election fraud.” And because there is a chance that prior to the mail-in ballots being counted, Pennslyvania may show Trump with a lead on election night, triggering the president’s dishonest plan to go into effect.

Dishonest plans are the only kind he has.

He is certainly confident in them. A “non-scalable” wall went up around the White House complex last night, “a metaphor for the last four years,” Eric Lutz writes at Vanity Fair. The acting president will throw a private watch party behind it tonight, evoking again parallels with Poe’s classic cautionary tale of wealthy hubris and denial in a time of plague.

With luck, his misrule will soon pass and Joe Biden’s nascent presidency will defeat the plague and restore some semblance of normalcy.

What are you doing reading this?

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 3, 2020

Get off your asses and get to the polls! Take people to the polls! Friends. Family. Neighbors. Work the polls! Work the phones! Save the country! SAVE THE FUTURE!

Some ass-kicking musical accompaniment, in no particular order.

https://youtu.be/YgpU3uwnkoo

For after AP calls the race for Biden-Harris:

His closing whine

Published by digby on November 2, 2020

Aaaand scene.

From earlier in the day:

His closing message: Don’t worry, I plan to cheat

Published by digby on November 2, 2020

And I think his voters like that about him. If he were to wrest the presidency from the Democrats even though he won fewer votes it shows dominance, and we know how much they love that.

S.V. Date at Huffington Post:

After four years of ignoring expertise, lying daily, and breaking both laws and “norms” with impunity, President Donald Trump headed into Election Day with a brazen pledge: that he will cheat by not counting all the ballots.

“It’s a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that’s very bad,” Trump told reporters traveling with him on Sunday, as he repeated his desire to end all vote counting on Tuesday night. “As soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”

“He’s been laying the groundwork for this for months,” said Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor and the lead lawyer for House Democrats during Trump’s impeachment over his extortion of Ukraine to help his reelection bid. “Mind-blowingly fascist.”

Can he pull it off? I don’t know. It’s a long shot. But then his whole presidency is a long shot. So I’m anxiously huggly my shot glass tonight hoping that tomorrow night is decisively for the good guys and Trump is put back in his cage.

And then we can start to worry about what he’s going to do for the next three months to get his revenge.

You know he will:

Trump getting revenge in the lame duck transition period before he leaves office is the best case scenario, I’m afraid.

Trump’s last lap

Published by digby on November 2, 2020

The New York Times does a final pre-election day round-up. It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know except the fact that it’s possible Trump’s bluster isn’t matched by any serious planning — which may be good news:

President Trump arrives at Election Day on Tuesday toggling between confidence and exasperation, bravado and grievance, and marinating in frustration that he is trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom he considers an unworthy opponent.

“Man, it’s going to be embarrassing if I lose to this guy,” Mr. Trump has told advisers, a lament he has aired publicly as well. But in the off-camera version, Mr. Trump frequently exclaims, “This guy!” in reference to Mr. Biden, with a salty adjective separating the words.

Trailing in most polls, Mr. Trump has careened through a marathon series of rallies in the last week, trying to tear down Mr. Biden and energize his supporters, but also fixated on crowd size and targeting perceived enemies like the news media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s infectious disease expert whom he suggested on Sunday he might try to dismiss after the election.

At every turn, the president has railed that the voting system is rigged against him and has threatened to sue when the election is over, in an obvious bid to undermine an electoral process strained by the coronavirus pandemic. It is not clear, however, precisely what legal instruments Mr. Trump believes he has at his disposal.

The president, his associates say, has drawn encouragement from his larger audiences and from a stream of relatively upbeat polling information that advisers have curated for him, typically filtering out the bleakest numbers.

On a trip to Florida last week, several aides told the president that winning the Electoral College was a certainty, a prognosis not supported by Republican or Democratic polling, according to people familiar with the conversation. And Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, has responded with chipper enthusiasm when Mr. Trump has raised the idea of making a late bid for solidly Democratic states like New Mexico, an option other aides have told the president is flatly unrealistic.

His mad dash to the finish is a distillation of his four tumultuous years in office, a mix of resentment, combativeness and a penchant for viewing events through a prism all his own — and perhaps the hope that everything will work out for him in the end, the way it did four years ago when he surprised himself, his advisers and the world by winning the White House.

But by enclosing himself in the thin bubble of his own worldview, Mr. Trump may have further severed himself from the political realities of a country in crisis. And that, in turn, has helped enable Mr. Trump to wage a campaign offering no central message, no clear agenda for a second term and no answer to the woes of the pandemic.

Most people in the president’s inner circle share his optimism about the outcome of the race, even as they fight exhaustion and the president’s whipsawing moods, interviews with more than a dozen aides and allies showed. But some advisers acknowledge that it would require several factors to fall into place. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.

Republican lawmakers have offered less rosy assessments of his prospects, and in private some Trump advisers do not argue the point. One high-ranking Republican member of Congress vented to Mr. Meadows last month that if Mr. Trump “is trying to lose the election I can’t think of anything I’d tell him to do differently,” the lawmaker recalled, noting that the aide only nodded his head in acknowledgment. “They just think they can’t do anything about it.”

He cannot learn. He is impervious to advice that doesn’t fit his worldview and he’s convinced of his own ability to “win” no matter what and beat the odds every time. After ll, he has managed to get out of scrapes his whole life. Why not this time?

However, he does have some other things on his mind:

Seldom far from Mr. Trump’s thoughts, however, is the possibility of defeat — and the potential consequences of being ejected from the White House.

In unguarded moments, Mr. Trump has for weeks told advisers that he expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors if he loses. He is concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him.

While Mr. Trump has not aired those worries in the open, he has railed against the democratic process, raising baseless doubts about the integrity of the vote and suggesting ways of undermining an election that appeared to be going against him, including interference by the Supreme Court.

He has also mused about prematurely declaring victory Tuesday night, but if there’s any organized plan to do so his top lieutenants are not conveying it to their allies. One congressional strategist said that he spoke to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, on Sunday and that Mr. Kushner not only didn’t ask for buy-in from Capitol Hill Republicans for such a plan but also didn’t mention the prospect at all.

The Times doesn’t seem to be taking that threat very seriously. But the Republicans have lawyers all over the country standing by and they’ve already filed more than 40 lawsuits to try to stop the vote or stop the counting of votes. I guess that’s no biggie? Sure seems like it should be …

Meanwhile, some Republicans are still somewhat reality based, if only for the moment:

Mr. Trump’s advisers do continue to believe he has a realistic chance of besting Mr. Biden, but they concede it would take a last-minute breakthrough in one of the Great Lakes states where he is currently trailing, as well as a hold-the-line performance across the South and Southwest. Some Republicans, however, are already bracing for losses or close calls in a series of Sun Belt states — and expressing alarm that Mr. Trump may have turned some of them prematurely blue in the same fashion that Barack Obama’s 2008 landslide made Virginia and Colorado Democratic bulwarks.

“Arizona and Georgia are a big deal,” said Nick Everhart, a Republican strategist. “That’s a shift people thought would come but once they’re gone they’re hard to reel back.”

Trump is making everything worse:

The president himself has done little to strengthen his chances in the final days of the race. On Friday, Mr. Trump used a rally in Michigan to float a baseless theory that doctors are classifying patients’ deaths as related to the coronavirus in order to make more money, drawing fierce condemnation from medical groups, as well as Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama.

And on Saturday, in Pennsylvania at the site where George Washington mapped out his Delaware crossing during the Revolution, aides wrote out a sober speech for the president to deliver. Midway through, he seemed to get bored and began to riff about the size of Mr. Biden’s sunglasses.

He has frequently used his speeches to deliver long diatribes against Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, even though some Trump advisers believe the whole subject is a sideshow in the midst of a public-health disaster. But Trump associates say he simply enjoys attacking the Biden family.

Grotesque insults and ugly hate is what gives him pleasure. And his followers love it too.

This is because he is a sociopath who is recklessly spreading COVID 19 to his cult members and ginning up extremists to take up arms against his political opponents. If we get out of this thing without violence, it will be a miracle.

But we’re due for a miracle.

The most honest thing he’s ever said

Published by digby on November 2, 2020

This is absolutely true. He had no idea what he was doing, still doesn’t. So he just said “I’ll do the opposite.”

It’s really worked out great. The world hates us, we have 230,000 Americans dead in 9 months from a deadly disease (most of whom didn’t have to die) the country is more divided than its been since the civil war, and the economy is the worst its been since the Great Depression. Other than that he’s done a terrific job.

He screwed the pooch on the pandemic

Published by digby on November 2, 2020

If Trump weren’t such an ignorant egomaniac he would have recognized that despite surviving impeachment with a party line vote, he was in trouble for re-election and he would have seized on the pandemic as a chance to reinvent himself as a “wartime” style president and get the country to rally around him in time to boost his ratings and get him a second term. Presidents who successfully deal with crises are usually rewarded for it if their timing is right and his would have been.

But he is a fool who thought he was coasting to an easy victory and saw the pandemic as an impediment rather than a chance to prove his leadership so he decided to try to micromanage it with delusional cheerleading and magical thinking. And in the process proved himself to be an even worse president than we thought.

The only thing keeping him even in the running are the cynical opportunists in the GOP establishment and the right wing media that want to milk every penny from the crass, hateful mob that loves him for his monstrous personality.

This story in the Daily Beast wraps up the story of the administration’s epic pandemic failure:

President Donald Trump’s prospects for re-election likely rest on convincing voters that he has succeeded in containing the spread of COVID-19 even as the virus ravages the country and creeps back into communities.

It’s a remarkable gambit: Tell the public not to believe the carnage playing out before them. And it’s one made even harder by recent events. Over the past week more than 500,000 Americans tested positive for COVID-19, more than 230,000 have died during the pandemic, and 47,000 are hospitalized because of complications from their infection.about:

It didn’t have to be this way, both for the president and the country.

While COVID-19 surprised the world with the speed at which it reproduced itself and infected others, top health officials—both current and former—concede that Trump and some of his advisers made critical mistakes along the way that not only allowed the virus to spread uncontrollably, but also put Trump in the precarious political position in which he now finds himself.

Officials say that while there were several unknowns about the virus in the first days of the worldwide outbreak, Trump and the White House did, in fact, understand the risk it posed to Americans. They just hid it from the public. Although there were plenty of warnings from national-security and health officials, the White House didn’t move fast enough to respond to a virus that had already forced Italy into a full lockdown. Trump was too slow in shutting down flights from China and Europe, too slow to ramp up testing, too slow to move the country into lockdown, and too slow to invoke the Defense Production Act to supply hospitals with medical supplies and personal protective equipment, those same officials said.

“The administration thought it reacted early to blocking travel from China in the early days but it was almost too late. The virus was already here. That was the biggest mistake—not moving quickly enough. The breaking point was really that early,” said one senior health official. “We went from a full-on defense to an ‘It’s here, what do we do?’ mentality.’ We haven’t been able to reverse course since then.”

But the most severe misstep didn’t have anything to do with making swift national-security decisions, officials say. The virus was able to plow through communities in large part because, from the outset, the White House tried to handle the federal government’s response on its own, cutting out essential input from doctors and scientists and other top officials who had experience handling major natural disasters. Normally, officials said, the White House allows health agencies or other branches of government—including the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Administration—to take the lead in handling the response to national emergencies. In those situations, the president is briefed and offers counsel but does not dictate how they are handled in absolute terms. That wasn’t the case for Trump and COVID-19.

“The White House took over operations, which it never should do. The task force should have always been the policy-making entity, driving policy demands down to the agencies which have the expertise to execute that,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security. “The White House doesn’t have the bandwidth. We didn’t spend that time either determining what assets we had, resupplying the stockpile and guiding manufacturing.”

One senior official described the mistake more succinctly. It was, the official said, “arrogance” thatmade the president believe that he could handle the pandemic on his own, which in turn caused major delays in the distribution of testing, personal protective equipment, and ventilators. The president and his advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, decided they would run the response like a business, that official said. And Trump was the boss.

“It’s one thing to say, policy-wise, you may bring outside-the-box thinking; it’s another thing to believe that you can execute on that in a nation as big and as vast and the pandemic being that scary,” Kayyem said. “There was no understanding of how a pandemic response works.”

While Trump delegated almost all the grunt work to others, he refused to relinquish the spotlight.He held press conferences almost daily, during which—at one point—he speculated wildly about whether injecting bleach into the body would be a good way to kill the virus. The moment became iconic for its inanity. But the ripple effects were quite serious.

“From that point on, we knew that the response to this virus was going to have to entail a large countermessaging campaign… efforts to fight back against the president’s rhetoric,” said one senior health official working with the coronavirus task force.

Officials say Trump’s frequent appearances severely hindered the administration’s ability to push out a clear message. From the beginning, Trump tried to conceal the severity of the virus from the American people. “This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Bob Woodward in a February interview, even as he explained that he didn’t want to “create panic” and so would “play it down.”

“There wasn’t the level of urgency I expected. Most people thought [Trump] didn’t understand or he wasn’t giving it an appropriate amount of attention,” said Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security for counterterrorism and threat prevention during the Trump era. “In reality, he chose to downplay it because he didn’t want to affect the economy he wanted to run on.”

Trump’s preoccupation with the public-relations elements of the pandemic response compelled him to make decisions at odds with what public-health professionals wanted.From the start, officials said, Trump pushed back on recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases specialist, and Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the task force, to press forward with recommendations to lock down certain portions of the country experiencing worrying test positivity rates and push guidelines on mask-wearing and social distancing.

“There was a basic pushback that this thing could hit us the way it did other countries,” said one senior official. “And that messaging was coming from the White House and extended outside the administration.”

He also resisted efforts to promote mask-wearing, even as it became clear that it would help significantly mitigate against the spread of the virus.

“We should have had a united front across the country on this and we would be light years ahead of where we are now—which is almost even worse than where we were at the beginning of the pandemic,” said Olivia Troye, a former senior adviser to the task force who endorsed Biden shortly after departing the Trump administration. President Trump, she added, “made a choice early on—a choice that we all continue to suffer from with our communities once again suffering, more loved ones getting sick now, and lives continuing to be lost every single day.”

Donald Trump is responsible for a major mass death event in this country because not only is he too stupid and too narcissistic to realize the seriousness of the crisis and fulfill his responsibility to the American people. He is also too stupid and narcissistic to realize that he made his own re-election prospects even harder.

There’s more at the link. And it’s really worth reviewing as we face a winter of sickness and death from the pandemic while the president is holding superspreader rallies all over the country with people chanting “Fire Fauci.” I wonder how many of them will be dead in the next few months.

It’s all just horrifying.