Month: December 2020

… and not just here in the land of the free:

Despite betting money on President Donald Trump’s re-election, Helen was unfazed when Joe Biden was declared the victor.

She watched press conferences by Trump surrogates who claimed the election was a fraud. She watched a pro-Trump web show that alleged the same. Then, using the online gambling service Betfair, she wagered even more money on a Trump victory after Election Day.

“To be honest, the more likely it looked like fraud, the more I bet,” Helen, an Amsterdam-based British woman who declined to give her last name, told The Daily Beast.

Had Trump won re-election, Helen would have won nearly €2.7 million euros, according to screenshots of her Betfair account. But Betfair and other gambling sites closed the books on their 2020 presidential betting on Monday, after the Electoral College certified Biden’s victory. Now Helen, who says she’s lost approximately €140,000 and believes the election results will be overturned, is joining other bettors in accusing gambling sites of wrongly calling the election for Biden.

Some of those Trump bettors are turning to conspiracy theories about election fraud—and threats to visit the homes of gambling company employees.

I guess it’s nice to know that Americans aren’t the only people who’ve completely lost all common sense and decency. What’s wrong with people?

Americans (with a few exceptions) cannot legally bet on elections, but gamblers in Europe and Asia poured millions into the 2020 presidential race. Some of those bettors, like a Brit who wagered about $1 million on Biden, became significantly richer when betting sites began paying out after Biden’s Electoral College win on Monday.

Others were not so lucky. Some of these European bettors have become deeply invested in U.S. election fraud conspiracy theories, which they (still, despite everything) say will result in an overturned election and the return of their money.

Jordan Lea, a U.K. man, told The Daily Beast he had “around £50,000 riding on Trump winning.” He and others say they are appealing to Betfair to undo its payouts, ostensibly because Trump could still win (he can’t).ADVERTISING

Lea and Helen both said Biden’s victory was up for debate because Republicans in several states had filed lawsuits challenging the election, while other Republican legislators had assembled pro-Trump “alternate” electors to challenge Biden’s win in their states. Proponents of the “alternate” voter scheme claim Vice President Mike Pence will choose those pro-Trump votes instead of the legitimate ones when, per the 12th Amendment, Congress convenes to ratify the Electoral College vote on January 6.

That was stupid, of course. I just can’t believe people in other countries would buy this nonsense.

And, as you might expect, these foreign Trumpies are just like our domestic brand: whining, infantile fools:

Still, the election’s results were uncertain enough for sites like Betfair to hold off on declaring a winner until Biden received his Electoral College victory on December 14. “We will only settle the markets when there is certainty around which candidate has the most projected Electoral College votes,” Betfair announced on November 5, two days after the election.

WIth Betfair still accepting wagers long after voting had stopped, some bettors like Helen dropped more money on the race, on the basis of voter-fraud theories.

“I watched the hearings of Rudy Guiliani and Jenna Ellis for ballot fraud, I listed [sic] to Sidney Powell and Lin Wood for the election fraud,” she said, in reference to conspiratorial lawyers arguing in Trump’s favor. “It looked very, very likely from the day of the election like it was fraud and as more info came out, I was more convinced of the win. Which is why I have such a large amount riding on it.”

Lea said it was wrong for Betfair to call the election after Biden’s Electoral College win because the company “explicitly told us that they’re aware of these alternate electors and still claim that there is 100 percent certainty surrounding the Electoral College vote.”

He claimed an early version of Betfair’s terms and conditions said the site would pay out bets only when a candidate won the majority of Electoral College votes, and that on November 27, the site quietly changed its rules to read, the “most projected Electoral College votes.” (In fact, an archived version of the site and its terms and conditions from November 6 shows the language about “projected” votes.) He said that had he known Betfair would settle its bets when the Electoral College projected a winner, he would have “cashed out immediately” and used a different betting service.

Betfair did not immediately return a request for comment.

Lea and other aggrieved Europeans have gathered in chat rooms to assemble evidence for what they say will be a large claim against betting companies.

“We have thousands of screenshots documenting the LIES we were told by the live chat assistants, as we have grouped together in various chatrooms and are pooling the evidence together to stake our claim,” he said.

Not all of the chatrooms target Betfair. A chat room on the messaging platform Telegram also took aim at the company Bet365, with multiple members claiming to either be lawyers or have consulted lawyers on the case.

Others said they were actively pursuing lawsuits.

Of course they are. I hear Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani are available.

I wish I understood the attraction to these conspiracy theories and the suspension of disbelief it takes to buy into it. I just do not get it and I never will. Everything Giuliani and Trump said in the post election period was monumentally preposterous. I don’t know how anyone could have believed it, especially enough to put money on it.

Astonishing.

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Trump and his minions have denied that they believed that uncontrolled spread of the virus leading to herd immunity (and mountains of dead bodies) was the best way to deal with COVID. But of course they did. Trump was quoted in the media asking at a task force meeting last spring why we couldn’t just let the virus “wash over” the United States. It was such a crudely nihilistic comment that Dr fauci didn’t even understand what he was saying at first.

Trump’s favorite Fox News doctor Scott Atlas was an open proponent of this disgraceful plan although he tried to deny it as well. And we know that Trump constantly said the virus was “going to go away” which was either magical thinking or his way of saying that we would eventually achieve herd immunity and everything would be fine. And if anyone is still wondering what happened with the administration failing to pre-order a second batch of Pfizer vaccine last summer, it’s a pretty good guess that they were clinging to this murderous notion that was rejected by virtually every expert in the world.

The US has had the worst pandemic response in the world. I wonder why:

Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, were installed in 2018 as two of the youngest political appointees in the history of the world’s premier public health agency, young Republicans returning to their native Georgia to dream jobs.

But what they witnessed during the coronavirus pandemic this year in the C.D.C.’s leadership suite on the 12-floor headquarters here shook them: Washington’s dismissal of science, the White House’s slow suffocation of the agency’s voice, the meddling in its messages and the siphoning of its budget.

In a series of interviews, the pair has decided to go public with their disillusionment: what went wrong, and what they believe needs to be done as the agency girds for what could be a yearslong project of rebuilding its credibility externally while easing ill feelings and self-doubt internally.

“Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was sidelined. It didn’t happen that way,” Mr. McGowan said. “It was more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C.”

Last week, the editor in chief of the C.D.C.’s flagship weekly disease outbreak reports — once considered untouchable — told House Democrats investigating political interference in the agency’s work that she was ordered to destroy an email showing Trump appointees attempting to meddle with their publication.

The same day, the outlines of the C.D.C.’s future took more shape when President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced a slate of health nominees, including Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, as the agency’s new director, a move generally greeted with enthusiasm by public health experts.

“We are ready to combat this virus with science and facts,” she wrote on Twitter.

Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell — who joined the C.D.C. in their early 30s, then left together in August — said that mantra was what was most needed after a brutal year that left the agency’s authority crippled.

In November, Mr. McGowan held conversations with Biden transition officials reviewing the agency’s response to the pandemic, where he said he was candid about its failures. Among the initiatives he encouraged the new administration to plan for: reviving regular — if not daily — news briefings featuring the agency’s scientists.

Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell, both 34, say they tried to protect their colleagues against political meddling from the White House and Department of Health and Human Services. But an agency created to protect the nation against a public health catastrophe like the coronavirus was largely stifled by the Trump administration.

The White House insisted on reviewing — and often softening — the C.D.C.’s closely guarded coronavirus guidance documents, the most prominent public expression of its latest research and scientific consensus on the spread of the virus. The documents were vetted not only by the White House’s coronavirus task force but by what felt to the agency’s employees like an endless loop of political appointees across Washington.

Mr. McGowan recalled a White House fixated on the economic implications of public health. He and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, negotiated with Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, over social distancing guidelines for restaurants, as Mr. Vought argued that specific spacing recommendations would be too onerous for businesses to enforce.

“It is not the C.D.C.’s role to determine the economic viability of a guidance document,” Mr. McGowan said.

They compromised anyway, recommending social distancing without a reference to the typical six-foot measurement.

One of Ms. Campbell’s responsibilities was helping secure approval for the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, a widely followed and otherwise apolitical guide on infectious disease renowned in the medical community. Over the summer, political appointees at the health department repeatedly asked C.D.C. officials to revise, delay and even scuttle drafts they thought could be viewed, by implication, as criticism of President Trump.

“It wasn’t until something was in the M.M.W.R. that was in contradiction to what message the White House and H.H.S. were trying to put forward that they became scrutinized,” Ms. Campbell said.

Dr. Tom Frieden, the C.D.C. director under President Barack Obama, said it was typical and “legitimate” to have interagency process for review.

“What’s not legitimate is to overrule science,” he said.

Often, Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell mediated between Dr. Redfield and agency scientists when the White House’s guidance requests and dictates would arrive: edits from Mr. Vought and Kellyanne Conway, the former White House adviser, on choirs and communion in faith communities, or suggestions from Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and aide, on schools.

“Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won,” Mr. McGowan said.

Episodes of meddling sometimes turned absurd, they said. In the spring, the C.D.C. published an app that allowed Americans to screen themselves for symptoms of Covid-19. But the Trump administration decided to develop a similar tool with Apple. White House officials then demanded that the C.D.C. wipe its app off its website, Mr. McGowan said.

And then there’s this:

A top Trump appointee repeatedly urged top health officials to adopt a “herd immunity” approach to Covid-19 and allow millions of Americans to be infected by the virus, according to internal emails obtained by a House watchdog and shared with POLITICO.

“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,” then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.

“Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…” Alexander added.

“[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected” in order to get “natural immunity…natural exposure,” Alexander wrote on July 24 to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Caputo and eight other senior officials. Caputo subsequently asked Alexander to research the idea, according to emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee’s select subcommittee on coronavirus.

Alexander also argued that colleges should stay open to allow Covid-19 infections to spread, lamenting in a July 27 email to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield that “we essentially took off the battlefield the most potent weapon we had…younger healthy people, children, teens, young people who we needed to fastly [sic] infect themselves, spread it around, develop immunity, and help stop the spread.”

Alexander was a top deputy of Caputo, who was personally installed by President Donald Trump in April to lead the health department’s communications efforts. Officials told POLITICO that they believed that when Alexander made recommendations, he had the backing of the White House.

“It was understood that he spoke for Michael Caputo, who spoke for the White House,” said Kyle McGowan, a Trump appointee who was CDC chief of staff before leaving this summer. “That’s how they wanted it to be perceived.”

Note that he said “we need to establish herd” and “we use them to develop herd” which is a weird way to say it and Trump used that odd phrasing as well. It’s obvious that Trump was aware of this and believed it.

I wrote about Alexander last September. Recall:

On June 30, as the coronavirus was cresting toward its summer peak, Dr. Paul Alexander, a new science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, composed a scathing two-page critique of an interview given by a experienced scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, a 32-year veteran of the C.D.C. and its principal deputy director, had appealed to Americans to wear masks and warned, “We have way too much virus across the country.” But Dr. Alexander, a part-time assistant professor of health research methods, appeared sure he understood the coronavirus better.

“Her aim is to embarrass the president,” he wrote, commenting on Dr. Schuchat’s appeal for face masks in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“She is duplicitous,” he also wrote in an email to his boss, Michael R. Caputo, the Health and Human Services Department’s top spokesman who went on medical leave this week. He asked Mr. Caputo to “remind” Dr. Schuchat that during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009, thousands of Americans had died “under her work.”

This. Was. Deliberate. They politicized the pandemic response to such a degree that it ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. I am hard pressed to see how such a thing isn’t criminal.

The Biden administration simply cannot let this go. There must be some accountability for this behavior. We cannot accept that a president can allow the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans for political gain.

At the very least Biden needs to name a commission to look into what happened, hold public hearings and issue a report. And congress obviously needs to act on those findings. This can’t just be swept under the rug.

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First of all, thanks so much to those who have participated in the Hullabaloo Holiday fundraiser this year so far. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your support.

I don’t know if anyone noticed but when I moved the site over to this new domain this year, I decided not to run ads. It cost me some money but as with most websites, ad revenues had dropped and I just thought it wasn’t worth it anymore to have all those distractions on the page. I would never criticize anyone who does it, though. It’s hard out here for online media. But I’ll admit that ads drive me crazy, so I figured I’d just as soon tighten my belt a little and let them go.

There is a new big thing with a lot of good writers doing subscription substack newsletters (I’ve endorsed Eric Boehlert’s Press Run on here a few times) that seem to be making good money for them so maybe that’s the wave of the future. I hope for the best for them. Any way people can make this writing thing work for them is great as far as I’m concerned.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing old fashioned political blogging because frankly, I still think it’s a great medium and I still think it adds something to the political conversation. The fact that after all these years people continue to stop by here and read our scribbles tells me that it does have some value. As long as they do that, and a few of you help to support the effort, we’ll keep doing it.

(And, by the way, I’m still mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. In case you were wondering …)

So thanks again for reading and if you would like to put a little something in the stocking, you can do so here or at the snail mail address on the sidebar.

And Happy Hollandaise!

But he did what he came to do.

Poor Bill Barr.

After all that he did for President Trump, Barr was still forced out of his job as Attorney General for failing to hurl himself over a cliff as a human sacrifice. Trump wanted him to use the Department of Justice to help overturn his election loss which even Barr wasn’t able to finesse. Adding insult to injury, Trump just couldn’t forgive him for failing to “pull a Comey” by using a DOJ investigation of Hunter Biden to sabotage Joe Biden’s campaign.

Not that Trump’s unceremonious dumping stopped Barr from debasing himself even more ostentatiously than usual by offering a “resignation letter” that he obviously cribbed from one of those flowery love notes North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un used to write to Trump during their passionate bromance. I’m guessing that was the price of getting out without being fired via an insulting tweet which seems to be something Republican men fear even more than thermonuclear war or feminism.

It just goes to show that no matter how much people are willing to prostitute themselves for Donald Trump, they are only as good as their last bad deed. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, Trump even stabbed his old mentor Roy Cohn in the back when he no longer had use for him:

Barr, who publicly lobbied for the job, proceeded to spend the next two years as a loyal flunkie for Trump, leveraging the power of the attorney general’s office to shield Trump from any accountability for his various criminal and ethical violations. Barr covered up for the Russian collusion. He tried to fix the Ukraine scandal. In the last days of the campaign, he even bolstered Trump’s lies about “voter fraud”, obviously an effort to support a conspiracy to steal the election.

To that list I would add his blatant political interference in the Michael Flynn and Roger Stone cases as well as his personal interest in the Durham probe all of which created massive turmoil in his department causing several career prosecutors to leave in disgust.

Barr never even tried to hide the fact that he considered it his duty to protect the president and his cronies from prosecution. He holds a political philosophy about the imperial presidency honed by decades of fulminating about the allegedly poor treatment of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan by congressional upstarts and special prosecutors. Barr’s infamous, unsolicited memo asserting that Robert Mueller could not charge the president with a crime, echoing those famous words of Richard Nixon — “if the president does it it’s not illegal” — was what got him the job in the first place. The inane pretense that he is adamantly opposed to “politicizing” the department of justice, even as he politicized it more than any Attorney General in history, was a true triumph of gaslighting.

He is also a right-wing culture warrior who believes in authoritarian policies to ensure that the nation subscribes to his definition of “order” (he rushed to reinstate the federal death penalty and immediately began executing prisoners in a hurry) and has argued forcefully for a dismantling of secular society And yes, he is a hard-core partisan zealot whose so-called principles are applied solely for the benefit of the Republican Party.

Frankly, I also think in his private moments he is probably a lot closer to the 1970s Archie Bunker style of old-fashioned bigot that he is willing to let on. He’s barely able to hide his revulsion for anyone who doesn’t conform to his idea of respectability and it’s more than obvious that he is hostile towards Black people. We saw that play out in his reaction to the George Floyd protests and the grotesque militarized responses in Lafayette Square and Portland, Oregon. It’s not hard to see why he was so keen to join up with Donald Trump.

However, Barr seems to have realized that Trump’s loss means that he’s done all he can to create the precedents for future Republican imperial presidents to consolidate their power. He successfully protected his president by exerting his own power while ensuring that the norms he broke are still available for Republicans to use against Democratic administrations. His work is done.

As I mentioned on Monday, there has been some chatter that after Barr took the unusual step of making John Durham into a Special Counsel, which somewhat insulates him from a Biden Department of Justice, Trump wanted Barr to appoint other Special Counsels to investigate the baseless election fraud claims and, of course, Hunter Biden. Presumably, Barr declined to lay these landmines on Trump’s behalf because the AP reported on Tuesday that Trump is still obsessing on this idea and has been discussing it with numerous other people including White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

His aides are all pushing him hard to do it because they believe “that a special counsel probe could wound a Biden administration before it even begins.” And Trump is still debating whether he should pressure Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey Rosen and if he can’t persuade him, whether to replace him with someone who will do it. This could end up making the Saturday Night Massacre look like a schoolyard squabble. Trump has even suggested that he might be able to appoint the Special Counsels himself. (Bill Barr’s many lessons on the unlimited power of the Imperial President — “I have an Article II!!”— seem to have penetrated.)

It’s good to see that Trump has his priorities straight, as usual. Sure, we may still be in the throes of a deadly pandemic and facing logistical complications in getting the vaccines to everyone who needs them. And yes, Congress is flailing about under Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell’s malevolent desire to make people suffer instead of offering necessary relief. Oh, and the federal government seems to have been the victim of a massive cyberattack by Russia which Trump has not bothered to discuss even once. But that’s because he’s still busy blustering about voter fraud and plotting to sabotage Joe Biden.

Bill Barr, his obsequious “resignation” letter notwithstanding, is obviously making a break for it before the whole thing explodes. Perhaps he thinks that by getting out now, before Trump could fire him and replace him with someone who would do even more dirty work to subvert the incoming administration, he will have saved his reputation. But it’s way too late for that. Barr will forever be remembered as Donald Trump’s Roy Cohn and nothing more.

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Dune and The Matrix 4 will stream the same day they release in theaters. Same for Wonder Woman 1984. Derek Thompson writes at The Atlantic of “America’s declining social engagement” that sociologist Robert Putnam wrote of 20 years ago in “Bowling Alone.”

The explosion of entertainment sources combined with social isolation imposed by a global pandemic has accelerated niche partitioning, a term from ecology describing how “competing species become hyper-specialized in an attempt to co-exist in an environment with scarce resources.” What it means in the infotainment universe:

One might assume that polarization is what happens to people cut off from information. But the truth is closer to the opposite: More information means more polarization. Research shows that access to broadband internet in the U.S. has in many cases increased various measures of polarization, as the web introduces voters to a bigger menu of partisan news from which voters select the sites that match their political tastes.

We’ve seen this phenomenon accelerate in 2020. Four years ago, most people would have said there were three major cable news networks: the center-left one (CNN), the liberal alternative (MSNBC), and the conservative juggernaut (Fox News). But in the past few months, the conservative-news monolith has shattered. Since the election, Newsmax TV and the One America News Network have stepped up to backfill President Donald Trump’s election-fraud lies with programming from an alternate reality. And behold, niche partitioning works: Last week, Newsmax rode the election-conspiracy story to its first-ever ratings win over Fox. Because Trump devotees are going to buy tickets to whatever media universe offers the best narrative, networks are competing to tell the Trumpiest tale.

Thompson is ecstatic about the prospects of returning to social interactions again in 2021, but suspects “an eerie undertow of isolation and anxiety” may persist. There is no going back to a time when Americans shared as much of their lives with others as they did once, he believes. But he forgets how much live sporting events still fill that space once filled by church-going and blockbuster movie openings.

Susan D. Hyde and Elizabeth N. Saunders, political scientists at UC-Berkeley and Georgetown respectively, survey the damage the Trump years have done to the republic. While we may have survived, they wonder how fundamentally weakened it is. What we will look like going forward?

Right now, there’s no way to know if the damage will be permanent. But we do know that democracies are better able to recover from such assaults because they allow for routine, peaceful replacement of leaders or parties. Dictators are more likely to be replaced through rebellion, military coup or civil war than through constitutional processes like elections and impeachment.

This is what democracy optimists get right. Mr. Trump’s abuse of foreign policy got him impeached. His spectacular failure to govern during a pandemic got him voted out of office.

But eventually, if stretched too far, democratic institutions will reach a limit. There may not be a dramatic break, like a coup, but democracy will be twisted and warped and cannot return to its original shape.

They argue that “a healthy, resilient democracy also requires sufficient citizen support for democracy across the political spectrum.” A tall order, they observe, given recent rejection of democracy by a significant portion of the Republican base. And rejection of fact-based reality by even more.

“The definition of community is ‘where you keep showing up,’” someone once told Thompson. For a small portion of the polity, at least, watching Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s online gaming fills some of the community void created by social distancing and quarantine. More than 400,000 tuned in to watch her play “Among Us” back in October. (I did as well.)

Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote? (I’ve never played but it looks like a lot of fun)

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 19, 2020

It’s like tailgating without the barbecue, hot dogs and beer, I guess. But it still feels like watching Ready Player One. It’s neither immersive nor truly communal. Humans need personal interaction to thrive. So does the country. Maybe sometime in 2021.

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BuzzFeed News has obtained a criminal referral alleging crimes connected with the July 25, 2019 phone call between outgoing President Donald J. Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. That call led to Trump’s impeachment. Obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Sept. 4, 2019 letter was signed by Michael Atkinson, inspector general for the intelligence community and sent to Stacey Moy, the deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division:

The inspector general “is formally referring allegations received from an individual regarding, among other things, alleged violations of law related to a telephone call on July 25, 2019, between President Donald J. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” Atkinson wrote. “This referral is a follow-up to my secure telephone call on August 27, 2019, with FBI Director Christopher A. Wray’s Chief of Staff, Paul B. Murphy, during which I provided to Mr. Murphy a summary of the Complainant’s allegations.”

An anonymous CIA whistleblower had filed a complaint on Aug. 12, 2019 with with the House and Senate Intelligence committees. It alleged Trump had used the call to condition $400 million in military aid to Ukraine on Zelensky’s investigating claims that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine’s prosecutor to drop an investigation into Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter had served. Trump also wanted Zelensky to investigate a debunked conspiracy theory relating to the DNC server hacked during the 2016 campaign.

NEW from me & @a_cormier_ via #FOIA: Nearly a year after the House impeached Trump, ODNI released the criminal referral alleging Trump committed crimes related to his call with Ukraine’s president, a conversation that sparked the historic proceedingshttps://t.co/6zSqSVrdx4 pic.twitter.com/VeQRnWyO9T

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) December 14, 2020

BuzzFeed also obtained a letter Atkinson sent to White House counsel Pat Cipollone on Aug. 26, 2019 requesting all materials relating to the Ukraine call, reminding the White House that failure to preserve all documents could “result in charges of obstruction of justice.” Trump fired Atkinson last April.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow observed Tuesday evening that with Attorney General Bill Barr leaving the Department of Justice in a week, his duties for the last month of Trump’s term will fall to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the deputy attorney general with a history of protecting Trump and his friends.

Drawing on Charlie Savage’s reporting at the new York Times, Maddow read off a bill of particulars against Rosen including burying the criminal referral BuzzFeed obtained:

Rosen kept convicted former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort out of Rikers Island as he awaited trial on another charge. Over objections from career prosecutors, Rosen suggested a grand jury should indict former F.B.I. deputy director Andrew G. McCabe over alleged false statements in internal inquiries. McCabe was acting director when the agency opened an obstruction of justice investigation against Trump.

Rosen reviewed the work of prosecutors in the case against Trump ally Roger Stone.

The Times report continues:

In June, according to a person familiar with internal deliberations, Mr. Rosen quietly quarterbacked a government lawsuit that unsuccessfully asked a judge to order Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton to pull back his White House memoir, which presents a negative account of the president and had already been printed. (The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Mr. Rosen’s behind-the-scenes role.)

Rosen also angered career prosecutors by stalling the filing of criminal charges against former interior secretary Ryan Zinke over a Montana land deal. Zinke was not charged.

Rosen wrote federal prosecutors suggesting they might bring sedition charges against anti-racism protesters.

Whatever his inclinations, his time as attorney general will be brief, noted Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Duke University School of Law. He added that if Mr. Rosen were to issue any “off the wall” edicts at the Mr. Trump’s request, career department employees could try bureaucratically to slow them.

“With so little time left, what is it an attorney general can do with a stroke of his pen?” Mr. Buell asked. “A sustained effort to steer a department in a particular direction takes more than a month.”

The implication is that however brief his tenure, Rosen is likely to make the most of his last five weeks in Trump’s service.

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Dearest Wall Street Journal,

In. a recent post, my fellow blogger Digby recently posted an advertisement for an upcoming Turning Point USA boredom-a-thon. Among the listed speakers is one Sebastian Gorka who, as you can see, uses the title “Dr.” despite the fact he is not an MD but instead holds a PhD in political science.

I’m curious: Do you plan to publish any op-eds that sneer at Dr. Gorka’s pretense? Or are you too scared to do so because Dr. Gorka sports a Vitézi Rend medal — an organization whose members participated in the slaughter of Jews during Holocaust — and so you don’t know what kind of sick lunacy his pals are capable of? FYI:

Vitézi Rend was created by the Nazi-backed ruler of Hungary, and many of its members were involved in the slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust. Today, members of the Order fall under an immigration watch by the State Department on groups that have violated human rights. Gorka and his father were reported to have joined (Katharine says this is false). And in photographs, Gorka has been spotted sporting a Vitézi Rend medal that, he insisted, he wore only to honor his father.

Looking forward to your response.

Love,

t

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I know it’s tragically uncool to compare the Keystone Kops plotting of the Trump campaign’s attempt to stage an election coup to the “you-know-whats” of Germany 1933. But it must be said that a whole lot of people thought the “you-know-whats” were pretty clownish too, although obviously they were more successful. The fact that Dear Leader Trump got 75 million votes should make everyone stop and take a moment to consider how dangerous he really is.

Masha Gessen in the New Yorker goes there. But in a really interesting way:

One of the best-remembered and most useful phrases from twentieth-century political theory is Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil,” born of her attempt to understand the motivations of Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust. The phrase has been interpreted to mean that Eichmann, despite his high position, was merely a cog in a wheel that would have churned with or without him—that he was normal for his time, a shapeless man who would have conformed to any era. All of this is accurate. But what perhaps struck Arendt most when she was reporting on the Eichmann trial, for The New Yorker, was Eichmann’s indifference. She notes that he didn’t seem to remember some of his most consequential, murderous actions, not because he had a poor memory—and not, she assumed, because he was dissembling—but because he didn’t care, and hadn’t cared at the time. Eichmann had an excellent recollection of two things: perceived injustices perpetrated against him—during his trial in Jerusalem he showed himself to be a first-class whiner—and events that advanced his own career, as when important people noticed him and, say, took him bowling.

The parallels offer themselves. From what we know about Donald Trump, he will remember 2020 as a year when he was unfairly treated by the voters, the courts, and the media, and also a year when he golfed. In this year of the coronavirus, Trump has oscillated between holding briefings and acting like the pandemic was over, while recommending bleach and bragging about his own tremendous recovery.

But what he has demonstrated consistently, while three hundred thousand people in this country have died and millions became sick, is that he couldn’t be bothered. Memorable news stories have focussed on the cruel and self-serving ways in which the Administration has addressed the pandemic, as when the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly found it to be politically advantageous that the virus was disproportionately affecting states with Democratic governments, or when Trump withheld resources from states whose governors had criticized him.

Trump apparently wanted to lift covid-19 restrictions because he wanted the short-term economic boost that might have helped his reëlection chances. But he also demonstrably, passionately, even desperately wanted a vaccine, and he wanted to take credit for it. His Administration poured money into Operation Warp Speed. And then they dropped the ball, for no reason that we can now see—likely because there is no real reason. Someone might have thought that it wasn’t his job. Someone might have wanted to spite Pfizer for refusing the money that Trump was so generously bestowing. Someone else might have assumed, overconfidently, that Pfizer could always be coerced later into producing the additional doses. Trump himself was most likely golfing.

I have written a lot of articles and several books about Russia’s transformation under Vladimir Putin, but the experience I’ve always found hardest to describe is one of feeling as if creativity and imagination were sucked out of society after he came to power.

The reason is not so much censorship or even intimidation as it is indifference. When the state took over television, for example, it wasn’t just that the news was censored: it was that the new bosses didn’t care about the quality of the visuals or the writing. The same thing happened in other media, in architecture, in filmmaking. Life in an autocracy is, among other things, dull.

Nothing has reminded me of Russia quite so much as the Trump Administration’s belated effort to encourage Americans to vaccinate. It will build on an earlier effort to “defeat despair” about the pandemic, which either wasted or simply failed to spend more than a quarter of a billion dollars, because the officials involved tried to ideologically vet two hundred and seventy-four celebrities who may or may not have been asked to take part.

Many, according to documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, appeared to have been disqualified because they had been critical of Trump. Several said no, and only a handful, Dennis Quaid among them, accepted; Quaid then apparently backed out, and the campaign went dormant. Had it all been a scam? A particularly dumb version of a Hollywood witch-hunt? Probably not. It was probably another story about a President and an Administration that cares about slights but not about people.

I think that’s a very interesting observation. America used to be pretty good at doing things. But these past four years have shown us just how mediocre we are at getting even basic things right anymore. I doubt this is all attributable to Trump but he certainly escalated the phenomenon.

He’s turned America into the Trump Organization.

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That sad group above represents the current Republican Party. You can’t just blame Trump however. The whole party has basically thrown themselves head first into a rabbit hole and is still trying to pull the country behind them.

They should be careful. As this piece by J.V. Last shows, the Trumpian carnage among his own close allies has been epic:

…[T]he sheer number of people who had their lives and/or careers destroyed over four years of swimming in Donald Trump’s slipstream is kind of staggering.

So let’s take a walking tour through the human wreckage of the Trump years. 

Because, with just a few important exceptions—most notably the Republican Senate majority—pretty much everyone Trump touched, died.

(1) Paul Manafort was an anonymous conservative consultant who had parlayed his years as a political operative into untold riches. Until he took a call from Donald Trump and agreed to become his campaign manager. That was June 20, 2016. Manafort was fired on August 17, 2016.

Because of the 58 days he spent working for Trump, Manafort wound up losing everything. He lost his license to practice law. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 47 months in jail. In separate charges, he pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and witness tampering, and for this was fined $22 million and had an additional 30 months tacked on to his sentence. Probably not worth it. (Unless the alternative was getting whacked by some Russian mobsters, I guess).

(2) Michael Cohen was Donald Trump’s personal fixer, a guy who skated on the line of the law. Had Trump not become president, Cohen would have lived his comfortable life indefinitely. Instead, he was arrested, charged, convicted, and disbarred. He’s currently serving a three year stretch in prison.

(3) Jerry Falwell Jr. was the Kim Jong-Un of Liberty University, the maximum leader whose reign of terror allowed him to live an opulent lifestyle under the radar. Then he signed on to Team Trump. His—no judgments here—proclivities found their way out into the world and his behavior became so deranged and debauched that his father’s university pushed him out. He now wanders the countryside looking for pool boys with excellent business ideas and hoping that his $10.5 million hush-money package from Liberty will be enough to last him a few decades.

(4) Sidney Powell was an anonymous career attorney. She checked boxes as an AUSA and then high-powered corporate lawyer. She could have enjoyed her autumn years as a member of the lower-upper class and retired quietly. Instead, she’ll forever be remembered as the Crazy Kraken Lady.

(5) Jeff Sessions was a senator for life. Then he endorsed Trump. As a reward, he was gifted the AG job. And then publicly humiliated. And then fired. And then Trump campaigned against him when he ran for his old Senate seat. Which he wound up losing to a washed up college football coach.

I know that might sound like a bad deal. But at least he got to separate Mexican kids from their families, put them in cages, and then send their parents home without their children. And for a good ole’ boy like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, some things are priceless.

(6) Steve Bannon was an autodidact, film producer, layer game grandmaster, and chairman of a burgeoning global network of racist blogs. He even got to live gratis in a faux embassy with a replica Lincoln Bedroom. Then he took the cursed job of Trump campaign manager. Next thing you know, he’s getting rousted out of his stateroom on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht by the cops. He’s charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering and looking at possibly 40 years in jail.

His trial date is set for May 24, 2021.

(7) Michael Flynn was a respected retired general until he came into Trump’s orbit. He wound up pleading guilty to making false statements to the FBI. And then things went really sideways for him.

(8) Rudy Giuliani became America’s mayor in the aftermath of 9/11. If he hadn’t started working for Donald Trump, New Yorkers probably would have named an airport or a stadium or a bridge for him. He would have been put up on the high shelf with Fiorello La Guardia.

Instead, he’ll be remembered for waddling around, while . . . impaired. Farting and having his hair dye running down his face while trying to help the president of the United States overturn the results of a free and fair election through a series of lies. He’ll be remembered as a cautionary tale. As an enemy of democracy.

(9) Brad Parscale made bank from Trump in 2016 and then, like an idiot, accepted the Death Job of campaign manager. Next thing you know he’s fired. Then out of his mind. Then getting carted off from his house by the po-po, shirtless, like a Special Guest Star on COPS.

(10) David Pecker was the most powerful tabloid mogul in America. Then he turned his trash empire into an arm of the Trump campaign, because reasons. After a series investigations of his company’s role in working on Trump’s behalf, Pecker sold his tabloids to Hudson Media and was subsequently pushed out of the organization by the new owners. Leaving him limp and powerless.

(11) Steve King had been a racist crank with a House seat for a dozen years with no one outside of Washington being any the wiser. Suddenly Donald Trump descends like the great White Eagle and people start picking on King just because he thinks white supremacism is okay.

And then he draws a primary challenger and gets beat like a drum.

(12) Roger Ailes was like the Jerry Falwell Jr. of Fox News—a guy who got away with everything for forever because people were terrified of him. But Ailes signed onto the Trump train and the Trump train helped spark the #MeToo movement—I posit to you that Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo never achieve the salience they did absent the election of the guy from the Access Hollywood tape as president of the United States.

What a rogues gallery. We can only hope that the likes of Stephen Miller and Kellyanne Conway and Devin Nunes and Peter Navarro and Scott Atlas and all the other minions and collaborators get theirs too. But I have to say that I’d happily let them all get off easy if the Trump family has to answer for what it’s done:

(13) 300,000 Americans are dead today because of COVID-19. That number will continue to grow over the next 10 months. Many of those deaths—at least scores of thousands of them—can fairly be attributed to the actions of President Donald Trump.

Last writes:

By the way, that’s why I’m putting this list together. It’s not just the shameful joy of seeing bad things happen to bad people. It’s because it’s important to document this era in American politics and to remember what happened and who did what. Most of these guys—at least the ones who aren’t dead, or dying, or in jail—plan to just spend a few years golfing and hanging out at Trump Tower Istanbul before returning to a life of Davos panels, podcast stardom, and ambassadorships the next time a Republican becomes president with a minority of the vote. 

The Trump cult leaders, which includes almost the entire GOP congress, must never be allowed to forget what they did. Unless they are willing to abruptly change gears and do whatever they can to make up for what they’ve done, their names will forever be sullied by their willingness to accede to this assault on our democracy.

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Aaron Rupar at Vox wrote up Biden’s speech last night:

Over the past six weeks since Election Day, President-elect Joe Biden carried about his business while largely ignoring the circus surrounding President Donald Trump’s incessant lies about election fraud and refusal to concede. That changed a bit on Monday.

Speaking hours after the Electoral College officially voted to confirm his victory over Trump, Biden declared victory. He also criticized the president, whom he portrayed as on the wrong side of the struggle for democracy, for refusing to acknowledge the reality of his defeat.

And he took on Trump’s post-election attempts to overturn a legal election head on. It was strong:

Biden addressed the flood of failed lawsuits the Trump campaign has filed since the election and the Supreme Court’s refusal last week to take up a flimsy case that could’ve overturned his victory. He also praised state and local officials on both sides of the aisle for overseeing a fair election while refusing to be “bullied” by Trump.

“In America, when questions are raised about the legitimacy of elections, those questions are resolved through the legal processes. And that’s precisely what happened here,” he said. “All the counts were confirmed … none of this has stopped baseless claims.”

Later, Biden noted that “respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy,” adding that when Trump won four years ago, “it was my responsibility to announce the tally of the Electoral College votes to the joint session of Congress … I did my job.”

I don’t think I could have been this generous, but that’s just me:

Although a majority of House Republicans indicated in writing last week that they supported the aforementioned case that could have overturned the election results, Biden extended an olive branch, saying, “I’m convinced we can work together for the good of the nation on many subjects. That is the duty owed to the people, to our Constitution, to our history.” He also thanked the Senate Republicans who have already acknowledged his victory.

Biden has a cold apparently which is why he sounded hoarse. But for all his paeans to “unity” which I think he actually believes (although I’m hopeful that he’s not completely deluded about the chances for it) Biden was forcefully critical of the GOP’s assault on democracy in this speech and it was good. More of this please.

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