Month: February 2022

Of course he flushed documents down the toilet:

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday denied reports that he flushed documents down a White House toilet and said he was told he was under “no obligation” to turn over his administration’s records, a claim that flies in the face of presidential records law.

“Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” Trump said in a statement released by his Save America PAC after Axios reported on excerpts of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s upcoming book, “Confidence Man.”

Bloomberg White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs said Haberman’s reporting about the documents in toilets is “100% accurate” and that sources at the time confirm that staff found torn up pieces of papers in toilets and thought that Trump was behind it.

Trump has now faced days of questions and reports over his apparent flouting of the Presidential Records Act, which requires every White House to preserve memos, documents, and other memorabilia that is considered the property of the American people.

“In actuality, I have been told I was under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years,” Trump claimed in his statement.

The National Archives, which collects, sorts through, and later releases presidential records, has asked the Justice Department to investigate if Trump broke the law when he took documents to Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reported. In another sign of the seriousness of the situation, The Times reports that officials found possible classified information in the documents Trump belatedly handed over.

There are now at least four reported ways Trump sought to destroy documents while in the White House:

He ripped them up (as Politico first reported in 2018).

He ate them.

He dropped them on the floor.

And he flushed them down the toilet.

Axios, citing Haberman’s book, reports that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper.” 

Other reporters have verified this as well.

Here’s Trump’s full comments on the evidence that he stole documents. He seems somewhat perturbed.

Here’s a right wing politician and school teacher explaining why she should never be allowed to be a teacher again:

WATCH: Shelley Luther, a Texas GOP candidate and former teacher, said transgender children make her uncomfortable, and she complained that their classmates weren’t allowed to make fun of them. https://t.co/c8AX8IFpY8 pic.twitter.com/R25rfROza7

— Houston Chronicle (@HoustonChron) February 8, 2022

I once received a private tour of the Medical Leech Museum in Charleston, SC. There were live leeches, too, in aquariums. Not a joke. They are still used for reestablishing blood flow to severed limbs after they’ve been reattached. But not for curing Covid.

Andy Borowitz has some fun with that at Florida’s expense:

TALLAHASSEE (The Borowitz Report)—Joseph Ladapo, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s nominee for surgeon general, stirred controversy by urging the pharmacy chain CVS to carry leeches.

“The ancient Egyptians used leeches in medical treatments more than three thousand years ago,” Ladapo said at his confirmation hearing. “Unlike some quote-unquote vaccines, leeches have stood the test of time.”

Ladapo said that he was dismayed when he recently visited a CVS and found “plenty of masks and test kits, but no leeches.”

“There wasn’t even a leech aisle,” he added, shaking his head.

Praising Ladapo for “thinking outside the box” to combat the pandemic, DeSantis confirmed that he was mulling a leech mandate for Florida’s schools.

What’s crazy is humorists are having trouble keeping ahead of the crazies. Just when you think your joke is over the top, along comes the Soup Lady Who Broke the Internet and the Wisconsin GOP.

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

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“Not an isolated incident,” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tells CNN in promoting her upcoming book on Donald Trump, “Confidence Man.”

“I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged … and what the engineer would find would be wads of … either notes or some other piece of paper that, you know, they believe [Trump] had thrown down the toilet.”

They could have been anything from Post-Its to notes he’d written himself. There’s no way of knowing.

"I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged … and what the engineer would find would be wads of … either notes or some other piece of paper that, you know, they believe [Trump] had thrown down the toilet." – @maggieNYT pic.twitter.com/izJ53mD50S

— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) February 10, 2022

That might account for the man’s obsession with toilets not flushing to his satisfaction, Axios observes:

Why it matters: The revelation by Haberman, whose coverage as a New York Times White House correspondent was followed obsessively by Trump, adds a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents. Axios was provided an exclusive first look at some of her reporting.

Haberman reports Trump has told people that since leaving office, he has remained in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — whose “love letters,” as Trump once called them, were among documents the National Archives retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.

Zoom out: The news of White House toilet-flushing comes as the National Archives has reportedly asked the Biden Justice Department to examine Trump’s handling of White House records, amid the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

• • The Washington Post reports that National Archives officials “suspected Trump had possibly violated laws concerning the handling of government documents.” The National Archives later retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago, The Post reported.
  • Archives officials found possible classified material in the returned boxes, The New York Times learned.

While in office, the former president blithely flouted the Presidential Records Act, which required him to preserve written communications concerning his official duties.

• • Trump routinely tore up documents and after leaving office brought substantial written materials back to Mar-a-Lago.
  • A Trump spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment about the plumbing matter.

Former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman recounted to MSNBC this week something from her 2018 Trump White House book, “Unhinged.”

On a day Michael Cohen was leaving the Oval Office, she walked in and witnessed Trump chewing what he had just torn up.

“It was very bizarre because,” says Newman, “he is a germaphobe, he never puts paper in his mouth.”

Anecdotal, of course, but the anecdotes are piling up.

Some advisers were concerned about Trump’s many interviews with reporters as he tried to get ahead of forthcoming books on his presidency. But they felt Trump could not help himself. He tried to make each reporter feel as if they were getting “something special,” Mike Allen reported in June 2021. In a few cases, they did.

Haberman and the Times were often criticized for their unusual access to Trump and often softball interviews.

The Washington Post addressed the matter last week:

“It is against the law, but the problem is that the Presidential Records Act, as written, does not have any real enforcement mechanism,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. “It’s that sort of thing where there’s a law, but who has the authority to enforce the law, and the existing law is toothless.”

But while the Presidential Records Act may be toothless, concealment, destruction and misappropriation of govenment documents, including classified documents, are prosecutable in themselves. The question remains: Will the Department of Justice try to flush away evidence of those crimes by the Trump administration?

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You need it:

Just to clear things up, @RepMTG

Gazpacho: a vegetable-based Spanish cold soup
Gestapo: Nazi Germany's secret police pic.twitter.com/T9q76r706G

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) February 9, 2022

h/t to Tom Sullivan …

OMG https://t.co/HlnfZtOHJO

— Christine Pelosi (@sfpelosi) February 9, 2022

It appears that the American right wing is now interfering in the affairs of a foreign country: Canada. We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, they welcome foreigners to interfere here — as long as it’s on their side.

This piece in The Grid breaks it down:

Hundreds of people have been camped out in the icy streets of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, for more than a week, occupying the area around the nation’s government buildings. It’s a protest ostensibly stemming from some Canadian cross-border truckers’ objections to a Canadian requirement that those who cross the border be vaccinated against covid-19.

But a close look at several “Freedom Convoy” groups and crowdfunding efforts online shows the involvement of anonymous actors, deep-pocketed non-Canadian donors and prominent U.S. right-wing political figures.

Some of the largest Facebook groups responsible for galvanizing support, both ideological and financial, appeared to have been administered through a stolen account, Grid has found.

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The protests are not organized by Canadian trucking unions, the largest of which has come out against the protests. They also do not appear to reflect the values of most Canadians or most Canadian truckers: More than 80 percent of the Canadian public is vaccinated, including almost 90 percent of truckers, according to Canada’s minister of transport.

The speed at which the movement has raised millions of dollars raises red flags. A now-shuttered GoFundMe page raised nearly $8 million USD; a replacement crowdfunding campaign, on a self-described Christian platform called GiveSendGo, had raised more than $6 million by Tuesday morning, after just three days, with many donations of four and five figures.

The movement smacks of U.S. influence, said Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral scientist at the University of Regina who studies disinformation. “For sure, 100 percent, a large part of this is driven by cultural narratives that have emerged from the United States,” he said.

Right-wing politicians across the United States have praised and promotedthis small group. “The Canadian truckers … who are resisting bravely these lawless mandates and doing more to defend American freedom than our own leaders, by far, and we want those great Canadian truckers to know that we are with them all the way!” former president Donald Trump said at a Texas rally on Jan. 29.

That doesn’t mean that many of the protesters on the ground aren’t true believers — whether about vaccine mandates, broader right-wing causes or even more extreme ideologies, including white nationalism.

“They’re driven by a very deep connection to a cause that they feel to be just,” Pennycook said. “They’re acting in accordance with their attitudes and values, and it just so happens to be the case that a lot of the beliefs that they hold probably aren’t rooted in good evidence. There’s a lot of conspiratorial thinking and distrust of good sources and reliable sources.”

They are phony grievance junkies like most right wingers.

The piece goes on to trace a specific group of facebook pages connected to a woman in Missouri which were apparently hacked by unknown actors promoting this protest. Those pages were diaabled on Monday but there are others and the rightwing Telegram is apparently full of this stuff.

The usual reports of people defecating and urinating are making the rounds but I’m skeptical. People always say that about every protest. But there does seem to be proof that a group of them desecrated the war memorial last weekend and generally acted like hooligans. The AP reported some of them were carrying swastikas, although the protesters angrily deny that.

And then there’s the money:

In addition to Trump, Republicans including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Senate hopeful J.D. Vance of Ohio have encouraged the protests. Meanwhile, far-right influencers, like Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee have pushed their audiences to donate to crowdfunding platforms.

This movement has raised an astonishing amount of money

A GoFundMe organized for the protesters raised about 9.2 million Canadian dollars ($7.2 million) before the campaign was shut down on Friday. Many donations came from outside Canada, according to Ottawa’s police chief Sloly.

“We are now aware of a significant element from the U.S. that have been involved in the funding, the organizing and the demonstrating,” Sloly said.

GoFundMe said the campaign violated its terms and pledged to refund all contributions to the campaign. Organizers then moved their efforts to GiveSendGo, where they raised millions of dollars in a matter of days.

By comparison, Jan. 6 insurrectionists who ran campaigns on that platform in the months following the U.S. Capitol riots earned far less. A survey of 24 such campaigns, including eight supporting Proud Boys, revealed that they collectively raised less than $250,000 over the course of several weeks.

GiveSendGo released a statement on Monday, saying it has spoken with convoy organizers to ensure that “all funds raised will go to provide humanitarian aid and legal support for the peaceful truckers and their families as they stand for freedom.”

Republican leaders have called for investigations into GoFundMe for canceling the campaign.

I will be shocked if this doesn’t spread and end up here in the US and elsewhere. It this spreads they will attempt to cripple the economy and they might just succeed. That’s why they are being backed by the big players.

I’ve been waiting to see how Trump would react to the censure controversy and here is is:

He didn’t call his the “Old Crow” which McConnell actually co-opted by saying it is his favorite bourbon.

I sense he’s testing out a new message. He’s laying out the particulars against the administration while blaming it all on the “fraudulent election.” And he continues to slam RINOs which will be music to the cult’s ears. It could work.

This came from NY Times reporter Jeremy Peters, flogging his new book “Insurgency” on MSNBC, who said that Trump wants to prove that he’s the only person who can lead the GOP. He related a conversation he had with Bannon a couple of years ago in which he asked if Bannon thought Trump was grooming Pence as a successor.

Bannon said, “No, Trump wants the person who comes after him to lose by 40 points.”

I hadn’t thought of that but, of course, its exactly right. It’s all he cares about.

In a way, that’s lucky. The man Bannon thought he resembled had much grander ambitions:

When Donald Trump rode a golden escalator down to announce his presidential candidacy in 2015, the carefully choreographed scene before TV crews reminded a soon-to-be Trump advisor of scenes from one of the most effective propaganda films ever made.

“That’s Hitler!, Bannon thought, as the opening scene of Leni Riefenstahl’s seminal work of Nazi propaganda, ‘Triumph of the Will,’ flashed through his mind,” New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters writes in his new book, “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.”

In his notes on sourcing — which involved interviews with over 300 people, mostly while Trump was still in office — Peters explains that quotes presented in italics and in the past tense indicate “material from interviews conducted with the author on-the-record.”

Bannon’s immediate connotation to the Nazi propaganda film comes from the Trump 2016 campaign chief executive officer and former White House chief strategist’s longstanding fascination with the aesthetic techniques of Riefenstahl.

“He meant it as a compliment,” Peters writes. “As a documentarian himself who had studied and admired Riefenstahl’s work, Bannon saw some of her visual techniques in Trump’s production. To create the illusion that Hitler towered over everyone around him as a figure of superhuman proportions, Riefenstahl would keep him tight in her frame, often placing him on a higher plane than his adoring subjects.”

Naturally, Bannon jumped at the chance to join his campaign.

Mmmhmm. https://t.co/w3BTQBpS7X

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 9, 2022

The Huffington Post:

A constant theme of the 2016 election was the Republican belief that Hillary Clinton was a criminal because she used a private email server for government business as secretary of state.

“Lock her up!” and “Hillary for prison” chants and signs were mainstays at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies. Trump’s nickname for his Democratic opponent was “Crooked Hillary.”

Sure, there were other reasons that Republicans believed Clinton belonged in prison. But her emails were at the center of it all.

As secretary of state, Clinton set up a private email server for her government and personal business ― instead of having separate accounts. She said she did so because she didn’t want to have to carry around two mobile devices.

Clinton tried to separate, and hand over, the government emails for preservation, and she was hardly the first official to use a non-government account for personal business.

Yet the sloppiness and, in retrospect, horrible political decision, created an easy issue for Trump and Republicans to run against.

One of her most persistent critics was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who used his powerful perch as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to keep on the case of Clinton’s emails.

But on Tuesday, Johnson had no comment when HuffPost asked him about revelations that Trump literally ripped up government documents that he was supposed to preserve as president. He said he’d need to read up more on the issue.

The Presidential Records Act requires the White House to preserve documents related to a president’s official duties. Those materials should have been handed over to the National Archives when Trump left office.

But last month, the agency retrieved 15 boxes from his Mar-a-Lago residence, according to The Washington Post. Trump’s team continues to search for more documents.

Trump also frequently ripped up documents as president ― actions that could be criminal. Some of the records received by the National Archives had been torn and taped back together.

Republican senators were far less willing to go after Trump Tuesday than they had been against Clinton for her private email server.

“I know there are legal requirements, but I really don’t know enough to comment,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.

Yet in 2015, Cornyn was very concerned about Clinton’s server, saying it “raises serious concerns for Americans who believe in open government and the accountability of our highest officials.”

“I can’t comment on that. I don’t know about that,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) similarly said Tuesday. He, too, was deeply concerned about the proper handling of government information when it came to Clinton.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said there should be “accountability” for what Trump has done.

“His treatment of public records, which belong to us, the taxpayers, is another sign of his total and utter contempt for the law and norms and proper conduct,” he told HuffPost. “It must be that he has a lot to hide because he doesn’t want anybody to see the records of what he’s doing.”

Nobody really thought there was anything untoward about the emails. Nobody. Not in the press, not in the GOP not in the public. At best they thought they might be able to get a look at her personal correspondence to nose around in her private life. (The press and the GOP were dying to prove Bill was still philandering or that Hillary was gay or something…) It was the habit of many years of character assassination. It was sickening.

Now we have Trump literally tearing up documents, staffers putting them in burn bags and absconding with boxes of papers that should have been turned over to the National Archives and everyone shrugs. And his brain dead followers still chant “lock her up” at his rallies as he struts around like Mussolini on crack.

It’s infuriating. Outrageous, And, sadly, par for the course.

By the way, I see the same dynamics happening with Kamala Harris. It’s not the marriage stuff, although I’m sure they would pounce at the opportunity. But the media’s gossipy bitchiness is present for her too and the GOP is building up a full blown attack. Picture the right wing assault on Obama, the first Black president, with the media’s assault on Hillary Clinton, the first female presidential nominee and I think you get the picture.

I don’t think they’ve learned a thing.

The Republican National Committee’s censure resolution against Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger continues to reverberate through the halls of congress. That ill-advised phrase “legitimate political discourse,” referring to the Jan. 6 insurrection, has GOP officials tied up in knots, not wanting to offend their base while at the same time wanting nothing more than to change the subject.

You wouldn’t know any of this by the coverage on Fox News, however. As Aaron Rupar notes in his newsletter, Public Notice, the formerly fair-and-balanced network is barely covering the story at all. Instead, Fox hosts are focusing all their attention on the anti-vax trucker protests in Canada, which they are cheering on hour after hour. Former President Donald Trump has been egging the Canadian truckers on as well, sending out a statement of support on the letterhead of his supposed new company, Trump Media Technology Group, inviting them to use his new social media company (assuming it ever gets off the ground) and announcing that “thankfully the Freedom Convoy could be coming to DC with American Truckers who want to protest Biden’s ridiculous Covid policies.”

That’s right. Donald Trump is once again inviting “protesters” to Washington. There’s no word on which government building he wants them to storm this time, but you can be sure “it will be wild.”

He has not learned his lesson and neither have the right wing media networks who are ignoring Jan. 6 and pushing for more obnoxious pro-Trump right-wing demonstrations in the streets ahead of the November elections — which is actually the last thing the Republican establishment wants. The Cheney and Kinzinger censure has put the GOP congressional leadership in a bind, with reporters literally chasing them through the halls trying to get them on the record:

Why is Kevin McCarthy running like the Devil’s chasing him?😂#McDowellDemocrats pic.twitter.com/xRo4cYXv15

— McDowell County Democrats (@mcdowellnc_dems) February 9, 2022

In another hallway footrace, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the “legitimate political discourse” line referred to some people in Florida and refused to answer whether he supported the resolution. His deputy, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who succeeded Cheney when the latter was purged from the leadership, was a bit more straightforward, saying, “My reaction is the RNC has every right to take any action, and the position I have is that you’re ultimately held accountable to voters in your district.”

Over in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took the opposite tack, saying that Jan. 6 was a violent insurrection (as if that were really in dispute anywhere on Planet Earth). He then took a shot at the RNC censure but parsed the point pretty fine, saying that is problem was that the committee was “singling out members of our party who may have different views from the majority — that’s not the job of the RNC.” He has good reason to be concerned about that. The last thing he needs is Trump purity tests if he’s going to win back the Senate in November.

Republicans are feverishly working in the states to tilt the playing field by suppressing the vote and putting partisans in charge of the election machinery. But Senate elections tend to be very close these days, and they know they’ll need every vote they can get. McConnell understands that endless drama over the Big Lie will not be helpful to him in certain statewide races where they need to rope in independents and more moderate Republicans in order to win.

He got the public support from the usual suspects like Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, but for the most part Republican senators blabbered on about a “big tent” and how the RNC could speak for itself, as if they didn’t represent that party in the highest legislative body in the land. Not a single one came out and said the simple truth that can’t be uttered: Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

The situation in the House is problematic in a different way. Whereas McConnell has ostentatiously separated himself from Trump for all the reasons set forth above, McCarthy has a fractious caucus that’s highly tuned in to the Republican base, which is just as obsessed with the 2020 election as their Dear Leader, and just as thirsty for vengeance on the RINOs who dared to oppose him. Unfortunately, they are absolutely embracing the idea that the Jan. 6 Insurrection was “legitimate political discourse,” which explains why the RNC was so willing to throw Cheney and Kinzinger on the pyre. Unlike McConnell, McCarthy cannot afford much daylight between himself and Donald Trump.

The leadership of both houses want more than anything to be able to run their campaigns against Joe Biden and the Democrats. In normal circumstances, that would be obvious to everyone concerned. But Donald Trump, narcissistic as always, sees the 2022 election as a demonstration of loyalty to him, and fealty to the Big Lie is his litmus test. Whether the Republicans who roam the corridors of the Capitol like it or not, the base of the party is with him on that.

Just last month, the USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that a majority of GOP voters still believe Biden wasn’t legitimately elected. An even larger majority of Republican voters believe the Jan. 6 rioters “went too far, but they had a point.” These numbers are virtually unchanged from a year ago. As much as the GOP establishment may want their voters to move on, they are simply not doing so.

The RNC appears to have accepted this, and is acting accordingly. Spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez put it this way: “Outside of the D.C. bubble, our grassroots are very supportive of the decision to hold Cheney and Kinzinger accountable.” No doubt they are. If any of these other RINOs push back too forcefully, they’ll find out the hard way who’s really in charge. 

Salon