Skip to content

Month: August 2022

Crooked Donnie

Published by digby on August 10, 2022

Once a crook, always a crook

Trump announced that he had taken the fifth today in his deposition in New York with the state attorney general’s office. He says he had no choice because he is the victim of a witch hunt. Actually, that makes no sense. If it was a witch hunt there is little to be gained from not testifying where at least he could be on the record with the honest defense of his actions.

In a criminal trial the jury is not allowed to make any negative inference from someone taking the 5th amendment. In New York, that’s not the case in civil trials. So if AG James sues Trump the jury will make of that what they will and it’s reasonable to assume that any former president would not take the 5th unless he had to.

In other words, he took the fifth because he would incriminate himself if he didn’t.

Meanwhile, we have the results of making a criminal a president happening before our eyes. As Jonathan Chait writes regarding the Mar-a-lago raid:

In response to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, as is often the case, the revealing statements in the Republican Party come not from the fringe actors calling for civil war or defunding the FBI but the respectable statesmen in the mainstream. “No former President of the United States has ever been subject to a raid of their personal residence in American history,” complains Mike Pence on Twitter. “The idea that a law enforcement organization under a sitting president would raid the home of his predecessor, opponent in the previous election, and potential opponent in the next election, has no close parallel in American history,” editorializes National Review.

While it is factually true that there is no history of a former American president being raided by the Feds, these observations implicitly treat the FBI’s behavior as the source of the historic break. The reason Donald Trump is the first former president to be treated like a criminal is that he is the first former president who is a criminal.

We don’t know what evidence the FBI may have obtained when it searched for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Not even Trump’s most delusional acolytes doubt he repeatedly and flagrantly violated the Presidential Records Act by bringing boxes of White House material to Florida. It’s entirely possible this will be the only offense that is uncovered by the raid.

The Republican view of this has always been that record-keeping protocols by high-ranking members of the executive branch are matters of the utmost seriousness and that violations of it ought to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. National Review treated the FBI’s preelection announcement of an investigation into Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information with her emails, not as a case of FBI abuse but as a devastating indictment of Clinton, and it was still publishing stories two years later insisting she ought to have been criminally charged. Of course, those anti-Clinton arguments have always been bad. It would be wrong for Attorney General Merrick Garland to adopt the conservative movement’s rigid and unprincipled 2016 position and apply it to Trump.

But there is no reason to assume either that Trump’s potential offenses are limited to breaches of record-keeping restrictions or that the FBI has used these offenses as a pretext to lock him up. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, was nominated by Trump, and while he turned out to operate like a traditional Republican rather than a MAGA acolyte, this hardly makes him a presumptive partisan. Garland, who was confirmed with Republican support and has a deep streak of institutionalist caution, has treated Trump’s misconduct with consistent restraint.

And Trump has spent his life skirting the edges of the law. The New York Times reported that he and his father, Fred Trump, engaged in an elaborate fraud, including setting up fake companies with phony receipts, to allow Fred to funnel money to Donald illegally. Other reporters have found Trump continuing to use false accounting and abuse charitable donations in order to illegally enrich himself.

The Trump presidency was a long parade of alarmed subordinates reporting on his contempt for the rule of law and obsessive avoidance of any evidence that might implicate him in wrongdoing. He has berated lawyers for taking notes in his presence, citing the positive example of Roy Cohn, a lawyer he shared with several leading mobsters. It seems at least possible, even downright likely, that Trump’s paranoia about written evidence, which extended to flushing documents down the toilet, reflected something deeper than mere sloppiness. He certainly behaved like a man who had things to hide.

None of the Republican responses has left any room at all for such a possibility. Not only have they discarded their old Clinton’s emails–era view of record-keeping laws, they have pretended as if it is not even possible Trump could be guilty of a crime. “The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents,” hyperventilates Ron DeSantis, as if every leading Republican in America has roughly the same criminal exposure as a man who used to hang out with mobsters and boasted in public about bribing politicians.

If a Trump prosecution risks setting off some deeper crisis in the system, that is because Republicans formed a loyalty to a man who rose to his position by flouting the law. This is not the FBI’s fault. If Republicans don’t want the humiliation of a former president their base adores facing potential prosecution, they should have chosen a president who wasn’t a lifelong crook.

As ye reap so shall ye sow, dipshits.

He’s serious

Published by digby on August 10, 2022

I just don’t know what to say

COVID-19 fascism was the worst tyranny in American history, and those responsible must be held accountable so nothing like it ever happens again.

COVID-19 was used to launch the worst tyranny in American history, which we’re still facing even now. It was also the worst oppression in global history since the Third Reich. Just as that evil required a reckoning at Nuremberg, this one does as well. In this Nuremberg 2.0, we call witnesses that our elected representatives and law enforcement agents need to hear from in order to know the full extent of the evil, and who is responsible for it—so that this never happens again.

“Covid fascism”

1,030,933 have died to date since the spring of 2020. And this is what these people have taken away from that.

This isn’t our first rodeo

Published by digby on August 10, 2022

The DOJ understands how serious this is. The lack of the usual leaking is significant.

Following up on the post below, Here’s Josh Marshall with what I think is a measured, reasonable view of the DOJ’s decision to search Mar-a-lago:

If you read the reports from the biggest national news organizations what is most striking is how little they seem to know. They believe it’s tied to the 15 box document retention investigation which goes back like a year. But even that seems vague and they don’t seem to know much more. As I said above, this isn’t our first rodeo. Usually after an event like this the most sourced reporters are able to put together a pretty full picture pretty quickly. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. At least not based on the stories I’ve read. That speaks to an extreme secrecy uncommon even in the most delicate and politically-charged investigations. We know very little about what this is about.

I’m as much about messaging as almost anyone. Lies round the globe before the truth gets on its shoes and all that. But there are some cases where the facts will tell the story and set the narrative. This is one of them. I suspect they will show that a serious crime about which we do not yet know has occurred. The people in authority should simply follow the law. It goes without saying that any legal actions against the ex-President were going to lead to this tidal wave of fury and threats from his supporters. This is simply too hot a case for anyone who didn’t treat that as a given. We should also expect violence from at least some of the President’s political supporters. Jury selection starts today in the second trial of defendants in the Trump-inspired kidnap/murder plot against Gov. Whitmer of Michigan. What do we expect?

TPM Reader TS isn’t terribly impressed with the GOP threats.

How full of sound and fury signifying nothing the Kevin McCarthy rant is.  Obviously there will be nonstop faux fury investigations if the GOP takes the House and DOJ and everyone else knows this will happen no matter what they do or do not do.  If there are actual ongoing legal investigations, DOJ will be able to refuse to answer many questions anyway.  They will just sit there for Jim Jordan speeches.  They know it, so not much of a new threat.

I agree.

As a narrowly political matter, step back and see the broader context. Republicans have been trying very hard to keep Trump out of the midterms. They don’t want an election that is a choice between Biden and Democrats or Trumpism. They want a referendum about Biden and the general sense that everything kinda sucks. Until the summer that was working quite well and it may still work enough to hand them the Congress. Putting Trump at the center of things in the home stretch isn’t a plus for the GOP and they know it. They just have no choice.

Holding a criminal president to account is high stakes, unpredictable and necessary. I assume you knew that. In for a dime, in for a dollar. For my part, I knew it would be and I am content to watch the facts unfold in the knowledge that it is necessary for the well-being of the republic.

I am too. I don’t have my hopes up — it would be foolish to do so — but I think we need to at least see if the American justice system is capable of dealing with a rogue demagogue and his lunatic followers. If not, maybe we have even bigger problems than we knew.

The new “hoax”

Published by digby on August 10, 2022

Trump and his minions suggest the FBI planted evidence during their search

This makes me wonder more than ever just what in the hell is in those documents?

Here’s what the leadership of the GOP is telling their followers:

Here’s right wing media:

Trump’s lawyer:

They almost surely believe this is a great get-out-the vote strategy. I’m afraid they may inspire more than voting. This piece by Tim Alberta says why:

Because this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.

Think I’m being hysterical? I’ve been accused of that before. But we’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.

It’s tempting to think of January 6, 2021, as but one day in our nation’s history. It’s comforting to view the events of that day—the president inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—as the result of unprecedented conditions that happened to converge all at once, conditions that are not our national norm.

But perhaps we should view January 6 as the beginning of a new chapter.

It’s worth remembering that Trump, who has long claimed to be a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, throughout the 2016 campaign, reveling in chants of “Lock her up!” at rallies nationwide. (Republicans did not cry foul when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election.) It was during that campaign—as I traveled the country talking with Republican voters, hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon—that I began hearing casual talk of civil war. Those conversations were utterly jarring. People spoke matter-of-factly about amassing arms. Many were preparing for a day when, in their view, violence would become unavoidable.

I remember talking with Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old Navy veteran, outside an October Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve watched this country deteriorate from the law-and-order America I loved into a country where certain people are above the law,” Stauffacher said. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. Judges have stopped enforcing the laws they don’t agree with.”

Stauffacher went on about his fondness of firearms and his loathing of the Democratic Party. “They want to turn this into some communist country,” he said. “I say, over my dead body.”

This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.

On December 18, 2019, the day he was impeached for the first time, Trump tweeted a black-and-white photo that showed him pointing into the camera. “they’re not after me … they’re after you,” read the caption. “i’m just in the way.”

As I hit the road again in 2020, crisscrossing the nation to get a read on the Republican base, it was apparent that something had changed. There was plenty of that same bombast, all the usual chesty talk of people taking matters into their own hands. But whereas once the rhetoric had felt scattered—rooted in grievances against the left, or opposition to specific laws, or just general discomfort with a country they no longer recognized—the new threats seemed narrow and targeted. Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.

“They’ve been trying to cheat us from the beginning,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump was visiting during the early days of the pandemic. “First it was Mueller, then it was Russia. Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?”

I asked her to elaborate.

“The deep state,” she said. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party.”

This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.

What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.

“The Obama FBI began spying on President Trump as a candidate,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted this morning. “If they can do this to Trump, they will do it to you!”

“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”

“If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic,” the Texas Republican Party tweeted. “It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”

Adam Serwer: Conservatives believe Trump is above the law

It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall. Investigations of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were already more or less guaranteed; the question now becomes how wide of a net congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to exact vengeance on behalf of Trump and appease a fuming base, cast in probing other people close to the president and his administration.

Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.

“Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around.”

And then what? It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries. Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”

It’s hard to see how any of this gets better. But it’s easy to see how it gets much, much worse.

We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.

Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.

Yes, there is a risk to justice. It might make some people mad, for sure. But this logic only leads one way. The leaders of these deluded miscreants must be held above the law and these leaders know this which is why they are acting like a bunch of whining children every time they don’t get their way — their followers send them money and threaten to burn down the country, making every decision to follow the law a risk that the country will apart.

This is nothing more than blackmail and if we allow this to prevail we will lose everything.

This is on Marco Rubio and Rupert Murdoch who know better but are so thirsty for power and money that they simply can’t help themselves.

What’s in the boxes?

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 10, 2022

What’s in the warrant?

Politico:

Federal agents removed about a dozen boxes of materials from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and issued a warrant indicating the search pertained to possible violations surrounding classified information and the Presidential Records Act, a Trump lawyer confirmed to POLITICO on Tuesday.

News of the specifics of the search were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which wrote that agents walked away with roughly 10 boxes of material after the Monday search.

They could all be empty for all we know. Or not. Reports circulating say the content of documents sought is too sensitive even to describe.

Marcy Wheeler proposes a list of what might be in the 10 or 12 boxes. Likely, more than the Presidential Records Act is in play in the search given who visited Mar-a-Lago earlier this summer (CNN, emphasis mine):

In early June, a handful of investigators made a rare visit to the property seeking more information about potentially classified material from Trump’s time in the White House that had been taken to Florida. The four investigators, including Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section at the Justice Department, sat down with two of Trump’s attorneys, Bobb and Evan Corcoran, according to a source present for the meeting.

Bratt investigates espionage, Wheeler notes. Suggestions from the right that Trump merely retained personal keepsakes are bullshit.

Documents Wheeler speculates Trump might be reluctant to let go (Emptywheel):

Trump would be apt to take classified documents pertaining to the following topics:

    • The transcript of the “perfect phone call” with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other documents pertaining to his first impeachment
    • Notes on his meetings with other foreign leaders, especially Vladimir Putin and Saudi royals, including Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki
    • Information surrounding the Jamal Khashoggi execution (and other materials that make Jared Kushner’s current ties to Mohammed bin Salman suspect)
    • Policy discussions surrounding Qatar, which tie to other influence peddling investigations (for which Barrack asked specifically)
    • Intelligence reports on Russian influence operations
    • Details pertaining to security efforts in the lead-up to and during January 6
    • Intelligence reports adjacent to Trump’s false claims of election fraud (for example, pertaining to Venezuelan spying)
    • Highly sensitive NSA documents pertaining to a specific foreign country that Mike Ellis was trying to hoard as boxes were being packed in January 2021

For many if not most of these documents, if Trump were refusing to turn them over, it might amount to obstruction of known investigations or prosecutions — Barrack’s, Rudy’s, or Trump’s own, among others. Thus, refusing to turn them over, by itself, might constitute an additional crime, particularly if the stolen documents were particularly damning.

Click through to the Mike Ellis link above. It’s chilling.

Finally, Wheeler reminds that press complaints about non-release of the warrant (by the Department of Justice) are best directed to Trump himself.

Even conservative flack Hugh Hewitt agrees (Washington Post):

Still, the American public needs to see the warrant — all of it. The former president has a copy; he should make it public. It likely lists the items to be seized and the laws allegedly violated. The affidavit supporting the warrant is probably sealed, former prosecutors say, and Attorney General Merrick Garland can seek to unseal it.

Citizens need to know whether this a reasonable search based on probable cause of some crime by someone with access to Mar-a-Lago — as a judge has clearly decided there is probable cause to conclude — or yet another unmerited strike at the 45th president by the latest in the long line of former federal officials who have tried to take Donald Trump down a peg, or behind bars, and failed.

Release the warrant, Donald. Make our day.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Donald’s rendezvous with accountability

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 10, 2022

Banana Republic! he cried

The New York Times is running live updates this morning as TFG faces a deposition in New York City by attorneys from New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office. They mean to question him on Trump Organization business practices.

One key question this morning, CNN asks, is whether Donald Trump will answer questions or invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. That may depend on whether Trump takes the advice of his cut-rate attorneys or lies away under oath. Place your bets.

As I type this, reports say Donald Trump’s security detail at Trump Tower is preparing to transport him to his rendezvous with accountability.

New York Times:

The stakes for Mr. Trump are uncommonly high. While he has sat for numerous depositions over the years, he fought for months to avoid the testimony this week, which could shape the outcome of the investigation into the former president and his family real estate business, the Trump Organization.

The deposition comes at a legally perilous moment for Mr. Trump. Two days ago, while he was at his golf club in New Jersey, the F.B.I. searched his Florida home as part of an investigation into sensitive material that Mr. Trump took when he left the White House.

He has denied wrongdoing and lashed out at the F.B.I. search as “an assault” that “could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries.” He has also called the investigation by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, a politically motivated witch hunt.

He repeated his criticism on his Truth Social account. “In New York City tonight. Seeing racist N.Y.S. Attorney General tomorrow, for a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in U.S. history!” he wrote. “My great company, and myself, are being attacked from all sides. Banana Republic!”

See, nobody gets to turn the United States of America into a banana-republic dictatorship except Donald. He came close before he left office in 2021. He wants a do-over in 2024.

“If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… as long as I’m the dictator,” Trump told reporters.

No, wait. That was George W. Bush.

Stay tuned.

Update:

Hi-ho, the derry-o
The rat takes the Fifth

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Why didn’t they just issue a subpoena?

Published by digby on August 9, 2022
Well….

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner talks to Andrew Weissman about the Mar-a-lago raid:

To understand what the search might signal, I spoke by phone with Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor and F.B.I. general counsel who worked on the Mueller investigation. He is currently in private practice and a professor at N.Y.U. School of Law. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Merrick Garland was almost certainly involved in the decision to order the search, what criteria the government uses for asking a judge for a warrant, and the quickening pace of the Department of Justice’s January 6th investigation.

What’s your biggest takeaway from Monday’s events?

The usual way to get documents from somebody you trust is to give them a subpoena. Almost any time that the government is trying to get documents from a corporation, they do it by issuing a subpoena, or even by informal request. With any normal civilian, you will issue a subpoena and the person will collect the documents and produce them.

You use a search warrant, and not a subpoena, when you don’t believe that the person is actually going to comply. For me, the biggest takeaway is that the Attorney General of the United States had to make the determination that it was appropriate in this situation to proceed by search warrant because they could not be confident that the former President of the United States would comply with a grand-jury subpoena.

When you say he wouldn’t comply, do you mean that he wouldn’t recognize the relevant legal authority? He would destroy documents? Both?

It could be both. But one way would simply be to lie and say that you produced everything. Another would be to assert the Fifth Amendment’s “act of production” privilege. That might be the most benign. It’s a part of the Fifth Amendment that says you don’t have to produce documents in your possession if the act of producing them would be incriminating. So, for instance, there is a lot of speculation that this is about whether the former President has classified documents in his possession that he should not have. If he produced those pursuant to a subpoena, that would be incriminating himself, because it would show that he had them and knew where they were. The search warrant avoids all that. The F.B.I. just takes the documents, not asking the recipient to do anything.

Based on what you are saying, I assume that the Justice Department would need to convince a judge that a subpoena would not work. Is that accurate?

That is not accurate. The decision about whether to use a subpoena or to use a search warrant is a discretionary one made by the executive. A judge doesn’t weigh in on that. A judge doesn’t say, “I am not going to issue a search warrant because you could do this by subpoena.” That is not something that a court would weigh in on. But what the court would weigh in on is the following: in order to issue a search warrant—unlike a subpoena, where you don’t need any factual predication—there has to be a determination by a judge that there is probable cause of a crime, and that the evidence of that crime will be in the location that you seek to search.

And what about in terms of recency? If Trump took documents from the White House to Florida twenty months ago, would a judge want some reason to think that the documents are still there?

Yes. One of the requirements for the search warrant is evidence that the information will be there during the two-week period that the F.B.I. is authorized to do a search—the information is not “stale.” And that’s the term of art that people talk about. Is the information being presented by the F.B.I. to the court stale? What you are looking for is some evidence of recency. Why would [the material] still be in that location? Even if something happened eighteen months ago, that’s fine. But a judge might say, “What makes you think it is still in that location?” This is speculation, but you would think that there has to be at least one source who gave the F.B.I. information about what was there fairly recently, and that whatever they were looking for was in that location.

You alluded to this earlier, but why do you think Garland would have had to approve this? Just the fact that it’s a former President we are talking about?

Yes. In the spring, he reissued this memo that any steps involving a political figure would need to get approval [from D.O.J. leadership].

In the past six or seven years, we have learned that the government sometimes cares a lot about the handling of classified material. But, if that’s all it was, it seems possibly extreme to have that concern lead to the search of a former President’s home. When you heard that this might be the cause of the search, were you surprised?

That’s where I am trying to not get into what is really just speculation about what they are actually searching for. It could be sufficiently serious if there were classified documents that were taken, particularly depending on their nature. You could imagine them being quite sensitive. But let me just say: I didn’t have the reaction that this was tenuous or thin.

We know that the Department of Justice is looking into January 6th. And now there’s this raid, which may or may not be related. What are the issues that go along with investigating a former President? Are the standards different? You want everyone to be treated equally, but, at the same time, you want to be careful about investigating former Presidents, especially when the D.O.J. has a leader appointed by the opposite party.

The Attorney General is following the precedent that was set by the former Attorney General under President Trump, which is that these kinds of investigations need to be approved by the Attorney General. Sensitive political inquiries need to have that kind of oversight for exactly the reasons you said, to insure that there is essentially adult supervision and no hint of them being done for political or improper reasons. The current Attorney General said very clearly in his interview with Lester Holt that anybody who commits a crime is subject to the laws of this country, up to and including a former President. In terms of evaluating this on the merits, I am confident that Merrick Garland will judge it the way he would anything else.

When former Attorney General William Barr laid out the policy you just mentioned, some people viewed it cynically. Do you think that it was a good policy?

I think the idea that the Attorney General should have oversight over politically sensitive cases makes total sense. It’s a question of how it is applied. It was very suspect how Barr applied the standard, as I have witnessed and written about; he applied it to people like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone in a different way than he did to people in similar situations.

You wrote an Opinion piece for the Times last month, which was critical of how you believed the Department of Justice was going about the January 6th investigation. A lot has happened since then. Do you still feel that way?

It is great that a lot has happened since then. When I wrote that, I hoped that I was wrong. Up to that point, I had not really seen a lot of evidence of a robust investigation. My argument was that the January 6th committee was investigating this by looking at what Donald Trump and the White House were trying to accomplish in all of its facets, holistically, and not just what happened on January 6th itself—all of the ways in which this scheme was possibly perpetrated, whether it was influencing state electors or pressuring the Vice-President, or corrupting the Department of Justice by putting in flunkies who would falsely say that there was fraud. My hope was that you would look at all of that as a piece and investigate all of that as one overarching conspiracy. That was what the committee was doing, but it was unclear to me whether that was the approach that the Department of Justice was following. They seemed to have a more myopic view: just looking at what happened on January 6th and the lower-level people who stormed the Capitol, but not the White House and this grander scheme.

But you are more hopeful in terms of what you have seen since then?

Absolutely. 

Feel the momentum

Published by digby on August 9, 2022

Democrats are stoked

I don’t think the bill will make a huge difference in the election but if it gives the pols a lift, then good for them. The issue is abortion, guns, the assault on democracy and the spectre of a corrupt orange monster’s crazy corrupt party. But it’s always good to do good things for the people regardless of the politics.

Vulnerable incumbent Democratic senators like Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada are already planning events promoting the landmark legislation they passed over the weekend. Democratic ad makers are busily preparing a barrage of commercials about it across key battlegrounds. And the White House is set to deploy Cabinet members on a nationwide sales pitch.

The sweeping legislation, covering climate change and prescription drug prices, which came together in the Senate after more than a year of painfully public fits and starts, has kicked off a frenetic 91-day sprint to sell the package by November — and win over an electorate that has grown skeptical of Democratic rule.

For months, Democrats have discussed their midterm anxieties in near-apocalyptic terms, as voters threatened to take out their anger over high gas prices and soaring inflation on the party in power. But the deal on the broad new legislation, along with signs of a brewing voter revolt over abortion rights, has some Democrats experiencing a flicker of an unfamiliar feeling: hope.

“This bill gives Democrats that centerpiece accomplishment,” said Ali Lapp, the president of House Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC.

In interviews, Democratic strategists, advisers to President Biden, lawmakers running in competitive seats and political ad makers all expressed optimism that the legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — would deliver the party a necessary and powerful tool to show they were focused on lowering costs at a time of economic hardship for many. They argued its key provisions could be quickly understood by crucial constituencies.

“It is easy to talk about because it has a real impact on people every day,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the White House deputy chief of staff, said in an interview. The measure must still pass the House and could come up for a vote there later this week. “It’s congressional Democrats who’ve gotten it done — with no help from congressional Republicans.”

For younger voters, who polls have shown to be cool to Mr. Biden and his party, the package contains the most sweeping efforts to address climate change in American history. For older voters, the deal includes popular measures sought for decades by Democrats to rein in the price of prescription drugs for seniors on Medicare. And for both the Democratic base and independents, the deal cuts against the Republican argument that a Democratic-controlled Washington is a morass of incompetence and gridlock unfocused on issues that affect average Americans.

“It’s very significant because it shows that the Democrats care about solving problems, it shows that we can get things done and I think it starts to turn around some of the talk about Biden,” said Representative Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat running in a competitive re-election race, alluding to angst about the president as his national approval rating has hovered around 40 percent.

Adding to the Democratic Party’s brightening outlook were the results of the Kansas referendum on abortion rights last week, when a measure that would have removed abortion protections from the Kansas Constitution was overwhelmingly defeated. It was a stark reminder of the volatile and unpredictable political impact of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“I can kind of feel it on the streets, that there’s some change in momentum,” Ms. Titus said.

Indeed, in recent days, Democrats pulled ahead of Republicans for the first time this year when voters were asked which party they would prefer to control Congress — the so-called generic ballot test — according to polling averages maintained by the data-journalism website FiveThirtyEight.

Recipe for a dictator

Published by digby on August 9, 2022

Get ready for the purges

The following is an op-ed from the Wall St Journal about Trump’s plan to gut the civil service in order to insure that that the government is totally in his service:

President Trump’s Schedule F executive order, which I shepherded, eliminated job protections for policy-influencing federal employees. President Biden rescinded it, but it could—and should—be reissued by another president.

Career employees fill almost all federal jobs. Only 4,000 of the 2.2 million federal employees are political appointees. Career federal employees consequently do almost all the work of government. In theory, these career employees should be nonpartisan experts who neutrally implement elected officials’ policies. But in reality they have their own political views and policy preferences.

While many career employees faithfully implement the president’s policies, others don’t. Deborah Birx recently gave Americans a taste of this insubordination. Dr. Birx was a career employee tapped in 2020 to coordinate the White House Coronavirus Task Force. In her new book she boasts about advancing her own policies in defiance of senior White House staff. Senior appointees directed Dr. Birx to moderate lockdown recommendations in federal guidance. She instead deleted the offending materials, then reinserted them in less prominent places in the same documents. She describes this as “subterfuge” to “work around” senior appointees.

In hindsight it is clear the senior staff were right; Covid lockdowns went too far. But Dr. Birx’s actions wouldn’t have been justified even if she had been correct. Career employees should give their best advice to political appointees, but once politically accountable officials make a decision, career staff should implement it faithfully.

During my time in government, I saw what political scientists have long documented: Many federal employees reject this philosophy. At the White House I received frequent reports about career staff undermining presidential policies. Career employees routinely delayed producing new rules or produced drafts that couldn’t be used. As a result, many major regulations—such as the Education Department’s Title IX due-process protections—had to be drafted primarily by political appointees.

Career employees also frequently withheld vital information from political appointees. Career lawyers at the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, failed to brief political appointees about major lawsuits. Political appointees had to read public filings to learn what cases the agency was litigating and what arguments were being made in those cases.

Career staff at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division often wouldn’t work on cases they opposed for ideological reasons. They refused to enforce protections that say nurses can’t be forced to assist in abortions. And they refused to sue Yale for racially discriminating against Asian-American applicants.

This resistance, so widespread that it made national news, significantly delayed many policy initiatives and killed others. This behavior undermines our democracy. No one votes for career bureaucrats, and they have no authority to replace elected officials’ policies with their own.

This applies no matter which policies career bureaucrats sabotage. Conservatives widely opposed the Biden administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration vaccine mandate, but Labor Department career staff wouldn’t have been justified in slow-walking that rule. Courts decide the lawfulness of federal policies. (Eventually the Supreme Court struck the OSHA vaccine mandate down.) Career employees have no authority to block them unilaterally. Unfortunately, many do so anyway.

Career employees get away with this behavior largely because they have extensive removal protections. While it isn’t impossible to fire federal employees, it is difficult, uncertain and time-consuming.

Schedule F was developed to address this widespread misconduct and prevent its recurrence. We found a way for agencies to hold intransigent bureaucrats accountable. Schedule F would have made—and might still make—senior policy-influencing bureaucrats at-will employees. The order didn’t let agencies dismiss them for political reasons, but it enabled agencies to remove senior employees swiftly for poor performance or policy resistance.

In my research I learned this was the original vision for the civil service. The 19th-century reformers who ended the spoils system opposed removal protections. As George William Curtis, the era’s foremost civil-service reform advocate, argued, letting employees appeal dismissals would “seal up incompetency, negligence [and] insubordination” in the civil service. So while the Pendleton Act of 1883 strictly regulated federal hiring to prevent patronage, it intentionally kept civil-service employees at-will. The general federal workforce didn’t get removal appeals until a 1962 executive order.

Those protections now prevent the elected president from removing employees who try to undermine his agenda. For the federal government to answer to the American people, that needs to change.

Mr. Sherk is director of the Center for American Freedom at the America First Policy Institute. He served as a special assistant to President Trump on the White House Domestic Policy Council.

The civil service was formed to prevent exactly what this person believes the government should be. It was given independence to prevent corruption and political hackery and that progressive reform has served the country well. Needless to say, Trump and his accomplices find that to be inconvenient. It’ makes it difficult for them to steal and serve their Big Money masters.

Do not think this idea will be confined to Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis would take this idea and refine it as would any other Republican president. They are no longer democrats.