Month: March 2023

He screwed the pooch. Again.

TPM reports:

After days of pushback, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) finally broke his silence on the exclusive internal Jan. 6 footage access he gave to Fox News host Tucker Carlson — who spent months airing conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of the 2020 elections and the Capitol attack itself. 

Responding to staunch criticism from Democrats, McCarthy told reporters on Tuesday that none of the footage will be released to Carlson’s team or be broadcasted publicly before it is screened by Capitol police to make sure it doesn’t compromise the security of the Capitol building. 

“It’s many more hours of tape than we were ever told. They said at the beginning it was like 14,000 hours. There’s roughly almost 42,000 hours. We’re working through that. We work with the Capitol Police as well, so we’ll make sure security is taken care of,” McCarthy told reporters. 

Carlson has had what he described on his show as “unfettered” exclusive access to more than 40,000 hours of unreleased surveillance tape for days now. And McCarthy’s remarks Tuesday come only after he’s been backed into a corner by non-stop pushback from Democrats — who argue that allowing full access to an outside party like Carlson could create security risks for the Capitol and the people who work there.

In response to the criticism about possible security breaches, McCarthy emphasized that Carlson and his team are only interested in “certain parts” of the footage, saying that the team, for example, does not want to see “exit routes.”

“They’re not interested in it. They don’t want to show that,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy added that he expects the Jan. 6 security footage to be released “as soon as possible.” But he would not elaborate on the format of such a release. 

The California Republican also took the opportunity to try to turn the tables on Democrats, accusing the Jan. 6 committee of not taking the same precautions during their investigation last year.

“There’s times when the Capitol Police told me that they didn’t consult with them either on some of these routes, so that’s a concern,” McCarthy said.

He also dragged the panel for the footage they shared in public hearings, including showing then-Vice President Mike Pence leaving the Senate chamber after rioters breached the Capitol as well his own staff members being evacuated from his office wing.

“They went in and they showed our office … because they have a camera in our office. They never talked to any of us about it,” said McCarthy, who refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee.

Jan. 6 committee leadership quickly shot down those accusations.

“What we showed to the public was video that we vetted through general counsel, we vetted through the chief of the Capitol Police,” Jan. 6 committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MI) told reporters in response, according to the Hill. “And under no circumstances did we push out anything that we felt that would have violated any aspect of the security of this area.” 

He made a big mistake. It isn’t the first time…

Democrats are coming around:

The number of Democratic voters who think President Biden should be the party’s nominee in 2024 is rising, according to a new Emerson College national survey released on Tuesday. 

Seventy-one percent of Democratic voters said Biden should carry the party’s banner in the presidential election next year, up from 58 percent in last month’s Emerson College poll. 

Support for Biden to run for a second term is highest among 18- to 34-year-old Democratic voters, with 85 percent of the group saying he should run again. Only 15 percent of 18 to 34-year-old Democratic voters said someone else should be the nominee, according to the survey. 

Seventy-two percent of 35- to 49-year-old Democrats said Biden should be the nominee, while 28 percent said it should be someone else. Among 50- to 64-year-old Democratic voters, 61 percent said he should be the nominee, while 39 percent said it should be someone else. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats 65 years and older said he should be the nominee, and 33 percent said it should be someone else. 

The same Emerson College poll showed the president’s approval rating consistent with last month’s poll at 44 percent. His disapproval increase two points to 50 percent. 

Other polls also suggest that Democratic voters are warming up to the idea of a Biden 2024 run.

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released last week found that 50 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said the party has the best chance to win in 2024 with Biden, while 45 percent said they had a better chance with another candidate. That poll also saw a spike for Biden after November, when 54 percent of Democrat and Democratic-leaning voters said they had a better chance with another candidate. 

The threat of impending fascism has sobered Democrats up. They saw what happened when Orange Julius Caesar too the White House and they are not interested in playing games right now. Incumbency is perhaps the most powerful advantage any politician has. Fractious primary campaigns can be destructive. Nobody with a brain wants to take a chance that that freak could somehow get into the White House again.

Most impressively, the young seem to be the most cognizant of all this. That bodes well for the future.

And won victory after victory after victory

Anand Giridharadas took inspiration from his research for “The Persuaders,” and particularly from his chapter on progressive messaging authority Anat Shenker-Osorio. The left focuses so much on what it stands against that what the left stands for gets lost. It’s a habit we need to kick, she tells students. “We have to be for a thing.”

“As we fight against the neo-fascist right, let us not forget what we are for,” Giridharadas tweets in harmony.

In conversation this week hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library, Giridharadas explored “the possibility and the difficulty of persuasion in a time of polarization, disinformation, conspiracy theories, political violence, and more.”

But we should stop putting our political adversaries at the center of the progressive narrative, Giridharadas told the audience:

We are trying something hard and awesome. And at the risk of kind of mixing progressivism with patriotism, it is an awesome pursuit in history. Most of our ancestors lived in small, little monocultures in all kinds of different places in the world where they never met anybody who was different.

We are building an entire country on the idea that human beings are enriched through encounters with difference. And, even though there is this incredibly scary movement, it is not the protagonist of this drama. We are the protagonist of this drama. We have won victory after victory after victory to get here.

Look at this room. Most places in the world do not look like this room, right? And [opponents of the American experiment] are a barnacle on our progress. They are not prosecuting some awesome new revolution that is a cool, new idea. They have fought against every major advance of extending freedom to more people. They have lost virtually every time. They will lose again.

And I think we have to buck up, get our act together, talk and think like winners, and remember that the cause of the country we’re trying to fight for is an attractive cause, and make it attractive — joyous, your word [to a panelist] — and bring people in, not keep anyone out.

“When are you running?” an audience member shouted when Giridharadas finished.

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1631278596227465220?s=20

Freedom is a contested value, Shenker-Osorio’s research demonstrates. It is a word — better yet, freedoms, plural — that the left needs to reclaim as Giridharadas does above. Indeed, the political right uses the word as a shibboleth, a tribal signifier. As penile dislpay, if you will. A dominance move. Freedom is something the right hoards exclusively for its own faction. Using freedom that way, in this country, is a lie.

“They have fought against every major advance of extending freedom to more people,” Giridharadas insists. It is something the left should repeat, loudly, to drive home how much the right’s embrace of freedom is itself another Big Lie.

For the American experiment to keep succeeding, and for others to be persuaded to pursue it with us, people must be inspired. It’s something we too often forget. A Black man won the presidency uplifted by the inspiration in a single word.

“When are you running?”

And meanness?

The Fuck-your-feelings crowd is all about theirs. All the time. And America, fuck, yeah.

But what besides flag-waving and chest-thumping and damp-eyed singing of Lee Greenwood’s anthem does America mean to them?

Created equal?

Hanging together or hanging separately?

E pluribus unum?

Equal justice for all?

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?

Leave no team member behind?

Not damned likely.

It doesn’t seem MAGA holds any values more aspirational than every man for himself, cultural grievance, and not seeing white dominance slip. Their America is more about shibboleths and empty symbols, about tribes and owning the libs. In Jesus’ name. “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs” (if you know the reference).

Everyone else? Fuck ’em.

I posited to two vets over lunch recently that this country holds up the military as America’s best. Service. Duty. Sacrifice. Everyone has a job. Everyone gets fed, housed and clothed, medical care. Leave no team member behind. A code of honor: you watch my back, I watch yours.

But inside the fence line only. Step outside into the civilian world and America is dog-eat-dog. Taxes are theft. I’ve got mine, screw you.

I asked, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

The vets, puzzled, shook their heads. For good reason.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) opposes President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness proposal.

Apparently, asking Americans to help out fellow Americans for the benefit of America is un-American. Legally and morally wrong, says Cotton.

Hell, Tom, this American paid decades worth of taxes to fund tens of thousands of miles of interstate highways I’ve never driven. And for a court system I’ve never accessed. My parents and grandparents’ taxes paid for rural electrification even though they always lived in cities. America is a better place for it. For everyone. Your point is?

How about Sen. Mike Lee, Republican of Utah. whose goal is to tear out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by the roots and make the USA a meaner, poorer place where Americans too aged and worn down to keep toiling die sooner and in poverty?

Everything we’ve added since the 1930s is government overreach, in Lee’s view.

I tweeted in reply: “Mike, I kinda like knowing hurricanes & tornadoes are coming my way & using GPS to find my way, that my hamburger won’t kill me & produce grown via New Deal aqueducts is trucked over Eisenhower interstates & my plane won’t crash into yours & I won’t get polio.” I could add much more to that list, of course.

Is making the U.S. a grimmer place where life is solitary, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” what MAGA Republicans dream of? Because America can no longer afford Americans? Fuck, yeah?

And fuck the Ukrainians too? Because America (its spotty record nothwithstanding) no longer attempts even the pretense of pulling for underdogs fighting for survival against tyranny?

What feels the fuck-your-feelings have.

The only thing American about them are their birth certificates.

Here’s an interesting new wrinkle in the American First populism of the Republican Party. Some MAGA oxes are potentially being gored and they don’t like it:

Donald Trump’s latest salvo in his trade war with China is raising hackles among fellow Republicans from farm states, a crucial voting bloc in the 2024 GOP primary.

The former and would-be future president pitched a new proposal Monday to overhaul the U.S. trading relationship with Beijing, part of a wave of anti-China rhetoric surging through Washington in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon flap earlier this month. But while there is consensus within the GOP on taking a tough line, many rural Republicans were quick to reject Trump’s calls to slap new tariffs on Chinese goods — since Beijing targeted the U.S. farm economy during the former president’s last trade war with China. The rare pushback, in public and private, presents an early break with some representatives for one of his key constituencies: rural Americans.

Trump argues his recent proposal, which also includes revoking China’s preferred trading status, would reduce “taxes” on “American producers” in order to “completely eliminate” U.S. dependence on China. But key farm state lawmakers say it’s more complicated than that and they worry Trump’s plans, should he be reelected, would inflict new harm on the U.S. agricultural economy, which currently relies on exports to its biggest market: China.

“There are serious trade disparities that should rightfully be raised, but we should be honest about the potential economic impact to rural America,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.).

Another farm state Republican lawmaker was more blunt when asked about how Trump’s new trade proposal could impact the U.S. agriculture economy, calling it “fucking suicide” for rural communities.

Trump’s last tariff war with China originally targeted China’s steel dumping but provoked crippling retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural exports to China — hitting farmers who were already struggling financially. Rural families, especially on small farms, felt the economic toll. Farms increasingly defaulted on their loans as China looked to Brazil and other foreign markets for farm exports, even after Trump spent $28 billion in federal funds on bailout payments. Trump eventually signed a trade deal with Beijing that he claimed would result in China purchasing $50 billion in U.S. farm goods, something China has failed to live up to. Tariffs on billions of dollars on Chinese goods put in place by Trump remain today. The Biden administration, which is reviewing the tariffs, has made no moves to ease them in the past two years.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a staunch Trump ally, cautioned against new trade moves that could hurt American agriculture. “I can understand what he’s doing — China is our biggest adversary,” Tuberville said. “But we’ve got to be careful about tariffs on farmers.”

Trade wars have a habit of getting messy, don’t they? The Biden administration is probably keeping those tariffs in place for political reasons as much as anything else. Lifting tariffs on China in this environment would be very controversial — and the ones screaming the loudest would be the very people who are afraid of Trump’s promises to do more of it. No good deed goes unpunished.

Trump was always clueless about trade and he hasn’t learned anything. He thought that he could strong-arm China just by throwing some tariffs on their goods and nobody would be hurt but them. It doesn’t work that way, not that he knows that, even now. Biden has taken a different tack with bills like the CHIPs Act which encourages manufacturing in America.

It will be interesting to see how DeSantis and the other wannabes handle this. It’s a dicey issue in the MAGA base.

Election deniers are embedded all over the place

We’ve stopped talking about this. That’s a mistake. From TPM:

Since losing their midterm elections, several election deniers have sought leadership positions within their state Republican parties, all part of a national play by Trump supporters and Big Lie enthusiasts to keep election denialism alive and well, while they seek more control over local elections.

Two-thirds of the 345 election deniers who ran for office in 2022 won their races, according to a Brookings Institution study. But many, like former community college teacher Kristina Karamo, still lost, particularly in battleground states.

Karamo was running to become Michigan’s secretary of state during last fall’s midterm elections. The Trump-endorsed nominee argued as part of her campaign platform that the state’s election systems were vulnerable to fraud. True to form, Karamo even filed a lawsuit ahead of the election to try to force Detroit voters to either show up to polls or pick up absentee ballots in person, a legal challenge inspired by claims from Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked propaganda film. The suit was swiftly shot down.

She lost her race by 14 points, but that wasn’t the end of her election-denying crusade: On Feb. 19, Karamo beat out 10 predominantly far-right candidates to become chair of the Michigan Republican Party, which she said needed to be rebuilt into “a political machine that strikes fear in the hearts of Democrats.”

Karamo was just one part of a recent wave of election deniers who ran for secretary of state who are now seeking to take the reins of their state’s Republican Party. Kansas Republicans similarly elected Mike Brown, a former Johnson County commissioner and conspiracy theorist, to chair their party organization after he lost his bid to become the state’s chief elections officer in November.

In Colorado, Tina Peters – the former Mesa County Clerk and Big Lie truther facing felony charges for an alleged election equipment security breach tied to her 2020 election-overturning efforts –  is also running for the state GOP’s chair after losing the Republican nomination for Colorado secretary of state. Her pitch? “There’s no way a jury of 12 people is going to put me in prison.”

This trend appears to be part of the Trump base’s ongoing “precinct strategy,” a plan in which far-right Republicans fill the lower ranks of their state parties in order to keep the former president’s Big Lie relevant in the GOP’s broader messaging. The strategy was created by Dan Schultz, an Arizona lawyer who’s aligned himself with the far-right Oath Keepers militia; he’s promoted the strategy in conservative circles for over a decade, and even (self-)published a book on the topic in 2017.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon first promoted the idea on his “War Room” podcast in 2021. “We’re going to take this back village by village,” he said in an episode from that May, “precinct by precinct.”

Since he boosted the idea, thousands of right-wingers have taken low-profile jobs within state Republican parties and election administration. “We’re signing up election inspectors like crazy right now,” a Wisconsin party official told ProPublica in September 2021. Trump has since endorsed the plan in an email to his supporters.

Precinct officers are responsible for routine tasks like door-knocking on an individual level, but collectively they wield some power within the state party: from working the polls on Election Day to electing high-ranking party officials, like Karamo.

Far-right party chairs, once installed, can use their seats to influence elections in a myriad of ways, specifically as it relates to messaging around the election, experts say.

“The problem with election deniers running state parties is that they’re going to continue to support candidates and run messages that are going to undermine people’s confidence in the process,” Rick Hasen, an election law scholar and law professor at UCLA, told TPM.

“Parties can play a vital role in restoring some of our norms if they support candidates who will concede if they lose, if they provide endorsements for those who follow the rule of law and encourage voter participation,” Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer for programs at the Election Center, told TPM. If party chairs choose to spread mis- and disinformation instead, she said, “we will see further degradation of the confidence in our elections.”

They didn’t manage to prevail in their various attempts to deny the outcome of the 2022 election. But they are still in the learning process. I would expect them to be much more coordinated and proficient in 2024. Will everyone else be ready for this? I wonder.

Say it ain’t so

The Washington Post reports that FBI agents argued with prosecutors over the Mar-a-Lago search saying that there was no need for a warrant after the president assured the DOJ that all the classified documents had been found back in June. Yeah, how did that turn out?

Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.

Starting in May, FBI agents in the Washington field office had sought to slow the probe, urging caution given itsextraordinary sensitivity, the people said.

Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June, after Trump’s legal team asserted a diligent search had beenconducted and all classified records had been turned over, according to somepeople with knowledge of the discussions.

The idea of closing the probe was not something that was discussed or considered by FBIleadership and would not have been approved, a senior law enforcement official said.

This account reveals for the first time the degree of tension among law enforcement officials and behind-the-scenes deliberations as they wrestled with a national security case that has potentially far-reaching political consequences.

The disagreements stemmed in large part from worries among officialsthat whatever steps they took in investigating a former president would faceintense scrutiny and second-guessing by people inside and outside the government. However, the agents, who typically perform the bulk of the investigative work in cases, and the prosecutors, who guide agents’ work and decide on criminal charges, ultimatelyfocused on very different pitfalls, according to people familiar with their discussions.

On one side, federal prosecutors in the department’s national security division advocated aggressive ways to secure some of the country’s most closely guarded secrets, which they feared Trump was intentionally hiding at Mar-a-Lago; on the other, FBI agents in the Washington field office urged more caution with such a high-profile matter, recommending they take a cooperative rather than confrontational approach.

I’ll let Peter Strzok explain why this is totally bizarre.

An astonishing article. In 20 years of working cases involving classified information, I never – not once – encountered prosecutors who wanted to get a search warrant and reluctant – even refusing! – agents. The other way around, sure.

The article points to a damning fear in the FBI stemming from political fear, not from fact.

“The FBI agents’ caution also was rooted in the fact that mistakes in prior probes of Hillary Clinton…had proved damaging to the FBI”

Really? Name one. I’ll wait.

“Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June, after Trump’s legal team asserted a diligent search had been conducted and all classified records had been turned over”

How’d that work out?

Oh, right, Trump still had 100+ docs.

Trump, Barr, Durham, and others successfully chilled the FBI’s willingness to investigate anything related to Trump.

The FBI handled Trump with unprecedented kid gloves, afraid to follow the facts for fear of political blowback, delaying the investigation for months.

“They also heard from top FBI officials that some agents were simply afraid”

You know what would go a long way to erasing that fear?

Leadership that protected agents from political blowback, allowing them to do their job.

Originally tweeted by Pete Strzok (@petestrzok) on March 1, 2023.

I would suggest this actually indicates that there are some very loyal Trumpers in the FBI. Surprised? I’m not. And like so many others (Mike Pence, please answer the white courtesy phone) the more Trump degrades them the more they love him. Sure, maybe they were afraid. But I’d guess quite a few just didn’t want to see Dear Leader sullied. Again.

It’s a nice idea but really, why bother

David Wallace Wells in the NY Times asks us to imagine what would have happened with the dialog around the origins of the pandemic if we could just all get along. It’s true that on a different planet we could imagine such a thing. Unfortunately we live on a planet where the right wing is batshit insane so reasonable dialog is impossible.

Steve M makes the point well:

But we can’t “imagine that none of this was presented … in partisan or nationalistic terms.” We can’t “imagine that Donald Trump had not been president and that nobody used the term ‘bioweapon'” — or, more memorably, the phrase “China virus,” a name Trump first endorsed on March 11, 2020, when COVID was barely a presence in much of the United States, and then used repeatedly in speeches and on Twitter.

Going up fast. We need the Wall more than ever! https://t.co/7TxErJKAgT

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 10, 2020

Right-wingers poisoned our COVID discourse from the start, the way they poison our discourse on so many other issues. Writing about our COVID debates as if they can be imagined without right-wing demagoguery is like talking about the real estate market in East Palestine, Ohio, as if the train derailment never happened. The housing stock is wonderful! The schools are first rate! Yes, but there are deadly toxins in the air, water, and soil. The derailment determines what we talk about when we talk about East Palestine, just as right-wing demagoguery sets the terms for how we talk about … well, pretty much anything these days.

Instead of saying that “we” — meaning right-thinking liberals — deserve blame for failing to advocate better lab safety, Wallace-Wells should be angry at the right for making reasonable debate impossible. We’re seeing it again as Republican politicians and the right-wing media respond to news that the Department of Energy believes the pandemic resulted from a lab leak, a conclusion the FBI had already reached. Downplayed in right-wing rhetoric — which is flooding the zone right now — is the fact that other agencies still dispute this conclusion, as The Washington Postnoted on Monday:

… other intelligence agencies involved in the classified update … were divided on the question of covid-19’s origins, with most still maintaining that a natural, evolutionary “spillover” from animals was the most likely explanation….

The overall view — that there is as yet no definitive conclusion on the virus’s origin — has not changed since the release of an earlier version of the report by the Biden administration in 2021, according to the officials.

“The bottom line remains the same: Basically no one really knows,” one of the officials said.

Moreover, it appears that no agency believes that the virus was altered in the lab.

But the agencies are united, the official said, in the view that the virus was not developed as a bioweapon.

“‘Lab’ does not equal ‘man-made,’ the official said, noting that lab workers could have collected the virus in nature and stored it at the lab from which it escaped. “Even if it was a leak from a lab,” the person added, intelligence analysts “still think it would be a naturally occurring virus.”

If even agencies that believe the virus spread via a leak believe it was “a naturally occurring virus,” then presumably it was not even the product of “gain of function” research designed to test responses to potential future pathogens.

But the agencies’ actual conclusions — and ongoing uncertainty about whether a lab was involved — aren’t preventing Republican demagogues from proclaiming that (a) it’s settled fact that COVID came from a lab and (b) it’s certain or nearly certain that the virus was engineered, in all likelihood as a bioweapon:

Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) bluntly asked at the House Select Committee’s hearing about Communist China if the totalitarian regime created the coronavirus as a bioweapon.

Directing his question to former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, Banks cited a recent statement from FBI Director Christopher Wray indicating that the coronavirus came from a Wuhan lab.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”

… In his question, Jim Banks took it a step further by asking Pottinger if the virus did not simply originate from a lab leak, but if China actually created a bioweapon.

“Mr. Pottinger, less than an hour ago, the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, confirmed that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab. Do you think there is a chance that the Wuhan lab was involved in bioweapons research?” asked Banks.

… “We know for certain that the Chinese military is involved in research in coronavirus,” [Pottinger] said. “We know that they were experimenting using U.S. technology to work on chimeric viruses. That is ones that had been engineered.”

“We know that the Chinese government and military had been involved in trying to develop vaccines for coronaviruses. I think that this is an area that there is still a great deal of information that has yet to come out that will show that there was an enormous amount of interest,” he added.

(Emphasis added.)

Christopher Wray confirmed nothing. But this is how the right dictates the terms of the debate. If the rest of us feel we can’t talk about lab safety without feeding right-wing demagoguery, you can’t blame us.

Also, please note that the right-wing narrative — ChiComs deliberately unleashed COVID on the world — suggests that we don’t have a lab safety problem. In the view of the right, the Chinese are evil supervillains. Supervillains don’t make mistakes — every diabolical thing they do is deliberate. So maybe the right deserves even more of the blame for the fact that we’re not talking about lab safety.

This whole thing makes my head hurt. Obviously, we should worry about zoonotic transmission and worry about lab leaks and we should worry about bioweapons too. These are all threats to one degree or another. But when you’re dealing with wingnuts there are only cartoon villains and we end up where we are now. If we don’t deal with that, none of the rest of it will matter.

Say it ain’t so!

It looks like the hard right ideologue is making some big bucks for destroying America. nice work if you can get it. Heidi Pyzbla in Politico has an article entitled

Dark money and special deals: How Leonard Leo and his friends benefited from his judicial activism: The Federalist Society co-chairman’s lifestyle took a lavish turn after he became Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations.

It should be shocking but really, at this point, it’s not. They’re all a bunch of crooks. These people aren’t getting rich from writing books or giving speeches or even sinecures on corporate boards. They’re getting rich because they have corrupted government in favor of the wealthy and their special causes:

A network of political non-profits formed by judicial activist Leonard Leo moved at least $43 million to a new firm he is leading, raising questions about how his conservative legal movement is funded.

Leo’s own personal wealth appeared to have ballooned as his fundraising prowess accelerated since his efforts to cement the Supreme Court’s conservative majority helped to bring about its decision to overturn abortion rights. Most recently, Leo reaped a $1.6 billion windfall from a single donor in what is likely the biggest single political gift in U.S. history.

Fundraising reports for 2022 have yet to be filed but spending by Leo’s aligned nonprofits on his for-profit business in 2020 and 2021 demonstrates the extent to which his money-raising benefited his own bottom line. And it shows how campaign-style politics — and the generous paydays that go along with it — are now adjacent to the Supreme Court, the one U.S. institution that’s supposed to be immune to it.

A POLITICO investigation based on dozens of financial, property and public records dating from 2000 to 2021 found that Leo’s lifestyle took a lavish turn beginning in 2016, the year he was tapped as an unpaid adviser to incoming President Donald Trump on Supreme Court justices. It’s the same period during which he erected a for-profit ecosystem around his longtime nonprofit empire that is shielded from taxes. Leo was executive vice president of The Federalist Society at the time.

The for-profit and nonprofit entities share more than just Leo’s involvement: The same longtime ally managing the books for two of his new leading nonprofits, Neil Corkery, is also chief financial officer of Leo’s for-profit company, POLITICO confirmed in IRS filings. One of those nonprofits paid the for-profit $33.8 million over two years.

“That’s a classic type of situation the IRS looks into if it appears you [via a nonprofit] are shoveling money to yourself in a for-profit context,” said Philip Hackney, an expert on tax law and charities who worked in the Office of the Chief Counsel at the IRS.

Leo’s Virginia-based CRC Advisors — a political consulting firm that was created in 2020 and for which he is chairman — declined to say what services it provided for the $43 million payments.

POLITICO also asked CRC how much of the millions in spending since 2016 by his aligned nonprofits Leo has kept for himself and about concerns by ethics experts that the lack of disclosure underscores the need for greater transparency around the court. Leo did not respond to multiple requests for comment. CRC also did not comment on Corkery’s role.

“CRC Advisors puts its clients’ money to work more effectively than any other enterprise of its sort and we are blessed to be able to have this kind of impact in our country,” the company said in a statement.

A web of nonprofits

The majority of CRC’s payments came through The 85 Fund, a rebranded dark money group that Leo has said he plans to use to fund conservative causes nationwide. Corkery and his wife, Ann, founded and ran the nonprofit under a different name for more than a decade, during which time Leo directed funds toward it. Such nonprofits are exempt from taxes and not required to disclose donors. It is now run by Carrie Severino, a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.

Read the whole thing. it will make you sick.

He’s Nixon

There is some new polling out this week on the nascent Republican primary which shows that former president Donald Trump has gotten a little bump in the last month or so.

An Emerson poll shows Trump leading Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 55% to 25%, while the Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows him over DeSantis, 47%-39%. DeSantis had been leading Trump by 4 points last month. The GOP polling firm Echelon Insights, meanwhile, has Trump at 46% and DeSantis 31% and the big kahuna, Fox News, has Trump over the Florida governor, 43%-28%. It would appear that at the moment that despite all the DeSantis hype, Trump is still the favorite among GOP primary voters.

To further illustrate that point, here’s a classic moment this week from Fox News, which is clearly trying to push DeSantis’ candidacy:

Kilmeade desperately trying to find someone in a FL diner who wants Desantis for president. It doesn’t go well. pic.twitter.com/IxJPYa9lVF

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 28, 2023

It’s still not obvious to the GOP establishment, which includes the right-wing media, even after all this time that their voters really do like Donald Trump. Some obviously like him more than others. The “Always Trumpers” appear to make up about 30% of the party, a substantial bloc. But the rest of the party at least sort of likes him too, even if they might wish he’d cause less trouble. DeSantis is more of an idea at this point, maybe even a backup in case Trump gets impossibly snarled in legal trouble or keels over. But no one should kid themselves that GOP voters no longer like Trump.

DeSantis hasn’t declared yet but he’s clearly running. He’s recently been traversing the country giving speeches in blue states obviously trying to get national press and raise his profile beyond the hardcore right-wing media audience that sees him on Fox News. To that end, he’s also published the obligatory campaign book, “The Courage To Be Free,” and has set out on the requisite book tour.

The book looks like it’s going to be a bestseller, but I will be shocked if more than 10% of those who buy it can get through more than a few chapters before they relegate it to the bookshelf or the garbage can. It’s a really tough read, so boring that it makes you look longingly at that huge tome on the history of the federal reserve you’ve been avoiding for years now. As Jennifer Szalai memorably quipped in her devastating review in the New York

For the most part, “The Courage to Be Free” is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.

Chat GPT would likely be more entertaining. That’s because, by all accounts, this boring book is an accurate reflection of the man himself. He’s a dour, withdrawn, cold automaton who many people who know him really can’t stand. Not only does nobody want to have a beer with him, but they are also downright hostile to being in the same room with him. In a profile for the Atlantic, Mark Liebovitz quotes a former Florida lobbyist saying, “I’d rather have teeth pulled without anesthetic than be on a boat with Ron DeSantis.” In another profile by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, an anonymous politician says, “Ron’s strength as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck. Ron’s weakness as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck.”

He seems nice, doesn’t he?

Ron DeSantis is anything but a happy warrior. In fact, he doesn’t appear to like human beings very much at all which seems to me to be an odd characteristic for a politician. But it isn’t unprecedented. DeSantis doesn’t go into much detail in his book about anything personal but he does make a point of saying that his parents were originally from Ohio and Pennsylvania and therefore imbued in him “rust belt values” even though he grew up in Florida. He came from a middle-class home, excelled in school and went to Ivy League schools by dint of his own hard work — and he makes quite a big deal about how he didn’t fit in with all the prep school rich kids. He spends a great deal of time railing on the elites and how he felt their scorn and proudly says that he left the liberal academy more conservative than he went in. It’s hard to tell if his sense of grievance about all that is contrived to make himself more attractive to the Republican base or if he really feels it. 

The contrast between him and Trump is quite interesting. Trump doesn’t really like to mingle with average people except when they are paying customers at one of his properties. The way people react to Trump is like fans in the presence of a celebrity — they think he’s glamorous and exciting (for some reason.) And Trump feeds on the crowd’s love. DeSantis could not care less about them.

As I was slogging through his dull assault on literature it came fully into focus that despite all his whining about “woke” (a word which must come up 635 times) culture war grievances and hostility to the press, he’s not like Trump at all. He’s much more like another disgraced Republican president: Richard Nixon.

Like DeSantis, Nixon had a naturally introverted, withdrawn personality. Nixon, like DeSantis, had great resentment toward the so-called elites and it colored his worldview in toxic, distorted ways. Those distortions led him down the path of immorality and corruption that culminated in his infamous disgrace. This attitude is not healthy for a political leader.

There’s no reason at this point to believe that DeSantis is as deeply corrupt as Richard Nixon. But then when Nixon first ran for president people didn’t know that about him either (although there were certainly hints of it.) When he ran again eight years later he had honed his skills at exploiting the culture war issues of that time — which included a real war—- and he won narrowly in a three-way race. Four years later he was re-elected in one of the most monumental landslides in American history proving that even a person who nobody on Earth would ever want to have a beer with can win the presidency. So don’t count DeSantis out. He may not have the inexplicable appeal of Donald Trump but he might just be the second coming of Richard Nixon. 

Salon