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Sure GOPers, talk some more about abortion

Published by digby on March 13, 2024

It’s a winner. Huge.

You go boys and girls:

Republicans leading the party’s effort to defend the House in this fall’s elections are pushing GOP colleagues to openly discuss their positions on abortion, rather than try to sidestep the issue like many did in the previous campaign, arguing that doing so will be critical to winning competitive races.

A memo prepared by House Republicans’ campaign arm and viewed by The Wall Street Journal says Republicans have a “brand problem, not a policy problem,” as their reluctance to discuss the issue left it to Democrats to define where the GOP stood. Many voters view the party’s hopefuls as opposing abortion under any circumstances, when there are actually a variety of positions held by candidates, particularly in swing districts, the memo states.

The guidance tells candidates that they must “confidently articulate” their stance and that “being unwilling to stake out a clear position with voters is the worst possible solution.”

Abortion has weighed on the party’s success in recent years. Republicans won back the House in 2022 but by a narrower-than-expected margin, a far cry from the “red wave” they had hoped would sweep them to a big majority in the chamber. Lawmakers from both parties say the Supreme Court’s decision that year ending the right to an abortion revved up abortion-rights voters and helped Democrats defend seats.

The party is trying to figure out a better approach headed into the 2024 contests, when the White House, the Senate and the House are all seen as tossups.

The guidance, which will be presented to GOP colleagues by Rep. Richard Hudson (R., N.C.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, also recommended that members express empathy for women, discuss “common sense” solutions and push back on what it calls Democrats’ extremism on the issue. Hudson plans to share the guidance with his colleagues on Wednesday night at one of the kickoff events for the party’s three-day retreat in West Virginia.

Hudson intends to back his argument up with a poll conducted in more than 60 competitive House districts by Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and former senior adviser to Donald Trump. The polls found that about one-third of people surveyed associated Republicans with wanting to outlaw all abortions, while a similar number showed respondents saw Democrats favoring abortion for any reason at any time. Republicans say that underneath the basic abortion-rights and antiabortion labels, voters generally back some restrictions on abortion, putting them more in line with the GOP than Democrats.

Democrats counter that they are better aligned with voters. If Republicans “think people need to hear more about their unpopular antiabortion policies, go ahead. We’re confident voters will respond accordingly in November,” said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Viet Shelton. 

What?????

Published by digby on March 13, 2024

We now know the recipients for the next Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Awards.

This year’s RBG Awards will go to entrepreneur Elon Musk, actor and filmmaker Sylvester Stallone, lifestyle expert Martha Stewart, philanthropist Michael Milken and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

This award is given out by a right wing foundation through the Library of Congress so I guess that explains it. But why is the Library of Congress involved in something like this? And they couldn’t find more than one woman for the RBG award? Sylvester Stallone?

Reality vs Whining

Published by digby on March 13, 2024

Judging from the bots on my social media feeds none of this reality makes any difference. People are convinced that their lives are the worst they’ve ever been, they’re are all barely getting by, unable to buy food or gas and have no jobs and no future. Americans are starving while “illegal” criminals are killing them in their beds. We are in a dystopian nightmare from which we cannot awaken — at least until Donald Trump makes America great again.

Here’s just another little reminder which will be refuted immediately because as it happens, Trump’s term actually ended in 2019 rather than 2020 according to many Americans. He bears no responsibility for anything bad and gets credit for Obama’s recovery. Isn’t that special?

The Committed Uncommitted

Published by digby on March 13, 2024

There was a pretty energetic push to get primary voters in the state of Washington to vote “uncommitted” to protest the administration’s Israel policy. It got 7.5% of the vote representing 48,600 votes which is quite a few. It’s not a state with a large Arab American population but there are a lot of lefties there and they made their voices heard. Still, it’s not a battleground state so perhaps it’s not as relevant as it was in Michigan.

Dave Weigel reported on the project for Semafor:

Next week, they’ll try again in Kansas. Next month, they’ll do it in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — all states where “uncommitted” efforts have come together quickly, inspired by campaigns in Michigan, Minnesota, and Hawaii that have denied Biden 20 delegates so far.

“We’re focused on ensuring that President Biden and his campaign listen to us,” said Rami Al-Kabra, the 47-year-old deputy mayor of Bothell, a city in Seattle’s suburbs. “What happens in November? Hopefully we will not be having the same conversation again.”

The activists organizing “uncommitted” votes don’t expect to defeat Biden, or even carry a state; they did best last week in Hawaii, where an ad hoc coalition of progressives and pro-Palestinian groups won 29% of the vote in a low-turnout caucus. They agree on some demands — a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to military aid to Israel without human rights conditions — and don’t fight about the others.

So far, they’re also meeting little resistance from the Biden campaign or state Democratic parties. After a brief frenzy in Michigan, where Biden surrogates barnstormed the state to turn out more votes for the president, Democrats are taking a light touch.

Al-Kabra got involved in the “uncommitted” campaign after he learned that a friend had thrown out his mail ballot instead of casting a protest vote. He and local Democratic leaders agreed: Keeping voters active, even if they’re temporarily undermining the president, was preferable to watching them drift away and sit out the November election.

“We welcome the discussion,” said Shasti Conrad, the chair of the Washington State Democrats. “We want people to feel as though this party is a space that they can participate in, where they can hold opinions that are different than the majority. That’s why we’re not a cult. That’s why we’re different than the Republican Party.”

This is important. The protest is legitimate and important and I have to think it’s having an effect on the Biden administration, along with the obvious facts on the ground and the disapprobation growing around the world toward Israel’s siege, as they face the general election. But it’s also vitally important not to miss the forest for the trees and young people especially are idealists and have a tendency to put blinders on and it could be disastrous for them and the world. It’s good to have national leaders like Ilhan Omar and locals like Al-Kabra making that clear.

The Democrats are respecting that which is very smart:

There is no serious organized Democratic Party effort to stop these campaigns, which highlight an issue that separates the president from most of his voters. (The Hawaii Democratic Party voted to endorse a permanent ceasefire in December.) State party chairs who talked with Semafor about the campaigns agreed on two points — that the president was trying to get a ceasefire that nearly all critics should be able to support, and that they’d rather those critics cast ballots than throw them out.

“We don’t censure our members for disagreements on policies,” said Nancy DiNardo, the chair of the Connecticut Democratic Party. “We have that all the time. We just hope that, later, we can talk to them and convince them why it’s important that they do vote Democratic in November.”

Weigel added these comments, however, and I expect he’s right. Now that the primaries are over, this is going to become the story for the media which doesn’t have much else to report and we know how that’s going to go:

The end of the competitive phase of the primary is a boon to protest-voters and organizers, who have flooded the zone that Nikki Haley and Dean Phillips just abandoned. These primaries are going to happen anyway, and a press corps hungry for a story — this is me, breaking the fourth wall — will have one until the war ends.

At least this story will have some substance to it instead of Biden’s age and Trump’s nicknames. Weigel goes on to point out that the big thing that’s changed is that the Democrats have decided to be philosophical about this and aren’t doing any kind of organized pushback. The Biden campaign said this:

“The President believes making your voice heard and participating in our democracy is fundamental to who we are as Americans,” a Biden campaign spokesman said in a statement. “He shares the goal for an end to the violence and a just, lasting peace in the Middle East. He’s working tirelessly to that end.”

I think the vast majority of non-MAGA voters are beginning to see the stakes in this election and they will act accordingly. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt if some combination of the Americans, other leaders in the region and around the world and, most of all, Israelis themselves would topple that monster Netanayahu and his government and put an end to this siege.

By the way: I heard from someone the other day that in Israel, the public is still in the midst of the trauma of October 7th, overwhelmed with the images of terror and fear still being shown on their TVs every day and they aren’t really seeing what’s happening in Gaza. I have to imagine that is having a terrible effect on the people and on their ability to clearly see that they are making themselves more vulnerable not safer with this over-the-top response. We did that after 9/11 and we all know it resulted in more death and destruction over the course of many years because the terror and blood lust blinded our government and a good part of the population. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were bad enough, just imagine if 9/11 had happened here when Donald Trump was president. That’s what they have with Netanyahu, a desperate man trying to stay in power in order to stay out of jail.

Butheremails Redux

Published by digby on March 13, 2024

Here’s part of that story:

Hur’s February report stated that following a yearlong investigation into Biden’s possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents, he had concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted.” But journalists quickly fixated on Hur’s incendiary and unfalsifiable description of Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and his references to specific Biden memory lapses over the course of their five-hour interview.

The mainstream political press treated Hur as an impartial voice levying credible accusations, unleashing a deluge of reports calling Biden’s mental acuity into question. Hur’s background as a former clerk to right-wing judges and a Trump administration appointee — and his gratuitous swipes at a Democratic president that happened to align with a yearslong GOP campaign to portray Biden as addled — failed to raise their alarms.

But after reviewing the full transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur, released Tuesday morning before Hur’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, several outlets are concluding that the then-special counsel’s claims in his report lacked necessary context.

The Washington Post ran 33 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, according to a review by Popular Information. On Tuesday, however, the Post reported that the transcript “paints a more nuanced portrait of the exchanges between Biden and the special counsel” and that “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.” With regard to some of the specific instances Hur cited in describing Biden’s memory as “significantly limited,” the Post found that “the transcript provides more detail on those exchanges, with questioning jumping around the timeline in some instances.”

The New York Times ran 30 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, according to Popular Information. But on Tuesday, the Times reported the transcript “shows that on several occasions the president fumbled with dates and the sequence of events, while otherwise appearing clearheaded.” As to Hur’s claim Biden “did not remember when he was vice president,” the Times noted: “The transcript provides context for those lines. In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.”

The Times further found that “Mr. Hur was selective in portraying Mr. Biden’s memory of an ambassador’s position.”’

The Wall Street Journal ran 18 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, Popular Information found. On Tuesday, however, the paper reported that the transcript shows Biden “veering into frequent digressions, but not stumped on basic factual questions.”

Hur has raised more questions about his own credibility since issuing his report. The lawyer who reportedly prepped him for Tuesday’s hearing is William Burck, a veteran Republican attorney who represented several senior Trump administration aides and serves as a Fox Corp. board member. And Hur arranged to leave the Justice Department on Monday, ensuring that “instead of appearing as a DOJ employee who is bound by the ethical guidelines which govern the behaviour of federal prosecutors, he will appear as a private citizen with no constraints on his testimony,” The Independent reported.

I haven’t seen a recent word cloud illustration of this election but I have no doubt whatsoever that the next one we see for Joe Biden the word “AGE” will be humongous, just as “EMAILS” was in 2016. And it will be for the same reason. Yes, people were interested in the emails story back then and about Biden’s age today. But the overemphasis in the press on these right wing talking points and their rush to amplify them whenever the wingnuts throw out a juicy morsel is journalistic malpractice that’s been going on for over 30 years now. I don’t know what it will take to make them stop it despite the fact that it has helped lead us to the brink of fascism.

He Gives The Very Best Names

Published by digby on March 13, 2024

Donald Trump is very proud of his talent for nicknames. In a recent interview in New Hampshire he explained, “I do a lot of names for people, some people say I’m very good at that.”

I suppose that’s true. His followers do seem to love it when he bestows some juvenile nickname on one of his rivals. This seems to be the extent of his “branding” expertise which makes some sense since his success at that was due to him slapping his own name on everything in sight, from meat to ties to con games and buildings. Put a name on it and it sticks, I guess.

When he first ran for office his penchant for silly nicknames was jarring but it’s so common now that nobody much notices the fact that he really seems to have lost his touch since the halcyon days of “Li’l Marco” “Pocohontas” and “Lyin’ Ted.” His nickname for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was “Ron DeSanctimonious” or sometimes “Ron DeSanctus” neither of which made much sense. I’m not sure he even knew what the words meant. Calling former cabinet member Elaine Chow “Coco” and New York Attorney General Tish James “Peekaboo” was weird. And let’s face facts. Recycling “Crooked Hillary” to “Crooked Joe” was just pathetic. This is the best the “master brander” can do these days?

But we must give credit where credit is due. He has finally come up with a nickname that is so outrageous that it will go down in political history as his piece de resistance: he’s now calling himself “Honest Don.” I’m not kidding:

The man who is going to go down in history as the president who incited an insurrection with something widely known as The Big Lie is now calling himself “Honest Don.” You couldn’t make this up.

This is the man the Washington Post tracked making 30,573 false or misleading claims over the 4 years he was in office. And needless to say he’s made thousands more since then. He lies as easily as he breathes about everything whether it’s the size of his apartment (for which, among other lies, he was just found guilty of fraud to the tune of almost half a billion dollars) or that his presidency was the most successful in world history (never mind the hundreds of thousands of Americans dead from the pandemic by the time he left office.)

And then there are all the women who say that “Honest Don” sexually assaulted them, including E. Jean Carroll whom he continues to defame on the campaign trail even though his lies about her have cost him almost a hundred million dollars and likely more because just can’t stop doing it. There is nothing he won’t lie about and there is just too much evidence of it to believe that his ardent followers don’t see any of it. They just don’t care.

“Honest Don” also happens to be under 91 felony indictments ranging from federal criminal charges for willful retention of national defense documents under the espionage act and conspiracy to defraud the United States to state charges for falsifying business records and solicitation of violation of oath by public officer. For such an honest guy he sure seems to have gotten himself into a whole lot of trouble with the law.

Then there’s all that money he took in during his years as president with foreign governments and others seeking access and currying favor by spending millions at his hotels and golf resorts and buying memberships in his Florida social club Mar-a-Lago, from which he profited handsomely. We know he lied about his lack of involvement in the businesses because at one point he even announced that the government was going to host the G7 at his Doral golf resort, a very lucrative contract. He was forced to back off that one because of an outcry from the press and the meeting was canceled due to the pandemic anyway but throughout his term he spent massive amounts of time at his resorts in Florida, New Jersey and around the world turning each trip into a promotional opportunity.

Now we’re entering a new phase in the dishonesty and corruption of “Honest Don.” He is in serious need of money right now because his legal fees are mounting exponentially, he’s got massive judgments in the civil cases he has to post bond for, his company is no longer doing new deals and who knows how many big loans are coming due? There’s a limit to how much he will be able to milk from his campaign coffers because he has to spend enough of it to mount a real run for the office to keep himself out of court and out of jail.

He may have been counting on the public offering of his social media platform Truth Social to provide a big cash injection now that it’s cleared a number of hurdles but that’s up in the air since he’s been sued by the two co-founders who built it but were cut out of the deal. (Honest Don” often doesn’t pay people who do work for him, always claiming that it wasn’t up to his standards. He’s stiffed hundreds of businesses over the years.) There is also mounting evidence that he may be changing his policies to help out donors, such as his abrupt about face on banning TikTok after meeting with a deep pocketed investor.

And then there’s the total banana republic move to take over the Republican National Committee by installing his daughter-in-law and a personal toadie to run the place and instituting a massive purge of employees in order to make room for Trump loyalists after strong-arming the board into allowing the organization to start picking up his legal bills. “Honest Don” is doing to the RNC what he plans to do to the country.

After all that what’s left for “Honest Don” to lie about you ask? Well, get ready. After the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee played a compilation of Trump’s various gaffes and gitches to push back on the claims in Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s scurrilous attacks on Joe Biden’s mental competence, get a load of what Trump posted on Truth Social:

I’m just surprised he didn’t think of that one earlier. Just as he says that any election he didn’t win is rigged, I think we can expect Trump to say going forward that any footage of him looking or sounding cognitively challenged is actually AI. “Honest Don” never loses and never makes a mistake.

Salon

Are You Better Off? Yes. But.

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2024

Chris Hayes makes the case for Biden recovery

“These are just the facts,” Chris Hayes argued Tuesday night.

In the wake of the pandemic inflation spike, I’ve experimented with store brands. Some are better than others. But many are just as good as the higher-priced, better-shelf-placement, name brands. Gas has come down to about $3/gal. Eggs are no longer $5/dozen. But that breakfast cereal I used to buy at about $3.69 a box is now about $6.39 and not budging. So, nope.

You can’t eat GDP charts or statistics. And those persistently higher food prices are in your face each week. That makes it a harder sell for President Joe Biden that the economy has recovered under his administration. Even if it has. And it has.

Chris Hayes made a valiant stab at making that case on Tuesday evening with a series of massive charts. Behold.

Wages are up, and disposable income. Even if it doesn’t feel like it at the grocery store. The consumer price index is better “than any of our peer countries,” Hayes points out. “They would all trade places to be us.”

View the segment below.

Bad things happened in 2020, and they all got better once Donald “91 Counts” Trump left office, Hayes argues. Americans have blocked out the nightmare that was the Trump administration, while Republicans have rewritten the history of Trump’s tenure to end it in 2019.

‘A’ for effort. But what Americans feel is the economy, not what they’re told about it. And there’s more to people’s voting behavior than their pocketbooks anyway, as TikToker mrsmisanthrope2 explains. Even if Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D) of Texas explained it more succinctly to Bill Moyers over 60 years ago.

I’ll still be watching for that cereal to go on sale at its pre-pandemic price.

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Eating Their Own

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2024

MAGA purges the RNC

Still image from Dawn of the Dead (1978).

“The RNC is entering the 2024 election with a third of the Democratic National Committee’s reserves,” writes David Graham in The Atlantic. Graham noted last month that the Republican National Committee has ceased functioning as a political party. Today, it operates as another arm of the Trump Organization, now with loyalist Michael Whatley, immediate past chair of the North Carolina GOP installed as chair, and Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “with the political equivalent of shock and awe,” Team Trump has begun a purge of the RNC staff. “The senior leadership has been almost entirely replaced or reassigned, while dozens of lower-ranking officials including state directors were either fired or told to reapply for their jobs.”

The RNC is now eating its own.

Given the RNC’s years of electoral losses post-2016, clearing out the dead wood makes sense, Graham writes, and presidential nominees typically take control of the party. Whether putting toadies in charge will change the RNC’s trajectory is questionable:

Truth be told, Trump can’t really distance himself from the recent mismanagement. The deposed chair, Ronna McDaniel, was Trump’s pick in 2017, and his main complaint about her is that she was insufficiently compliant. If Trump just wants more of the same, that’s bad news for the party. Trump critics within the GOP also fear that he intends to use the party coffers as a personal defense fund, underwriting his substantial legal bills. Last week, the committee pointedly rejected a proposal by an old-line member to prevent that.

From where I sit, installing Whatley who, according to a Fox News source, was selected for being “so powerful on election fraud,” is a plus. He struggled to raise money in North Carolina while the Democrats’ chair, Anderson Clayton, lapped him, and multiple times in small donations. Expect similar performance from Whatley at the national level.

Marrying the national party to its presidential candidate harms a political party, Graham argues, which is “where Obama offers a cautionary tale.”

When he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Obama was an insurgent; the DNC had long been dominated by allies of Hillary Clinton, whom he defeated in the primary. He wasn’t as deeply embedded in the old way of doing things. Obama viewed the Democratic Party as essentially a national organization, with the goal of supporting his political goals and his reelection. Upon winning the presidency, he moved key DNC functions to Chicago, his hometown and political base, despite the protests of party insiders who worried that downballot efforts would be overshadowed by Obama’s reelection campaign. He also created a group outside the DNC, Organizing for America, to support his political movement.

The result was a badly weakened DNC. The national focus led to a neglect of other elections. After Senator Ted Kennedy died, Democrats managed to lose a 2010 special election for his seat in Massachusetts, of all places—a failure that some Democrats blamed on the national party. The loss delayed the passage of the Affordable Care Act and required congressional Democrats to water it down to pass it.

The Bay State special was a harbinger. As Matt Yglesias calculated in 2017, the Obama years saw Democrats lose 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 12 governorships. The damage was especially bad at the state level. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures, the worst loss since Herbert Hoover dragged down the GOP. Republicans captured 29 separate chambers and gained 10 new trifectas—control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. All of this happened at the same time that Democratic presidential candidates won the national popular vote in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections (as they would again in 2020).

Now Trump is poised to replicate that for Republicans, with the RNC reportedly moving much of its operation to Palm Beach, Florida to be closer to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

Slashing the national footprint of the RNC may weaken the party at lower levels. Several state parties are already a mess. The chair of the Florida GOP was recently ousted amid a sex scandal. Michigan’s GOP chair, a fervent Trump backer, was also deposed after a tumultuous stint, and the state party is reportedly broke. The Arizona GOP also recently lost its chair and has been racked by feuds. But more MAGA is unlikely to be the solution to these problems, because infighting and obsession with Trump’s election denial have been at the center of several blowups. The most effective wing of the GOP apparatus right now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has succeeded by managing to create some insulation from Trump, allowing it to select strong candidates. In 2020, Republican congressional candidates mostly ran ahead of Trump.

When Trump is done with his party, or when the country and the the courts are done with him, they’ll have to rebuild. Democrats had to after Obama, explains Graham.

But Democrats’ over-focused on the presidential race before Obama. And Obama did not just lose seats. Republicans (and their moneyed enablers) strategically deployed resources with REDMAP to win them while Democrats abandoned the hinterlands to the GOP and focused on vote-rich cities for their top-of-ticket candidates. Ask me how losing control of state legislatures impacts local communities. Ask rural communities that lost hospitals. Organizing is not either/or. It’s both/and.

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He Likes Hitler

Published by digby on March 12, 2024

He really likes him

I’ve always thought it didn’t make any sense that Donald Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand because he doesn’t read. (He later said it was a book of Hitler’s speeches given to him by a friend.) I do think someone has told him that Hitler built the Autobahn which is why he thinks he’s just great:

Huffington Post:

John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, discussed the former president’s apparent dictatorial aspirations for a new book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

“My theory on why he likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is,” Kelly said, according to an article published Monday about the forthcoming book by the CNN anchor and chief national security analyst.

Kelly told Sciutto, “Every incoming president is shocked that they actually have so little power without going to the Congress, which is a good thing. It’s Civics 101, separation of powers, three equal branches of government.”

“But in his case, he was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial-type powers to send U.S. forces places or to move money around within the budget,” the quote continued. “And he looked at Putin and Xi and that nutcase in North Korea as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.”

Kelly was one of several former Trump administration officials who spoke to Sciutto for his book, “The Return of Great Powers,” reportedly warning that Trump is ill-prepared to lead the country in the current global climate, and that “they believe that the root of his admiration for these figures is that he envies their power.”

The book also revisits previously reported allegations that Trump praised Adolf Hitler, including Kelly’s claim that the former president lamented that his senior staff were not as loyal to him as the Nazi leader’s officers were.

“He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal — that we would do anything he wanted us to do,” Kelly told Sciutto.

There Ought To Be A Law

Published by digby on March 12, 2024

I don’t know if Biden will get credit for this but he should. It’s from the Hur transcripts:

It’s important not to get too carried away here. Biden may not have owned stock but he wasn’t called the Senator from MBNA for nothing. Representing Delaware he took up for a lot of banks in his day, including shepherding through a punitive bankruptcy bill back in 2005 on their behalf. He played the game. But there is no evidence that he personally enriched himself while in office. He bought some real estate back in the 70s that ended up being worth quite a lot. And he sold books and gave speeches like they all do. But of all people accused of influence peddling he’s one of the least likely.