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Trump Ordered The Code Red

Published by digby on September 21, 2024

You’re goddamn right he did

Trump has taken to saying that he never asked to prosecute his enemies because it wouldn’t have been right. he even says about Hillary Clinton that he didn’t think it would be right to put the wife of a president in jail (as if that’s all she was….) He is, as usual, lying through his big, white, fake teeth.

The fact is that Trump repeatedly ordered his DOJ to prosecute his enemies. His minions managed to keep- him from doing his worst. Here’s how this story by Mike Schmidt in the NY Times starts out (gift link below.)

It was the spring of 2018 and President Donald J. Trump, faced with an accelerating inquiry into his campaign’s ties to Russia, was furious that the Justice Department was reluctant to strike back at those he saw as his enemies.

In an Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump told startled aides that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not order the department to go after Hillary Clinton and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump would prosecute them himself.

Recognizing the extraordinary dangers of a president seeking not just to weaponize the criminal justice system for political ends but trying as well to assume personal control over who should be investigated and charged, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, sought to stall.

“How about I do this?” Mr. McGahn told Mr. Trump, according to an account verified by witnesses. “I’m going to write you a memo explaining to you what the law is and how it works, and I’ll give that memo to you and you can decide what you want to do.”’

The episode marked the start of a more aggressive effort by Mr. Trump to deploy his power against his perceived enemies despite warnings not to do so by top aides. And a look back at the cases of 10 individuals brings a pattern into clearer focus: After Mr. Trump made repeated public or private demands for them to be targeted by the government, they faced federal pressure of one kind or another.

it highlights how closely his expressed desires to go after people who had drawn his ire were sometimes followed by the Justice Department, F.B.I. or other agencies. Even without his direct order, his indirect influence could serve his ends and leave those in his sights facing expensive, time-consuming legal proceedings or other high-stress inquiries.

The story of that period has a powerful resonance today as Mr. Trump, angered in part by the two federal and two state-level indictments of him since leaving office, threatens to carry out a campaign of retribution if he returns to the White House. He has signaled that a second Trump administration would be stocked not with people who served as guardrails during his first term, but with carefully vetted loyalists who would eagerly carry out his wishes.

And there’s this:

If elected again, he would also return to the White House bolstered by the Supreme Court’s ruling in July that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution for official acts taken while in office.

Schmidt apparently had access to memos memorializing Trump’s orders and discussions among the staff as to their legality which members of the Trump administration snuck out of the White House. (Trump directed that people in the WH not take notes.) Both privately and publicly Trump was intent upon having the DOJ punish his enemies despite the constant admonishment by WH lawyers that it would cause havoc. And apparently, some of the lawyers who were very much against what he was trying to do, nonetheless reluctantly concluded that he could legally do it even though it would violate long established normas and result in mass resignations at the DOJ.

Schmidt doesn’t really go into what Bill Barr did personally, but we all know that he was almost as anxious to stick it to Trump’s enemies and the man himself.

Joe Biden has not ordered the DOJ to go after Trump. In fact, he’s stood silent as they prosecuted his beloved only surviving son on charges that would not have been brought against anyone else. So, even though Trump has been charged with federal crimes since he left office, the charges were fully justified — he tried to overturn the election and stole classified documents. — he cannot use Biden as an excuse to throw his enemies in jail if he becomes president again.

This article is thorough and includes a lot of detail about some of the episodes we had heard about earlier as well as some startling news facts. I’ve included a gift link here for you to read the whole thing.

Now that he knows he has immunity and will not have to seek another term (whether he leaves voluntarily or just decides he’s going to stay as long as he wants) all bets are off. He’s going to do it.

The More You Know

Published by digby on September 21, 2024

JD Vance is full of it

No the Haitians in Springfield are not murdering people in their beds. CNN’s Daniel Dale with a fact check:

“I’m talking to my constituents and I’m hearing terrible things about what’s going on in Springfield, and Kamala Harris’ open-border policies have caused these problems,” Vance said. Moments later, he said, “Murders are up by 81% because of what Kamala Harris has allowed to happen to this small community.”

We looked into this claim and found it’s a good example of how statistics can be cherry-picked and misleadingly framed to serve unfounded narratives.

“During the time that I’ve been with the prosecutor’s office, which is 21 years now, we have not had any murders involving the Haitian community – as either the victims or as the perpetrators of those murders,” Daniel Driscoll, the Republican top prosecutor in Clark County, in which Springfield is the largest city, said in a Friday interview.

Vance was citing real data, but he didn’t mention what the underlying numbers are.
Spokesperson William Martin said Vance was talking about official Ohio figures showing that Springfield had five murders in 2021 and nine murders in 2023.

That four-murder increase is indeed an increase of 80%. An increase from five murders one year to nine murders two years later, though, does not prove Vance’s claim that Harris and immigrants have caused a murder spike — or even that there is a current murder spike.

In small communities, Driscoll said, “if you were to have one murder one year and two murders the next year, you’ve suddenly got a 100% increase in the rate, but that’s not an appreciable difference in the number of murders you have.” He said what he looks at is “trends” — and “we’ve not seen any trend showing that the amount of murders is going up in Clark County.”

Springfield had more total murders under President Donald Trump than under Biden-Harris.

Vance said murders in Springfield have soared “because of” Harris’ policies. But a quick glance at Springfield’s murder numbers for the last three presidential terms – which are easily available online from the FBI and the state of Ohio – immediately calls his assertion into question.

President Barack Obama’s second term: 30 murders. Six in 2013; seven in 2014; 12 in 2015; five in 2016.

Trump’s term: 33 murders. Nine in 2017 (he took over from Obama on January 20 that year); 13 in 2018; three in 2019; eight in 2020.

President Joe Biden’s term through 3.5 years: 22 murders. Five in 2021 (he took over from Trump on January 20 that year); six in 2022; nine in 2023; two in the first half of 2024.

Even if you exclude the half-year 2024 data and only compare the three completed years of the Biden-Harris administration to either the first three years or last three years under the Trump administration, there have still been fewer murders under Biden-Harris.

So, if the president’s policies are causing murders, then Trump’s policies were obviously much worse. Of course, the president’s policies aren’t really responsible for murders (except to the extent that he’s been pushing unfettered gun rights) so it’s a ridiculous statement on its face. But if you’re going to make it, it’s very dishonest to cherry pick the figures to exonerate the man whose record is actually the worst one of the last three presidents.

But then this is JD Vance we’re talking about.

And by the way, there’s no reason to think that even the spike in murders that happened under Trump were caused by Haitian immigrants:


As we’ve repeatedly noted in fact checks about crime, identifying specific reasons for particular cities’ increases or decreases in any given year is notoriously difficult. And nobody has demonstrated that Haitian immigrants in particular or immigrants in general were responsible for the four additional murders in 2023 compared to 2021. (One prominent local case from 2023, in which a Haitian immigrant committed aggravated vehicular homicide and involuntary manslaughter when he accidentally crashed his minivan into a school bus and killed a child, is not classified as a murder, and the child’s father has said explicitly that it was not a murder.)

Local and state officials have certainly not attributed the uptick in murder to immigrants. Driscoll described it as “luck, or a lack thereof.” And Andy Wilson, now Ohio’s public safety director under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and formerly the Clark County prosecutor before Driscoll, told reporters this week that the main public safety issue with regard to Haitian immigrants in the state is safe driving, “not crime” and “not violence.”

There are a number of other data points on this at the link.

The influx of immigrants has caused some problems, as it would when any place has a rise in population in a fairly short period of time. Government resources are stretched, traffic, things like that. There’s a bigger upside, though. Businesses flourish, revenue rises for the town etc. This happens all the time.

We all know what the problem is. Black foreigners have come into this small insular town for work and the locals are uncomfortable with that. Some are downright racist. And Donald Trump and JD Vance and their MAGA followers are exploiting that to argue for mass round-ups, detention camps and deportation of tens of millions of people. It’s disgusting.

Good Morning!

Published by digby on September 21, 2024

Dear Leader has some inspiring words to share with you

Thank you Daddy:

Daddy’s awfully busy running for president…

Them Refs What Been Worked

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 21, 2024

If they’re complaining, you’ve hit a soft spot

As Digby noted yesterday, “the media has now found some integrity just in time to help [Trump], even as their previous irresponsibility also helped him.” That is, by burying Trump documents Iranian hackers recently hacked.

“Working the refs” is the phrase long used to describe how conservatives cowed journalists into treating the right’s lunacy as normal politics when its sabotage of democracy was still in previews. Both-sidesism is one approach press stenographers use to prove they have no liberal bias (for fear of being called bad names by the right and to preserve access to Republicans inside the Beltway).

Oh, but criticism is starting to bite. Access reporters cowed by the right object to being criticized by the left.

Sensitive, aren’t we?

Access journalism, press stenography, and bothsidesism has undermined faith in what you do, not criticism from the left. Press consolidation under private equity and hedge funds has not helped one bit:

Brooke Gladstone: In recent years, billionaire owners have snapped up outlets like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and others, with three of the top newspaper chains in the country are currently owned not by individuals or families but by private investment firms. According to Margot Susca, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Accountability, and Democracy at American University, we’re currently in the private investment era of media.

Private equity firms and hedge funds may function differently in the marketplace but Susca says they have a similarly ravenous approach to buying up news outlets and selling them off for parts. Susca, author of Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy, debunks the notion that it was solely the dawn of the internet that failed local news.

James Fallows follows up on Froomkin’s comment on FKA twitter:

Obviously I disagree w main points here: that press has overall done very good job covering Trump, and that there is a left-wing “industry” that is “dedicated toward attacking the media,” especially NYT.

But (seriously, no snark) credit to at least one prominent NYT figure for acknowledging that there is a critique.

Next step would be engagement on some specifics people have actually been asking about:

– Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot
– Why no retrospective public discussion, at all, about coverage in 2016 (Her emails!!!!) and lessons thereof. After Iraq WMD coverage, NYT under Bill Keller did a public retrospective (“what we got wrong”) etc
– Why no public explanation of diff between coverage of HRC/Podesta Russian-hacked emails and silence on Trump Iranian-hacked emails
– Why diff between extent / persistence of Biden “fitness to govern” cognitive overage vs Trump-cognitive issues.
– Thoughts about proportion of “guy in a diner” stories, vs “women in the suburbs” stories. And proportion of “econ is good but feels bad” stories.
– Whether there’s a diff in general outlook of coverage of US politics (need for “balance”) vs coverage of the rest of the range of news. And so on

Worth considering this as a start.

It’s all so tiresome.

Mein Harrumph

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 21, 2024

GOP primary voters wanted that guy

For those just tuning in, yes, N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) is a freak show. Between his tax troubles, investigations into his daycare business billings and bankruptcies, his misogyny and demand for an ouright ban on all abortions, it’s his porn habits that are finally attracting big headlines. Go figure. Okay, on the heels of his “some folks need killing” comments. Little of this is news to North Carolinians.

I was always partial to his declaration that “The Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation” as the clearest indicator not of his dishonesty or fetishes, but of where his type wants to take the country. Oh, and “Tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that will drag this nation down into a socialist hellhole that you will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground, choking on my own blood.”

Even Donald Trump is not that colorful. P.T. Barnum might have put this guy on display and made a fortune.

Some New York Magazine writers are playing catch up.

“Mein Kampf” is enough of an informative read that Robinson extolled its virtues on a porn site (Nia Prater and Chas Danner):

Robinson, who has publicly questioned some of the events of the Holocaust, allegedly used antisemitic slurs and displayed an affinity for Hitler. In one 2012 comment, he expressed a preference for the dictator over then-president Barack Obama. “I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” Robinson said. Per the Post, Robinson also wrote that Mein Kampf was “very informative and not at all what I thought it would be. It’s a real eye opener.”

No wonder Trump was such a quick endorser, being a reported fan of Der Führer’s speeches.

Zak Cheney-Rice:

This week’s revelation that Robinson once compared Dr. King to a maggot in more private forums showed a less filtered variation on a familiar motif. As did his apparent nostalgia for slavery — in his 2022 memoir, We Are the Majority, Robinson surveyed the two factions involved in the ’79 massacre and deemed only one of them the most “amoral people in the American political arena.” (Hint: It was not the Klansmen.) His admiration for Hitler and self-identification as a Nazi could be gleaned from his long-standing habits of diminishing the Holocaust and casting Jews as money-grubbing connivers. In multiple Facebook posts, he claimed that the dangers of Nazism had been overstated to launder the legacy of communism, and once described the Marvel movie Black Panther as a Jewish plot to extract Black dollars.

One aspect of Robinson’s Nude Africa posts that is largely absent from his Facebook output is their lascivious tone, which tracks — it was a porn site, after all. But even that element of his personality was poorly camouflaged: In his memoir, Robinson writes in unmistakably horny tones about his borderline-Freudian obsession with trains, which began when he was a kid rolling underneath oncoming locomotives and experiencing a rush as they screamed overhead. He confessed to giving them borderline-sexual nicknames like “big dirty” and stalking them across Guilford County trying to talk to them. “There’s a big dirty,” he would say aloud when he spotted one, “and he’s trying to hide from me, but I see him.”

Weird. Weirder. Weirdest. Robinson’s been hiding in plain sight, Cheney-Rice writes, and a type all too familiar among conservatives.

Just the type GOP primary voters who chose Robinson love in a way that’s just as creepy. Creepier, considering they may live next door.

I’m reminded of Siskel and Ebert doing a special show decades ago on the “women in trouble” film genre. The independent woman is always the slasher’s prime target. It was Ebert, I think, who was more creeped out by a guy sitting next to him in the theater. When the woman enters the dark attic/basement and we see her through the maniac’s eyes/mask, he whispered to himself, “She’s gonna get it now.”

Republicans nominated that guy for governor in North Carolina.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on September 20, 2024

There is a new viral superstar! Meet Moo Deng the adorable baby pygmy.

NBC reports:

Her toothless chewing is already an internet hit, and now, Moo Deng, the pygmy hippopotamus, is starring in cosmetic ads and quickly becoming a brand ambassador for Thailand. But the 2-month-old’s meteoric rise to online stardom has also prompted caretakers to urge visitors to show restraint and to limit her visit hours at Khao Kheow Open Zoo.

Moo Deng, also known as the “bouncing pig,” was named after a vote from more than 20,000 children and tourists on the Facebook page of the zoo in Chonburi, a city in eastern Thailand, where she was born in July. 

The hippo has become an internet sensation since her caretakers began uploading videos of her going about her day, which mostly includes napping, walking around her enclosure and chewing her caretakers’ knees while being hosed down for a shower.

And just like any human celebrity, Moo Deng has dozens of fan pages on social media with pictures and videos capturing her every moment in public.

Check out the memes!

Adorbs.

Oh NOW They Have Integrity

Published by digby on September 20, 2024

You may have heard a passing rumor that Iranian hackers got into Trump’s VP vetting communications and gave them to major newspapers which are refusing to publish them. Yesterday, it was reported that Iranians offered the same stuff to the Harris campaign but they didn’t even open the emails. (That hasn’t stopped the moronic Don Jr and his father from saying this proves that they are working with Iran to take out Trump.)

Anyway, last night Puck’s Tara Palmieri wrote this:

Like several other journalists covering the 2024 presidential campaign, I was contacted earlier this month, and again on Tuesday, by an individual peddling what appeared to be sensitive documents pertaining to Donald Trump. I alerted federal authorities, and I’m not reporting the contents, but the materials themselves confirm that the hackers, whom the Justice Department apparently suspects to be agents of Iran, have absconded with more than just the oppo files on J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum that have been disseminated to multiple news outlets. It appears that they may also have breached Trump’s legal team. 

Is this a Reverse Podesta situation? Who knows. The reality is that the media has become more responsible with hacked information, and frankly, it’s hard to imagine anything about Trump that would move the needle post January 6, post-bankruptcies, post-Access Hollywood, post-E. Jean Carroll, post-indictments, post-Arlington, and even after the dog-eating and baby-executing bit. 

Setting aside the blithe “nothing matters, Trump gets away with everything” at the end from a journalist, isn’t it nice (for Trump) that the media has now found some integrity just in time to help him, even as their previous irresponsibility also helped him. Win-win!

Trump is a very lucky guy, but he has had a whole lot of help from the media for eight long years. And as far as I know, they have never copped their part in his victory in 2016 so it’s news to me that they learned any lessons. Interesting that we only find out about it when there are reports that they are holding back information that might harm Trump’s campaign.

The Oprah Town Hall Was Pretty Great

Published by digby on September 20, 2024

Oprah Winfrey hosted a Kamala Harris online event last night that was surprisingly effective, I thought. I’m not usually much for town halls and tend to avoid them unless there’s a special reason to watch. But this one was quite good. maybe it’s the Oprah effect. She is a professional,after all, and very adept at evoking emotion. Here’s the lede in the Washington Post:

A star-studded online rally designed to showcase the enthusiasm and energy behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign turned somber as host Oprah Winfrey introduced the mother of a woman who died after waiting for health care in a state that has banned most abortions.

“You’re looking at a mother that is broken,” said Shanette Williams, whose daughter, Amber Thurman, died in what was deemed a “preventable” death stemming from Georgia’s abortion restrictions. “The worst pain ever that a mother, that a parent, could ever feel, for her father and myself and the family — you’re looking at it.”

Several people in the live audience were wiping their eyes by the time Thurman’s family members, including two sisters, finished speaking. The emotional moment prompted Harris to deliver some of her most forceful lines of the event — which over nearly 100 minutes turned the vice president’s campaign into a modern-day version of Winfrey’s popular daytime talk show.

“Amber’s story highlights the fact that, among everything that is wrong with these bans and what has happened in terms of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it’s a health-care crisis,” Harris said after lambasting Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for making such bans possible. “It’s a health-care crisis that affects the patient and the profession.”

Hundreds of thousands of people watched the event, which was an outgrowth of various Zoom meetings that came together in the days after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid — with groups including Win With Black Women, White Dudes for Harris and Swifties for Kamala gathering by the thousands to show their support for Harris. The campaign cast the event — which featured a live audience of a few hundred people — as an opportunity to showcase the breadth of support for Harris and as a call to action for those watching online.

Here are a few clips from the event which I thought was also rather creatively produced:

I especially appreciated this on behalf of us childless cat ladies:

By the way, this is what we’re up against:

The Manual

Published by digby on September 20, 2024

I think this is pretty brilliant:

You just have to love the guy.

Meanwhile, here’s James Comer:

This is what the GOP has become.

“Why Don’t The Jews Love Me After All I’ve Done For Them???”

Published by digby on September 20, 2024

Trump had a little sad last night

Philip Bump:

Buried in his efforts to convince a sympathetic audience that he deserved to return to the White House, Donald Trump made an important admission about a long-standing frustration.

“With all I have done for Israel,” he said at a campaign event ostensibly centered on antisemitism, “I received only 24 percent of the Jewish vote. Now think of this. I really haven’t been treated very well, but that’s the story of my life.”

Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.Z

In Trump’s estimation, he deserves both credit and unwavering support from Jewish Americans because of the things he did on Israel’s behalf as president. He said as much at the event.

“I said, I’m the best friend they ever had. And still in 2020 — so remember, I got 24, 25 percent [of the Jewish vote in 2016]. Now, I did all of these things and I got 29 percent,” Trump complained. “Think of it. So I wasn’t treated right. But it’s not me that’s been treated badly. It’s Israel.”

This is a recurring theme of Trump’s politics. Making his pitch to skeptical constituencies, he cobbles together accomplishments that he then promotes as exceptional, as the pinnacle of what those groups might have wanted. Black Americans want opportunity zones. Jewish people want the American Embassy to be in Jerusalem. He delivered on these things — but they still don’t love him? How can that be?

Bump points out that this is just what Trump thinks these constituencies want, I’d imagine based upon various donors (like Miriam Adelson, who sponsored the event last night) and some oddball supporters. He makes up a fantasy of his own greatness and gets very disappointed when the rubes don’t appreciate it.

He said that the Democratic Party had a “hold, or curse,” on Jewish Americans and repeated his claim that Jews would be “out of their minds” to vote for them because “because it will face an unceasing, bloody war to obliterate the Jewish state and drive Jews out of the Holy Land.” He called Chuck Schumer a member of Hamas. Some people cheered.

He also said last night that it would be the Jews fault if he doesn’t win which sets up some very dangerous incentives for his Nazi constituency which seems to be growing every day. Nice. “You Jews might want to rethink your support or things might get a little bit dicey, if you know what I mean.”

As Ed Kilgore noted, “if the hallmark of antisemitism is irrational fury at Jews combined with stereotypes of how they should think and behave, Trump is more of a suspect than a defender and vindicator.”