Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s deliberations.
Mr. Trump has studiously avoided taking a clear position on restrictions to abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the middle of 2022, galvanizing Democrats ahead of the midterm elections that year. He has said in private that he wants to wait until the Republican presidential primary contest is over to publicly discuss his views, because he doesn’t want to risk alienating social conservatives before he has secured the nomination, the two people said.
Mr. Trump has approached abortion transactionally since becoming a candidate in 2015, and his current private discussions reflect that same approach.
One thing Mr. Trump likes about a 16-week federal ban on abortions is that it’s a round number. “Know what I like about 16?” Mr. Trump told one of these people, who was given anonymity to describe a private conversation. “It’s even. It’s four months.”
When discussing prospective vice-presidential candidates, Mr. Trump often asks whether they are “OK on abortion.” He is instantly dismissive when he hears that a Republican doesn’t support “the three exceptions.” He tells advisers that Republicans will keep losing elections with that position.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Mr. Trump told advisers that he believed the decision was going to be harmful to Republicans. Since then, he has formed the view that the abortion issue is overwhelmingly responsible for a string of Republican losses in congressional races.
And he is acutely aware of his own vulnerability: He appointed the three justices who enabled that decision, a fact he has publicly claimed credit for in several settings. Those statements have already been included in ads, and Democrats plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to remind voters of that fact.
I hope so.
The smarter play is to simply say that he believes in states’ rights and that that’s what the Supremes did. It’s not great but it’s a little bit better than endorsing a national ban. But he can’t. The evangelical wingnuts won’t let him.
The White House clashed with the Justice Department in the run-up to the release of a special counsel report last week about President Biden’s handling of classified information, previously undisclosed correspondence shows.
The letters, obtained by The New York Times, show that a top Justice Department official rejected complaints from Mr. Biden’s lawyers about disparaging comments in the report regarding the president.
The lawyers wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland the day before he released the report by the special counsel, Robert K. Hur. They raised objections to passages in the report in which Mr. Hur suggested that Mr. Biden’s memory was failing and questioned some of his actions, even though the special counsel had found no basis to prosecute the president.
The lawyers said Mr. Hur’s comments “openly, obviously and blatantly violate department policy and practice,” the letters show.
The next day, as the department was preparing to make the report public, Bradley Weinsheimer — the department’s senior career official, or nonpolitical appointee, who deals with ethics complaints or appeals of department decisions — wrote back rejecting their criticism. He insisted that the comments in the report “fall well within the department’s standards for public release.”
The Biden Impeachment inquiry seems to attract witnesses who turn out to be con artists and criminals for some reason. The Republican inquisitors get a tip that somebody’s got the goods on “the Biden family” and they fan out to the right wing media to hail the news that they’ve finally nabbed the Big Guy. Then the truth inevitably comes out that they were played for fools.
The alleged crime at the center of the impeachment probe is still that ridiculous claim that then Vice President Biden was working on behalf of his son’s business, Burisma, in Ukraine when he pushed the government to fire a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, whom they claim was investigating the company. The problem is that he wasn’t investigating the company at all and was ousted because he failed to investigate corrupt politicians. (No wonder all these Republicans find him to be such a sympathetic figure.) In fact, the whole international community was agitating to have him fired because he was corrupt and the Ukrainian parliament finally did it.
When the Republicans took over the House in 2023, they went full steam ahead with their investigation of those same moldy facts, following the orders of their leader Donald Trump who has demanded that they impeach Joe Biden at least once as payback for his impeachment which, not coincidentally, was also centered around Ukraine. (He also wants his impeachments “expunged” like they are a juvie record but it looks like that will have to wait until he’s restored to the White House next year.)
Republicans had been hinting around that they’d found a smoking gun in the case for some time with House Oversight Chair James Comer, R- Ky., and Nebraska Senator Chuck Grassley flamboyantly announcing last May that they’d sent a letter to he Justice Department stating that there was evidence of “an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions” and demanding that the department release this damning evidence to the public. Comer even threatened the FBI with contempt if they didn’t turn over the documents immediately.
Grassley took the lead in leaking out tidbits of information about this evidence which was attributed to an FBI confidential informant who had been informed of the bribe by a Ukrainian businessman. And lordy, they said there were tapes of Biden and Hunter being bribed electrifying the right wing media and leading to hours of feverish innuendo on Fox and other networks.
Media Matters has tracked Fox’s obsession with this story for some time:
Hannity’s show aired at least 85 Hunter Biden segments in 2023 promoting the dubiously sourced and wholly unproven notion that Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who controlled Burisma, paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden. This is an extension of the Ukraine conspiracy theory with all the problems detailed above, in addition to its own issues, but nonetheless is treated credulously by the Fox host. Of those 85 segments, 28 were Hannity monologues.
Those hysterical monologues are truly something to see. Here’s a bit of the one Hannity gave on the day Grassley released the document:
There are now real and growing concerns that your president, the president of our country, is compromised. After months of obfuscation from the FBI and the DOJ, that FD-1023 form that documented allegations of bribery from a trusted FBI confidential human source has now finally been released, thanks to Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Now, its contents are devastating…this is about the big guy himself, Joe Biden, a corrupt career politician who is now very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.
It was never very credible. One of the red flags, as I noted at the time, was the fact that this five million dollar bribe seemed to be a “sloppy conflation with a five million dollar bribe that was revealed in September 2020 when they arrested three Burisma executives for offering five million dollars to Ukrainian anti-corruption officials and which the Ukrainian government went to pained lengths to say neither Hunter Biden nor Joe Biden had anything to do with.” There is also the fact that there were quite a few Republicans who were very cagey about this breathless assertion that there were tapes of the bribes.
It makes you wonder what they knew or suspected about this whole thing now that it turns out that their smoking gun witness was arrested in Las Vegas yesterday on charges of lying to the FBI and creating false records. The indictment, returned by a grand jury and filed by Special Counsel David Weiss tells quite a tale.
It says that the informant Alexander Smirnov, “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Biden] and his candidacy.”
In the original interview, Smirnov had claimed that he’d been told about the bribe in 2016. But apparently Smirnov couldn’t have had that conversation in 2016 because he “met with officials from Burisma for the first time in 2017, after [Biden] left office in January 2017.”The indictment says that Smirnov’s meeting with Burisma were “unremarkable” pitch meetings not discussions of bribes to then VP Biden that were made at a later date.
Smirnov’s accusation was cited over and over as the main basis for the impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, despite the fact that they knew the information was unverified:
Chairman @jimjordan has said that the “best example” and “most compelling evidence” of wrongdoing by POTUS are the Burisma allegations that relied solely on an FBI source’s info.
Today, that FBI source was indicted for lying about Burisma.
None of the Fox News celebrity hosts mentioned this indictment tonight, after flogging in relentlessly for the past year. James Comer issued a statement expressing no remorse for his role and even criticized the FBI for not being forthcoming about its investigation of his big witness, despite the fact that he and Grassley made the whole thing public over their protests. He told CNN, “to be clear, the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023. It is based on a large record of evidence, including bank records and witness testimony, revealing that Joe Biden knew of and participated in his family’s business dealings.” None of that has panned out thus far.
Oh, and by the way, this is the second major Comer witness to be indicted. The first was Gal Luft indicted last July on 8 counts of arms trafficking, sanctions violations and acting as an unregistered agent for China. He’s now a fugitive from justice.
These Republicans sure know how to pick ’em. Or, to be more precise, these unsavory characters know how to pick Republicans.
I guess we all knew it was likely at some point. Vladimir Putin is a murderous dictator and it was clear that Navalny was being mistreated in prison. But it’s still shocking and depressing that it has happened.
The death of Aleksei A. Navalny, reported by the authorities in Russia on Friday, would leave the country without its most prominent opposition voice at a time when President Vladimir V. Putin has amassed near-total power, invaded neighboring Ukraine and drawn the sharpest divisions with U.S.-led Western allies since the end of the Cold War.
Mr. Navalny had been serving multiple prison sentences — on what supporters said were fabricated charges — that would likely have kept him locked up until at least 2031. The news of his death shocked world leaders, with Vice President Kamala Harris saying that while the United States was still trying to confirm the reports, it believed “Russia is responsible.”
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement that Mr. Navalny, 47, had lost consciousness and died after taking a walk on Friday in the Arctic prison where he was moved late last year. “All necessary resuscitation measures were taken, which did not lead to positive results,” the statement said.
Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media that his team could not immediately confirm his death and that a lawyer was traveling to the remote town where the prison is. “As soon as we have any information, we will report it,” she said.
Here are some clips and comments about it from this morning:
Yulia Navalny gets a standing ovation at the Munich Security Conference, hours after being told her husband is dead.
Via translator: “I thought, ‘Should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children?’ Then I thought, ‘What would would have Alexei done in my place?’” pic.twitter.com/wpv2q80bJo
"… around him, his government, his friends, I want them to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country, with my family and with my husband. They will be brought to justice and this day will come soon." https://t.co/MvG6YKqZFz
This is the moment I mentioned in my previous tweet. So damn poignant. Be inspired by @navalny's bravery. And beware of those who praise or prop up Vladimir Putin and his regime of repression and war crimes. https://t.co/Zijah66b9P
It’s probably a coincidence that Tucker Carlson is in Moscow right now prancing around singing Russia’s praises and that just this week Trump gave the green light for Putin to invade any country in Europe.
really *something* to have one of the most famous people on the American right unfurling a hype campaign for Russia as Vladimir Putin's top critic is found dead https://t.co/byP3akCS0q
The enormous contrast between Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of Putin’s regime will remain. Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.
Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country. For a dictator who survives thanks to lies and violence, that kind of challenge was intolerable. Now Putin will be forced to fight against Navalny’s memory, and that is a battle he will never win.
Meanwhile, here’s the spin coming from the right wing.
When a Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) or a Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) stand up and call out Republican BS or CEO excess, it’s like a breath of fresh air to liberal politics. Not Jon Stewart brashness, exactly, but not the usual business-as-usual politics that is too easy for the press to ignore.
Nerds. Maybe it’s because we’re nerds, rarely sure enough of ourselves to go straight at the opposition or stand up for ourselves. Democrats wanting to be liked are forever second-guessing themelves. Republicans will settle for being feared. Why else all the posing with guns? On one side of this Lord of the Flies narrative, Ralph and Piggy try to maintain order and improve living conditions on the island while Jack and his spear-armed tribe cohere around fear of the Beast (any real or imagined threat).
The press preferences flash over substance and pays more attention to the former. Digby observed yesterday that the press under-reports Joe Biden’s economic accomplishments because he “hasn’t been entertaining enough for them.”
Piggy wore spectacles. Jack’s “warriors” made spectacle.
Brian Beutler this morning goes straight at “finger-in-the-wind style analysis rooted in little more than the media’s sense that Things Seem Bad For Democrats On TV.” Beutler sees its roots in “the clash between insecure liberalism and kayfabe conservatism.” But the press also reflects “Democratic neurosis and artificial Republican aggression” back to the world, Beulter writes:
A toughness schtick has been integral to every Republican campaign and strategy I’ve ever covered, but it has reached cartoonish levels in the Trump era. It’s visible in their efforts to spare Donald Trump from prosecution, their “don’t make me hurt you” threats of tit-for-tat retribution in response to any measure of accountability, and Trump’s constant lying about polls.
Sometimes it’s so effective at warping political junkies’ sense of what’s what that they retroactively confuse the facade for reality. Ahead of the 2022 election, polls showed Democrats holding up surprisingly well, particularly given the historical pattern of incumbent parties losing badly in midterms. Republicans had just overturned the right to abortion, and fielded Big Lie election deniers for high office in key swing-states. Survey data said Democrats were poised to benefit. Republicans responded with a blitz of propaganda focused on crime (which has fallen under President Biden from its Trump-year highs) and inflation (which was actually elevated at the time). Elite Democrats were spooked; many of them second-guessed their campaigns for playing to the pro-choice, pro-democracy base. The distortion was so severe that when Democrats crushed expectations, observers stipulated that the polls must have been wrong. But the polls were right! The discourse was wrong.
Democrats attributed Tom Suozzi’s NY-03 victory “to his conservative bona fides,” writes Beutler, while Republicans beat their chests and swore they’d win back the seat when the fall campaign shifts, New York GOP chair Ed Cox said, to “Joe Biden and Democrats’ disastrous open-border, soft-on-crime policies.” But it’s so much bad faith and false bravado.
There’s plenty of Republican faithlessness out there, Beutler continues, but it’s not wise to chalk it all up to posturing. “A puffy chest … is not a concrete promise to commit atrocities.” Some may be them playing mind games with Democrats. But when “they promise to purge ‘vermin’ or intern immigrants or cheer Vladimir Putin on as he marches into NATO countries … we should still take them at their word.”
Democrats may in some instances benefit from setting expectations low. They may, in fact, playact at losing to galvanize their voters. But it just as easily risks demoralizing their base while overconfidence invites complacency.
But losing is demoralizing, feelinglikeyou’re losing is both demoralizing and disorienting. When you’re not actually losing, it makes you prone to errors—like changing the theme of a campaign, downplaying issues that benefit your party (abortion rights, democracy protection) in order to increase the salience of issues like crime and immigration that galvanize white reactionaries.
[…]
But even if you can’t see through the nonsense every single time, healthy skepticism of GOP rhetoric and healthy confidence in your own values are available to all of us. They’re more productive than chasing neurotic self-doubt into the fetal position every time a Republican pretends to be triumphant or angry.
Older Democrats, in particular, I’ve observed, fret like abused spouses over what Republicans might do or say in response to liberal statements or policies. They tend to be policy liberals and cautious campaign conservatives, always trying to appeal to the middle without inflaming the right. That is a mistake. For one, because it is not a good look. Voters seeking leaders watch for cues that tell them this candidate or that one will have their backs. They want heroes. How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? They’ll root again and again for an underdog with heart and grit.
The irony of MAGA is that Trump is just an insecure bully who kayfabes confidence (some of his lieutenants are actual authoritarian bullies). MAGA followers are attracted like medieval peasants to promises of protection by their liege-lords while deluding themselves that fealty to cartoonish tough guys makes them American Übermensch. That and AR-15s.
Democrats can do better than feeding delusion. But they’ll need to display more heart and grit. That’s why Raskin and Porter make us cheer.
A good message engages your liberal base, persuades the middle, and alienates the right. It draws a contrast voters can see. Milquetoast doesn’t do that. Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain,” chuckled when I told him a key lesson I took from his book on messaging came down to this: If you’re not pissing ‘em off, you’re not doing it right.
Choose your fighter: Jesus vs. Satan — This TikToker pointed out the hyprocisy of some conservative Christians (via @ incrediberry on TikTok) pic.twitter.com/I79enQuQYr
Ron is now seeking some adjustments. Seems some members of his anti-woke mob are out of control. Here he is today:
“With objecting – if you go to a school board meeting objecting. If you have a kid in school, okay. But if you’re somebody who doesn’t have a kid in school and you’re gonna object to 100 books? No, I don’t think that’s appropriate. So I think the legislature is interested in limiting what the number of challenges you can do, and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not. We just want to make sure we’re not trying to incentivize frivolous objections or any type of games being played.”
They counted on MAGA to be stupid. Always a smart bet.
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This is an interesting tick-tock of the Border/Foreign Aid bill from the NY Times. (Gift link, here) It starts off recounting how the Republicans thought they could back the Dems into a corner by demanding a border component to Ukraine funding which they knew was vitally important to the White House. The Democrats decided that they would call their bluff and negotiate a border bill and one that would be seen as credible by serious border hawks. But they were not surprised when the Republicans balk:
The possibility that Republicans would bolt from their own deal had occurred to Mr. Schumer from the start, given his previous experience.
“We knew it way back then,” he said.
But Mr. Schumer saw a political upside should that occur: Democrats would be able to say they tried and point to the Republican opposition for failing to halt a surge of migrants illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico.
“It’s a win if Republicans abandon us at the last minute,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview, explaining his calculation, “because if Democrats could put together a tough, bipartisan bill on border, it would not take border away as an issue for the Republicans, but it would give us a 50-50 chance to combat it.”
I’m actually glad to hear that. I would have been very concerned if they weren’t prepared for this since the Republicans have been playing this game for quite some time. And I think that Joe Biden certainly knew it since he’s personally been involved in some of the most egregious examples of GOP bad faith saving the Democrats from a deal their voters hate.
A promising moment came when Congress returned last month, Mr. Schumer said. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the Republicans’ lead negotiator in the talks, began disclosing details of the potential agreement to top colleagues, who seemed to be impressed by how far Democrats had moved on the issue. Approval seemed possible, though in the weeks that followed, Mr. Trump began savaging the emerging deal pre-emptively and urging Republicans to reject it.
The deal quickly collapsed on Feb. 4, within hours of the details being made public. Far-right conservatives in the Senate rebelled, scoffing at the notion that Democrats had made real concessions and saying that Mr. Biden would not enforce the new law regardless.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Senate Republicans, including Mr. McConnell, ran from the agreement. Only four Republicans ended up voting to bring it to the floor. Republicans still intend to hammer Democrats on border security issues and blame the lack of tough border policy in the Ukraine aid bill as a rationale for not taking up the legislation in the House.
“The Senate’s foreign aid bill is silent on the most pressing issue facing our country,” Speaker Mike Johnson said in attacking the legislation and suggesting it was dead in the House.
Still, members of both parties credited Mr. Schumer for deftly playing a hand that insulated Democrats from a backlash to the collapse, provided a political defense on border policy and still allowed him and a bipartisan coalition of senators to salvage the Ukraine aid.
“He saw an opening, and he seized it,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “His approach has kept this effort bipartisan despite the rancor and resistance.”
It also allowed Democrats to wring maximum political benefit from the immigration debate without having to follow through with any policy concessions. They were able to signal to voters that they embraced strong border provisions — and blame Republicans for killing them — without having to put the restrictions into force, which would surely have alienated their progressive base.
Tom Suozzi ran on immigration by pointing out that Trump ordered them not to take the deal and suggesting that he would have voted for it with a path to citizenship for DREAMers and others already in the country. It seems to have worked for him.
It was risky for the Dems to do this because you never know for sure that the Republicans will refuse to take yes for an answer. But at this point it’s a pretty good bet.
This was ultimately what they expected to happen. They wanted the real winners of the election to riot so they could justify calling for the Insurrection Act and put the military on the streets of America. That’s what Trump meant when he said that he pre-authorized the Department of Defense to be prepared to deploy troops in DC in the days before the Insurrection.
And, in fact, that’s what Trump and Steven Miller are planning to do in the second term except this time they plan to use immigration as their excuse.
They just want to use the military against Americans one way or another. There is no doubt that he will do it this time.
Guess what? The Biden administration is meeting its commitment to under served communities
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There was a bit of a brouhaha on Xitter in the last couple of days when an economic reporter for the NY Times posted that his friends in Brooklyn didn’t know about Biden’s economic successes and when confronted with the fact that the media bore some responsibility for that he fired back that he isn’t the Biden administration’s PR company. Let’s just say it wasn’t well received. Apparently, Biden hasn’t been entertaining enough for them to cover it. He needs to up his “PR” so the news media will feel it’s important to cover it.
Having said that, here’s a shout out to Axios for reporting this, which I did not know before:
There’s an unprecedented building boom underway in America. With it has come a less-noticed phenomenon: a surge of investment into communities left behind in the last economic expansion.
Why it matters: Poorer counties with lower employment rates have attracted a large share of the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for clean energy projects, semiconductor mega-factories and more.
If sustained, the investment surge has the potential to help reshape local economies — a sharp departure from the 2010s, a period that saw more muted investment in these parts of the country.
Driving the news: These counties have received a disproportionate share of investments relative to their economic output, according to a new report from the Brookings Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The researchers look at private investment in economically distressed communities — the 1,071 counties with a median income below $75,000 and prime-age employment that significantly lags the national average.
“The previous three years of data indicate that after decades of economic divergence, strategic sector investment patterns are including more places that have historically been left out of economic growth,” the report says.
The big picture: The building boom has been spurred in part by money allocated under Biden-era legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and CHIPS and Science Act — that’s helping put a floor under the national economy and sustaining demand for workers.
Some of that legislation provides incentives for investments in low-income areas.
Since 2021, distressed communities received 16% of investments in clean energy, chips, bio-manufacturing and other industries. That’s double their share of national GDP and about 1.2 times their share of the U.S. population.
Between the lines: When compared to overall private investment, investments in these specific industries are more likely to go to distressed communities.
“Distressed communities are attracting new clean energy and semiconductor investment at roughly twice the rate of traditional private investment,” says Brian Deese, former top White House economic adviser who joined MIT last year.
“If this trend continues, it has the potential to change the economic geography of the country and create economic opportunity in parts of this country that too many people have written off in the past,” says Deese, an author of the report and a key architect of Biden’s industrial policy.
The intrigue: These counties are mainly concentrated in southern states but include some areas in the Northeast, West and Midwest.
In effect, it’s created a new center for American private investment — a much different trend than that seen in the 2010-2020 period.
During that time, distressed counties received an average of 8% of total private fixed investment (excluding residential investments) — roughly the same as their share of national GDP.
Aaaaand:
The huge question heading into the 2024 election is what credit Biden gets for the investment boom.
In some states, Republicans are taking credit for the manufacturing renaissance, Axios’ Hans Nichols has reported.
Of course we all “wonder” if Biden will get any credit, which requires that the media report it but here we are back at square one. Still, kudos to Axios for at least putting it out there. maybe someone else will notice. I suspect that the best way for the democrats to get attention to this is by highlighting the GOP members taking credit. It’s only news when it’s “fun.” And that has an element of fun.
