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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Emails? Oh my God!

Published by digby on October 8, 2023

Trump blurts out nuclear secrets to anyone who’ll listen and it’s just not a big deal

By the way, Biden is old. I don’t know if you’ve heard. But it’s been on every front page in the nation for weeks now.

Trump the king

Published by digby on October 8, 2023

Trump throws a hail Mary at the Supreme Court in an attempt to finally declare the presidency immune from all legal accountability

Last week Trump filed a number of delaying tactics in the courts where he’s been indicted courts around the country but one may be the most significant. His lawyers filed a case in federal court arguing that the president has total immunity from any crimes he may have committed while in office. Therefore, his attempt to illegally block the peaceful transfer of power cannot be prosecuted.

It’s complicated but this article gives a good overview of the legal issues at stake:

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team went big in their latest effort to derail the prosecution against him for conspiring to interfere in the 2020 election: They filed a motion to dismiss that could be called a motion to make U.S. presidents into kings.

The 52-page legal motion filed in the D.C. case asks U.S. District Judge Tonya Chutkan to dismiss the indictment based on the concept of “presidential immunity” that Trump argues makes him immune from any criminal prosecution for acts he took as president. The legal precedent underlying the motion is that presidents have been immune from civil lawsuits over actions taken while they served as president and Justice Department policy that sitting presidents cannot be indicted while in office. But Trump seeks to expand this immunity from civil lawsuits for money and DOJ’s policy of forbearance from prosecuting a sitting U.S. president into a limitless doctrine of executive immunity that would green light nearly any criminal actions committed by a president.

Trump’s lawyers argue that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s charges against Trump must be dismissed because, “Here, 234 years of unbroken historical practice–from 1789 until 2023– provide compelling evidence that the power to indict a former president for his official acts does not exist.” While they are right that it has never been done before–arguably because no president has shown such brazen disregard for the law–the historical fact that it has not been done before adds nothing to the legal basis for the defense.

The Supreme Court case of Fitzgerald v. Nixon established absolute immunity for civil liability for actions by a president while in office. But the “absolute” qualifier was limited in that case to what has become known as the “outer-perimeter” zone of official duties, which made clear that presidential conduct that fell outside that boundary could be actionable in a civil context. The lawsuit filed by Paula Jones against former President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment was one such example of actions that fell outside the zone of official presidential conduct. In any case, Fitzgerald v. Nixon never established an absolute immunity against criminal prosecutions, so even though the DOJ and Jack Smith may be doing something that has never been done before, it’s Trump who is trying to extend legal precedent in a way never done before. Indeed, in another case involving former President Nixon, the Supreme Court famously held that Nixon could not use executive privilege to shield himself from a criminal grand jury’s subpoena for the tapes he had made while in office.

The DOJ will no doubt take apart Trump’s arguments in its response and Judge Chutkan is almost certain to side with federal prosecutors and reject Trump’s effort to dismiss the case. Trump–who loves to say: “I will appeal”–will certainly then try to appeal, and that is where the legal questions become sticky.

Appeals pre-trial are limited in criminal cases, with most arguments being taken up only after a trial and conviction (prosecutors cannot appeal an acquittal). But in certain limited situations an interlocutory appeal could be allowed, meaning the issues raised by Trump could be appealed first to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. Precedent exists for allowing disputes over immunity to be appealed pre-trial. That’s because arguments involving absolute immunity are different than arguments involving factual innocence (I didn’t’ do it!) and other legal defenses (I did it but it’s not illegal) given the common-sense notion that a person who isn’t supposed to be subject to a legal process shouldn’t have to go all the way through before a trial and then be found that the trial never should have happened. Some of that precedent involves claims of double-jeopardy, where a defendant argues that they are “immune” from a prosecution in the sense that the double-jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment bars their prosecution.

Indeed, one of the arguments Trump also makes is precisely a double jeopardy argument, which looks silly on its face but may have strong strategic value in getting an interlocutory appeal. Specifically, Trump argues that his acquittal on impeachment by the Senate for his Jan. 6 conduct operates as a bar against his prosecution for election interference because to prosecute him criminally would be double jeopardy. That analogy is simply wrong, since by definition an impeachment is a political proceeding, not a criminal case brought by the government. The mere invocation of the double jeopardy argument, however, will bolster Trump’s chances of getting an appeal heard prior to his criminal trial starting.

If Trump’s motion to dismiss based on his claims of absolute presidential immunity are found to be appealable pre-trial on an interlocutory basis, then the case almost certainly will reach the Supreme Court. Although Trump has frequently been disappointed by SCOTUS not backing his legal theories, this one may be different because it involves expansion of executive authority. Trump’s appointments of three young conservative justices–Amy Coney-Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh–has created a powerful conservative majority. That conservative majority has indicated a leaning towards favoring expansion of presidential authority under the theory of the “unified executive theory.” Most recently, in the case involving whistleblowers, three justices (Thomas, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett) indicated their willingness to consider cases involving this theory in the future. A decision by SCOTUS upholding immunity from criminal prosecution for presidents would do more than allow Trump to escape accountability. It would transform U.S. presidents from chief executives into kings.

We can hope that the court won’t validate Richard Nixon’s famous assertion that “when the president does it it’s not illegal.” But you never know with this court.

All the MAGA ladies

Published by digby on October 8, 2023

It’s been quite a morning for the GOP superstar women on TV this morning

What Lovely people..

Who are swing voters?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2023

A teeth-grinding interview

What if the next presidential election is a rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump. Kristen Welker of Meet The Press sat down with four Pennsylvania “swing voters” how they feel about that.

First off, how were they chosen for this conclave? What makes theses four representative stand-ins for swing voters in general? What makes their opinions somehow illuminating?

At least this Republican voter (above) will take a stand even if he believes (somehow) that Biden is on the edge of senility. Welker didn’t ask in this edit what people thought of Kamala Harris as president in the event…. That might have been revealing.

Samantha Cieslinski voted Republican in the past but now feels her “moral compass” won’t let her choose either Biden or Trump. Oh, and she’s the one panelist who says she might sit out Election Day 2024 if there isn’t someone running she can “support wholeheartedly.”

Moral compass? As if even if her ambivalence is real and not for the camera, has any experienced voter in this country ever, ever in their lifetimes entered a voting booth in a presidential election and found just one race on the ballot? There will be dozens of choices for citizens to make. Dozens of choices for city council, county commission, school board, perhaps judges, state Senate, state House, and council of state races on that ballot in addition to federal races for U.S. House and Senate. Oh, but if I don’t like who’s at the top of the ticket, my “moral compass” might require me to stay home and let others make those decisions?

These kinds of interviews, like reporters’ heartland diner visits, are not meant to illuminate. They are cheap political entertainment.

How do you recall disinformation?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2023

We can’t even bury fascism

Yesterday’s first post explains why I’m not up to speed on what’s happening in Israel and Gaza and likely won’t catch up for a day or two. Compounding the problem is the inherent complexity of what’s happening there on the ground and what’s now happening with the internet. Digby tweeted (to hell with Musk) yesterday, “I used to turn to twitter at times like these but now I have no clue what’s real and what isn’t…”

A couple of observations about that.

Washington Post:

Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”

Sam Stein tried it out. Yup.

Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.

This epic AI fail reminds me of a line from George Carlin’s classic routine on birth control pills: “The entire female population of the US is being used as the guinea pigs to find out if birth control pills are gonna have any side effects or not. Isn’t that nice. Really, if every lady who used them gets to 61 and one leg gets shorter than the other one…better call the pills back.”

Decades later, all of humanity are guniea pigs for AI. Can you feel it yet?

Dan Froomkin has been relentlessly critiquing press obscurantism especially in New York Times headlines. It’s either conditioned reflex or deliberate. Crazy shit happens in Washington, D.C. and somehow there are no agents behind the chaos. It just happens, or both sides are behind it. Calling out the perps is bad for subscriptions and might provoke threats of violence against reporters.

Responding the crisis in Israel, Dave Roberts points out the bullshit Republican response on this continent. (It’s Joe Biden’s fault, you may have heard.)

Roberts adds, “Same thing with Trump’s repeated articulation of that most primal reactionary fear: they are laughing at us. Someone, somewhere, is laughing at us. Someone, somewhere, doubts our manhood so we must project it more, more, more! It’s so sad & sweaty.”

Speaking of sad and sweaty, Stephen Miller felt a need to weigh in on the Hamas attacks (h/t Rick Perlstein):

Perlstein: “Fuerherprinzip? Check. The Antisemitic code? Check. The palingenic chauvinism? Check. The ontological othering of liberalism? The workship of WILL? Check and check.” Also, “(I forgot one: “‘Rules” are chumps”? Check.”

Does anyone else always picture Miller wearing a black SS uniform?

One final bit of sadness and implied threat:

How should the press cover Donald Trump?

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

It’s become a perennial question and there aren’t a lot of good answers. But they should at least try to do something different.

I’m not sure I agree with all of these suggestions by Tom Rosenstiel in the LA Times but it’s worth considering. I do think that Trump absolutely must be covered because it’s vitally important that the normal people in this country do not lose sight of what a monstrous imbecile he really is, which is easy to do if he just becomes a regular candidate and they only cover him as some sort of a phantom from a vaguely remembered past. People must be relentlessly reminded of his current statements, which are even worse in many ways than those we recall from the last two elections. He is not a has-been clown we don’t need to worry about anymore, he is running again with a full-blown cult backing him up and it’s going to be close.

I have my doubts about what Rosenstiel says about journalists confronting Trump in interviews — he prevails by spewing a fire hose of bullshit that runs over even the best reporters. I think interviews are overrated anyway. They need to cover what he tells his followers and then explain why it’s crazy, stupid, dangerous etc.

Anyway, here are his suggestions:

Many confronting the challenge of covering Trump conclude that, as a recent column in the Arizona Republic put it, “It’s time to stop giving Trump airtime.” The larger point is that the media shouldn’t give exposure to people they know are going to make provably false assertions.

The problem with the “Don’t amplify liars” argument is twofold. First, the press is no longer a gatekeeper of what people know; it’s more often an annotator of what they’ve already heard elsewhere. So not covering Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene or others in politics who say patently false things will not silence them. It will just leave them less examined.

Second, it’s a dereliction of the press’ duty to ignore powerful dissemblers and liars in public life. We have an obligation to explain what’s false and offer clear and persuasive evidence of the truth. We have to help the public understand.

How can the press do that? Let’s start with Kristen Welker’s much-criticized recent interview with Trump on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The problem wasn’t that a reporter was interviewing Trump. The failures were in the execution.

The greatest failure was in not anticipating what Trump would predictably say and being prepared to follow up. Journalists tend to exaggerate the power of the “great question” and too often fail to develop strategies that lead to better answers. One reason so many politicians are having their way with reporters today is that they are better-prepared and better-versed in interview dynamics than the people interviewing them.

This notion of mapping out a questioning strategy is Interviewing 101 for lawyers. Attorneys identify where they want to end up and work backward, developing a series of questions that will guide a dishonest witness to a place where their evasions are exposed. Journalists need to plan their interviews in the same way but too often don’t.

This strategy usually relies on specificity: asking an evasive subject to provide evidence of their false assertions and having evidence ready to contradict predictable falsehoods and exaggerations. Jonathan Swan, then of Axios, provided an apt example in a 2020 interview with Trump. When the then-president tried to flimflam him with misleading statistics at one point, Swan replied with precision, detail and follow-up.

“Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” Swan told Trump. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad — much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”

“You can’t do that,” Trump replied weakly.

“Why can’t I do that?” Swan retorted.

When journalists lack that level of preparation, they slide into a trap Welker fell into. She ended up in a debate with Trump, repeatedly insisting “That’s not true” but having nothing in hand to prove it.

In the end, such encounters between journalists and politicians almost never get a subject to admit they’re wrong. But a well-prepared interview strategy, with a line of questions pointing in a clear direction and backed by evidence, offers the public three tangible benefits: It creates clarity rather than confusion, reveals more about the politician and makes it harder to lie.

Even if the press is not interviewing Trump or another politician — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is too afraid to face reporters one on one — this strategy of having hard evidence ready and using it well has become essential to reporting on their statements and campaigns. Again, we are now annotators.

How should the press cover a modern campaign more generally? The answers here are not new or complicated. But they do require more discipline and enterprise than chasing the parade, a habit journalists too readily fall into.

The press should dramatically reduce the time it spends following candidates around and attending rallies, imagining that the way politicians run their campaigns is a proxy for how they would govern. This conventional approach inevitably leads to stories on campaign tactics and horse-race coverage. Most voters don’t care. The press does it because it’s easy.

The 2024 race will be nothing like what journalists have encountered in past elections. They would better serve the public if they changed their habits and shifted their resources to four other dimensions of the campaign.

The candidates’ biographies: The campaign biography should be a full-time beat, not a one-day story. Reporters should focus on telling us who the candidates are, what they have done, how they have led, the impact of their choices, how they treat other people and more. And modern storytelling forms can present this information more effectively and accessibly than the classic candidate biography.

The nation’s problems: Campaign coverage shouldfocus more on the biggest problems facing the country, from inflation to climate change to the resilience of our democracy, and tell us what the candidates have done and can be expected to do about them.But these shouldn’t be old-fashioned compilations of shorthand policy positions that don’t mean much and falsely suggest every candidate is equally prepared for every challenge. If a candidate doesn’t really have a record on an issue or much apparent understanding of or interest in it, reporters need to make that clear.

Better fact-checking: Fact-checking needs to become a less haphazard and more relentless feature of political coverage. Traditional journalistic fact-checking is often too subjective: Journalists look for questionable statements to check out, inviting suspicion about bias. Beyond that traditional approach, fact-checkers should also borrow from social science by testing and measuring the veracity of random samples of statements, which would give voters more insight into the candidates’ truthfulness. Also, because research shows voters resist fact-checking of their favored candidates, fact-checkers should organize their work by issue as well as by politician, which would be more informative for more people.

The electorate: The press is supposed to operate in the name of the people, but too often its work reduces the public to a bystander. It should be a subject. Journalists should go beyond the usual polls and Midwestern diner interviews to report more deeply and consistently on what people across the country are feeling and thinking.

At bottom, elections are moments of public self-reflection. They tell us how we, the people, feel about the country and our future. If, on election day, the result seems inexplicable, that is a failure of journalism.

I wish I trusted the media to tell us anything about the electorate except tired tropes about “economic anxiety,” status loss and the high price of eggs. I just don’t think journalism has ever cracked what is going on with a political culture in real time because people don’t actually know what’s driving them most of the time. They are subject to conventional wisdom, peer pressure, cliches and stereotypes that may sound good to them and to others but don’t really get to the heart of why they are making political decisions.

There’s some utility in doing deep analysis of the electorate and there are some great journalists (like Ronald Brownstein) already doing it. But dispatching reporters to go forth into the country to figure out what “the people” are feeling and thinking mostly just tells us what they think they’re supposed to say.

Anyway, everything he recommends is all good as long as the media realizes that they have got to find novel ways of covering what’s going to be an unprecedented and momentous election. Just doing what they’ve been doing could be disastrous.

Meanwhile, back in the states

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

An insane man says Democrats kill babies after they’re born if the mother doesn’t want them

And that’s not all:

Aaaaand:

He is literally telling his cult that he judges everyone, including serial killers, whether or not they like him. And they think that’s great. If you think it’s a joke just look at how he treats Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

Who DIDN’T he tell?

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

If you’re in earshot of Donald Trump, chances are you’ll hear him blurt out some classified information

That time Trump shared top security information with the Japanese Prime Minister and his customers at Mar-a-Lago

Our best satirist Alexandra Petri makes a good point here:

The more that comes out about Donald Trump’s post-presidency conduct, the clearer it becomes that the real challenge was not prying confidential information out of Trump but avoiding receiving confidential information.

I think I see the problem. Donald Trump has two modes of conversation. He is either ranting about all the things he intends to do when he becomes dictator of the country — so many rights to strip away! so much vengeance to extract against his enemies! so many guardrails to dismantle! — or he is volunteering classified information. Those are really it. If you don’t want one, you have to buckle in for the other.

Which brings us to the news from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that Donald Trump apparently shared sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with an Australian billionaire. You might be wondering: Is this a private party, or can anyone play? Yes! All you have to do is pay money to be around Donald Trump by, say, attending a fundraiser or joining Mar-a-Lago, the most valuable golf club on the planet, valued at approximately $6 billion more than the sun, and you, too, can take the Trump Top Secret Challenge! See how long you can go without having Donald Trump just hand you some classified information.

Do you see all these people getting sensitive information from Trump — book researchers, foreign moguls, random users of the site formerly known as Twitter, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte — and wonder, Gee, how long can a person go in his company without hearing something they are not supposed to know? Is it measured in seconds, or in hours? Days seems too long. Fortunately, to answer this question, there’s the Trump Top Secret Challenge! Almost anyone can play! It’s not just for donors, although it is definitely for donors. The only objective is that you spend 24 hours around Donald Trump without learning any classified information.

Anyone can try! If you win, they give you a T-shirt (printed all over with state secrets), but nobody has won it yet. Somebody came close, once, because she was at Mar-a-Lago during a weekend when Trump was absent, but she made the mistake of visiting the wrong bathroom and — boom! Nothing but boxes of classified documents. Now she knows all our sources and methods. She wasn’t even interested in the sources and methods, but she hadn’t brought her phone into the bathroom with her, and she needed something to read.

Presumablythe Australian billionaire who reportedly learned about our nuclear submarines was also trying to do the Trump Top Secret Challenge. He thought he had a shot. Here he is, a foreign national, a cardboard magnate, with no obvious interest in naval warfare. (Usually, you can tell if a man has interest in naval warfare. That is one of the first things you know about him, usually.) Going into the challenge, his fear was that, knowing his passion for cardboard, Donald Trump was going to rush him to the bathroom and start showing off his collection of boxes, asking for his opinion on their absorption power and shape stability, and he might accidentally glimpse a secret that way. He had girded his loins against that possibility. What he was not prepared for was the fact that Donald Trump, any time there is a lull in conversation, will just tell you how close our nuclear submarines can get to a Russian submarine without detection. (Duterte made the same rookie mistake back in 2017.)

Other noteworthy losers include Russian officials (in the Oval Office in 2017), random social media users who looked at Twitter at the wrong moment in 2019 and got to see a classified photo taken by a classified satellite, and a pigeon that got too close to Air Force One at a critical moment.

It is one thing to walk into a meeting in the Oval Office and, say, be Russian. Everyone knows that Donald Trump loves to impress Russia. The odds were heavily against them. But researchers working on a book about somebody else mistakenly thought they had a shot. They weren’t even at Mar-a-Lago. That seemed promising. But no! Moments into the conversation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and the former president is waving classified documents at them. “Secret,” said Donald Trump. “This is secret information. Look, look at this!” Those are actual quotes.

This game is hard! But if you are willing to pay for proximity to the ex-president, you can play as many times as you like! Eventually, you’re bound to lose!

In all seriousness, I heard someone on TV yesterday (don’t recall who, sorry) saying that when they were first exposed to top national security secrets in a SCIF, they felt a massive weight on to them and they wished they didn’t know about it. The idea of accidentally revealing something so important is a huge burden to normal people. Trump not so much. But then, he’s not normal.

“The president is loaded”

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

50 years ago, Kissinger said that Nixon was too drunk to talk to the British Prime Minister when the Yom Kipper War broke out.

Right wingers are attacking Joe Biden all over the internet for waiting a couple of hours to issue a statement about the Israeli crisis, suggesting that he’s “in his basement” (which would be correct since that’s where the Situation Room is. ) Anyway, I think they need to shut their pieholes.

This one’s a doozy

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

This could be a syntax problem but that doesn’t make any sense either. Is he saying that “many reports are that American taxpayer dollars helped fund the attacks?” What does that mean? All the “reports” said that the money released recently to Iran was from a frozen account in South Korea that was sent to Qatar and hasn’t been released yet.

In any case, this garbled nonsense is typical for the putative GOP nominee for president.

I’m not going to be commenting too much on the Israel situation today because it’s very hard right now to get real information from social media and the mainstream media is also difficult to sort out. This was obviously a massive intelligence failure which is a condemnation of the current Israeli government as well as those supposed new Middle Eastern allies that Trump is so proud of creating. This is going to turn out to be more complicated than usual and that’s saying something.