Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

This NY Times piece analyzes Trump’s long-standing habit of obstructing justice. The man who claims that everyone else is cheating has always been a cheater and a cover-up artist. He is completely unethical and immoral.

By now you know the new charges in the superseding indictment. He tried to have the surveillance tapes destroyed and he worked to make sure his henchmen wouldn’t say anything. They did and now they are under federal indictment.

Trump has always done this:

“Demanding that evidence be destroyed is the most basic form of obstruction and is easy for a jury to understand,” said Mr. Goldstein, who is now a white-collar defense lawyer at the firm Cooley.

“It is more straightforwardly criminal than the obstructive acts we detailed in the Mueller report,” he said. “And if proven, it makes it easier to show that Trump had criminal intent for the rest of the conduct described in the indictment.”

The accusation about Mr. Trump’s desire to have evidence destroyed adds another chapter to what observers of his career say is a long pattern of gamesmanship on his part with prosecutors, regulators and others who have the ability to impose penalties on his conduct.

And it demonstrates how Mr. Trump viewed the conclusion of the Mueller investigation as a vindication of his behavior, which became increasingly emboldened — particularly in regards to the Justice Department — throughout the rest of his presidency, a pattern that appears to have continued despite having lost the protections of the office when he was defeated in the election.

In his memoir of his years in the White House, John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, described Mr. Trump’s approach as “obstruction as a way of life.”

[…]

The updated indictment also demonstrates how Mr. Trump, in the aftermath of the search of Mar-a-Lago last August, turned to an issue that he obsessed about in the White House: loyalty.

“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Mr. Nauta as saying about Mr. De Oliveira to another Trump employee.

That employee told Mr. Nauta that Mr. De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Mr. Trump.”

Shortly after that exchange, Mr. Trump called Mr. De Oliveira and said that he would get him a lawyer, the indictment said. Legal fees for Mr. De Oliveira, Mr. Nauta and other Trump employees who have become witnesses or defendants in the documents case are being paid by a political action committee affiliated with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump’s desire for loyalty echoed behavior that Mr. Mueller captured in his report, which laid out how Mr. Trump asked the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, for his loyalty just days after taking office. Mr. Comey continued to pursue an investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia and was fired in Mr. Trump’s fifth month in office. Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel in the aftermath of Mr. Comey’s dismissal.

Mr. Mueller’s investigation ultimately identified nearly a dozen acts Mr. Trump took that could be seen as obstruction of justice. One of the most damning related to how Mr. Trump pressured his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to create a fake document rebutting statements he gave to Mr. Mueller’s office. Mr. McGahn refused to go along with what Mr. Trump wanted.

Another example related to Mr. Trump’s powers as president. During Mr. Mueller’s investigation, several of his allies and associates — including Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort — were indicted by the Justice Department in cases that could have produced damaging testimony about Mr. Trump and his campaign. As the prosecutions of the men went forward, Mr. Trump publicly dangled the idea of issuing pardons. In the final weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency, he pardoned them.

“There are all sorts of ways to obstruct an investigation, but not every one has an equal impact,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former prosecutor on Mr. Mueller’s team. “Hiding and lying are damaging, but prosecutors can often still get at the truth. Destruction is often looked at seriously because it’s permanent. It’s permanently deleting or destroying” evidence in the case.

[…]

Over many decades before reaching the White House, Mr. Trump engaged in gamesmanship with prosecutors, regulators and officials who had authority in aspects of the industries in which he operated. He lived in a New York City where corruption touched aspects of the political and government establishments and the real-estate construction businesses, and he came to believe that everything could be worked out through some kind of deal, associates and former employees said.

He courted officials who had prosecutorial jurisdiction in New York City, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, and Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney in Manhattan. Faced with massive amounts of civil litigation, his impulse, former employees said, was to find lawyers who knew the judge.

In April 2018, an aspect of the Russian investigation spun off into a separate one into Michael D. Cohen, a lawyer for the Trump Organization who also served as a fixer for Mr. Trump and knew many of his secrets. After Mr. Cohen’s hotel, apartment and office were searched by the F.B.I. that month, Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen with a message: stay strong.

He then predicted on Twitter that Mr. Cohen would never “flip” on him. Mr. Cohen eventually did provide prosecutors with information about Mr. Trump’s hush-money payments before the 2016 election to a porn star who said she had a sexual liaison with him. He later said that Mr. Trump spoke in “code” to avoid plainly communicating his desires.

Mr. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, wrote in his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” that Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to interfere with law enforcement and other official actions involving foreign leaders.

During an investigation into Halkbank, a state-financed institution based in Turkey that was facing an investigation by U.S. officials for a scheme to evade sanctions on Iran, Mr. Trump told the country’s leader that he would “take care of things,” Mr. Bolton wrote.

In a brief interview on Friday, Mr. Bolton pointed to a specific aspect of Mr. Trump’s view of how the rules apply to him: his use of government power for his personal and political benefit while in office.

He cited Mr. Trump’s efforts to solicit damaging information about the Bidens from Ukraine as he withheld military aid to that country. “It shows as president he had fundamental difficulty distinguishing himself from the government,” Mr. Bolton said. “And it’s also why he couldn’t understand why government officials weren’t personally loyal to him.”

This is interesting…

Megyn Kelly: “Why can’t Disney oppose your law… without being punished?”

Gov. DeSantis (R-FL): “We’re just simply removing a special benefit.”

Kelly: “If I go to my boss and I say, ‘You sexually harassed me,’ and… he reduces my salary from $200k to $100k, that’s retaliation.” pic.twitter.com/NFOC0bKuot

— The Recount (@therecount) July 28, 2023

Dance, Ron, dance.

Megyn isn’t quick enough to throw back in his face the long-standing GOP view of small government and the private sector being completely independent from the state. His diversion from that ideology is very Trumpian: the only rule that corporations need to follow is that they must show total fealty to … him. There’s a word for that and it starts with F and ends with ism.

Trump discusses the surveillance tapes

He’s at a loss on this one. His excuse is lamer than usual:

“These were my tapes that we gave to them,” Trump told conservative radio host John Fredericks. “These were security tapes. We handed them over to them. … I’m not even sure what they’re saying.”

That’s a non-sequitur. Yes, they were his tapes. It’s what he ordered his henchman to do with them that was criminal.

The Department of Justice alleged that Trump and Nauta had asked De Oliveira to delete the footage from Mar-a-Lago, so the video would not get into the hands of a grand jury.

The new court documents claimed De Oliveira and Nauta were captured on surveillance video moving boxes that may have contained documents with classified markings before DOJ and FBI officials visited the property to collect subpoenaed items.

It also alleged that in June 2022, on the same day that the DOJ emailed Trump’s attorney another subpoena for surveillance video, De Oliveira had a private conversation with an employee in an audio closet during which he asked how long a server containing the video kept its footage.

The employee said the footage would stay on the server for 45 days, to which De Oliveira responded that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, according to the indictment. Trump also allegedly offered to provide an attorney for De Oliveira last August.

He knows very well what they are saying in the indictment. He just doesn’t know how to explain this except to bellow “mine” which can’t make sense even to the cult. (Or can it?)

This week the House held a hearing on UFOs

Not content with chasing phantom “Biden Crime Family” investigations, the Republicans decided to take a spin in a spaceship:

David Grusch, the former US intelligence officer who claims that the US government is harboring “intact and partially intact” and “non-human” pilots, appeared in Washington, under oath, to repeat the same.

The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs, Grusch told the oversight committee. He added that unnamed federal agencies had even recovered “biologics” from these craft, which he described as “non-human”.

Moreover, Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, said he had encountered “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of the government’s efforts to keep this alien program secret. Grusch told the committee that after going public with his allegations he had feared for his life.

Happily for Grusch, and for the scores of UFO enthusiasts who flooded to the hearing, some of the politicians listening appeared to be completely sold.

“I believe they [aliens] exist. I knew that before I came in here,” Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, told the Guardian.“I don’t want to oversimplify it, but how are you going to fly one [a spaceship]? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple,” Burchett said.

If Burchett’s statement seemed to ignore longstanding earth-bound technology which already commonly enables unmanned flight via drones, his enthusiasm will at least have buoyed onlookers. Given the Republican is co-leading the investigation into Grusch’s claims, he seems a good person to have convinced.

Also onboard is Matt Gaetz, a rightwing Republican from Florida. Gaetz, Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna, also from Florida, had caused a kerfuffle at a Florida air force base a week earlier when they turned up demanding to see evidence of a recently reported UFO incident.Gaetz said that having initially being denied access to the base, the trio were eventually shown an “image” of unidentified anomalous phenomena – a term preferred by some to UFO. “The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability either from the United States, or from any of our adversaries,” Gaetz said.

Luna, who is co-leading the oversight committee investigation with Burchett, also seemed keen. “It is unacceptable to continue to gaslight Americans into thinking this is not happening,” she said during Wednesday’s hearing. A day later Luna told Axios that her interest in UFOs came from encountering one in 2018.

Claims of UFOs, and of the government covering up aliens, have a long history in the US.In the 1940s and 50s, reports of UFOs, usually in the shape of a “flying saucer”, were commonplace, while Grusch himself has suggested – although not in Wednesday’s hearing – that Pope Pius XII negotiated the transfer of a UFO from Mussolini’s Italy to the US in 1944.

It wasn’t until the past couple of years, however, that Congress really began to take notice. Grusch’s accusations might have ultimately prompted this investigation, but the discussion of UFOs has been lent something approaching legitimacy by leaked military videos which appear to show odd-shaped objects zipping about in American aerospace, and claims from US navy pilots of strange encounters.

Two of those pilots – David Fravor and Ryan Graves – gave testimony on Wednesday. Graves, who has previously reported seeing unidentified aerial phenomena off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”, said that other, unnamed pilots had come across “dark grey or black cubes inside of clear spheres” where “the apex or tips of the cube were touching the inside of the sphere”.

Not everyone, however, was impressed with the new disclosures. Grusch has not personally seen any of the things he described, and his claims are based on interviews with people “with direct knowledge” of governmental goings on, which has raised eyebrows among skeptics.“Fravor and Graves for years have been telling this story pretty much as best as they can. And Grusch: I suspect he believes his story,” said Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole. How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect.

“So it didn’t really change that aspect of it for me. I already believe that they thought they were telling the truth, what I don’t think is that what they’re describing is an accurate representation of the facts.” West, a longtime investigator of alleged UFO encounters and claims, said sightings like the ones Fravor and Graves described could be attributed to radar issues or clutter, including balloons in the air.

In terms of proving, unequivocally, that the US government has alien craft, and indeed aliens, West said it “will come down to the physical evidence”. “They say they know the exact locations of where these alien craft are. So if you want to tell the American public about the whole program, if Congress wants to do that, then they can just go and look at these craft,” he said

One issue which commonly raises doubts is that the US government has allegedly been able to keep its stash of UFOs secret – for decades. Given the leaks, scoops and whistleblowing on various governmental secrets and wrongdoing, this apparent ability to remain tight-lipped on what would be the biggest secret in human history would be remarkable.

“And it’s not just the US government. It’s the whole world,” West said. Indeed, UFO sightings are not a uniquely American phenomenon. The UK, for one, has not been immune. In 2011 the British Ministry of Defence released 8,500 pages of reports on UFO sightings, dating back to the 1950s. The files included a report from one man who said he was “abducted” in October 1998, by aliens in a “large cigar-shaped vehicle with big projectiles on each side like wings”.

“And what about all the other countries? There’s a lot of other landmass, lots of places for UFOs to crash. It doesn’t make any sense,” West said. Maybe it doesn’t, but there is evidence that international cooperation may be coming. In May the Pentagon held a UFO-focused briefing of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – which includes the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – with the promise of more meetings to come.

And despite the lack of an extraterrestrial smoking gun, for longtime followers of UFO sightings, claims and developments Wednesday made for an extraordinary experience.“It was one of the most amazing and bizarre and surreal congressional hearings ever held,” said Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence.

“You had to almost pinch yourself and do a double-take when you heard phrases like ‘non-human intelligences’ and ‘biologics’ unpacked in the testimony.”

Grusch didn’t produce new revelations, repeatedly stating that he could not elaborate further in a public setting, something which Pope said made sense.

But some of the politicians spoke afterwards, however, about the importance of getting Grusch’s claims into the record. Pope said that was an important step in the road to finding out what the government might have. “It was clear listening to what the various people on the committee said that they weren’t going to let this lie,” Pope said. “You got a sense of the anger that they had, at the implication that things were being hidden from them improperly.”

One thing is certain: the UFO craze is not going away. The next things to look out for include a Nasa report due to be published this month, while the Department of Defense is due to issue a report of its own this summer. There will probably be more congressional hearings when representatives, who are about to leave Washington on a month-long recess, return in September.

“We’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing. Sorry to disappoint about half y’all,” Burchett said at the start of proceedings on Wednesday.

“We’re just going to get to the facts.”

What those facts are, and when exactly they might be uncovered, remains to be seen.

Ya think?

By the way, there weren’t any hearings on climate change last week despite the unprecedented heat waves all over the globe. The only thing Republicans had to say about it was, “it’s summer.”

Trump premieres new video, says it's time to consolidate the election system

🎙️📷https://t.co/bHZYJiiT8h

📷 Download the APP: https://t.co/lxaytBwGbn pic.twitter.com/6St329VM0e

— John Fredericks (@jfradioshow) July 29, 2023

He reluctantly endorses mail-in votes but says “you’re never going to get an honest vote… it’s disgraceful.”

As usual, he will accept the results if it goes his way.

A Southern man don’t need them around, anyhow

Ala-by God-bama!

“In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district,” Adam Serwer explains in The Atlantic:

Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.

More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black, but the state’s Republican majority has racially gerrymandered that population into a single district out of seven because it fears those voters might elect Democrats. The partisan motive is no excuse for racial discrimination—1870s Democrats also had a partisan interest in disenfranchising Black voters, who were then reliably Republican. After failing to get the Supreme Court to overturn Section 2, Alabama decided that following the law was optional.

Hell, yeah!

Even as the right criticizes Democrats’ calls for ethics rules for the court in light of conservative justices’ non-transparency about gifts from ultra-rich supporters, Alabama reserves the right to ignore court rulings it dislikes. Democrats’ complaints only further deligitimize the Roberts court, dontcha know? Conservative states reserve the right to treat unfavorable court rulings as mere recommendations.

At one point, the right-wing legal martyr and originalist Robert Bork was so frustrated by the Court being insufficiently conservative that he declared, “As our institutional arrangements now stand, the Court can never be made a legitimate element of a basically democratic polity.” In the right’s view, the judiciary was an “imperial judiciary,” an “out of control branch of government.”

That’s the highfalutin way conservatives say that the only legitimate court is one in which heads, they win and tails, libs lose. SCOTUS is illegitimate when rulings go against states like Alabama. See, “voiding constitutional prohibitions on racial discrimination” is a southern tradition. Heritage. Like slavery and the Confederate battle flag.

Serwer is even more blunt:

It is clear the right that views the Court as a political instrument for imposing conservative policy, and when the Court fails to heed its obligation to do so, they can simply ignore it. This is consistent with the movement’s Trumpist turn toward the belief that the legitimacy of any practice or institution—elections, fundamental freedoms, the state itself—is conferred not by the consent of the governed but by the consent of the right. You have an inalienable access to the franchise as long as you vote Republican. You have free speech as long as you say conservative things. The free market is free only when it leads to conservative outcomes. The Supreme Court’s rulings are the law of the land, except if those rulings are not what conservatives want.

Not to single out the South exclusively, that’s also how Ohio Republicans treat their state Supreme Court’s rulings.

The Democracy Optional Party. Ain’t that grand?

The morphing anti-woke war

Another of the downsides to the steady withering of “X” is the former bird platform’s function as a town square where professional and amateur media critics could find an audience, complains Dan Froomkin of Press Watch.

“Political reporters at our leading news organizations routinely put a thumb on the scale in favor of the far right – both by failing to call out its racist and increasingly homophobic nature, and by adopting right-wing frames in reporting current events,” Froomkin writes. He offers a short list of recent stories in which major media outlets tiptoe around the increasingly overt racist and homophobic impulses behind conservative actions and rhetoric.

“The right-wing’s anti-woke war against trans people has now —  as was entirely predictable —  morphed into a war on any expression of gender or sexuality that isn’t Biblically-approved procreative sex between a man and a woman,” Froomkin posted to the X site on Friday.

Slippery, meet Slope:

The Washington Post story about the homophobic attack on libraries that I mentioned above is just one example. The article by Gregory Schneider, was headlined “Public libraries are the latest front in culture war battle over books“.

But this is not a story about concerned “community members” legitimately worried about “terrible violations of the social order, of sexualizing and brainwashing children,” as Schneider described it.

There has been no violation of the social order — unless that social order is mandatory cis heterosexuality, which, at least for the moment, it is not. There has been no sexualizing and brainwashing at these libraries.

The story is actually about a little library defending itself against steamrolling by homophobic zealots who call anything that isn’t heterosexual pornography.

Twenty-seven paragraphs from the start, Schneider finally offers readers a hint that virtually all the people behind the complaints “said they had not read the books, only summaries.”

It’s as if reporting on Ohio Republicans’ effort to raise the bar for amending the state constitution in the August special election treated it as a legislative debate rather than it being “100%” about blocking the abortion rights amendment on the ballot in November.

Yes, there’s more:

A New York Times story headlined “Bungled Hiring of Journalism Director Exposes a Rift at Texas A&M” dramatically underplayed the role of racism in both the “bungled” hiring and the alleged “rift”.

Kathleen McElroy’s job offer to be the tenured director of the journalism program at A&M was rescinded because she was Black.

This was euphemized by reporters Colbi Edmonds, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Marina Trahan Martinez, who wrote that the “shifting offers” were due to “a backlash over the Black professor’s views on race and diversity.”

Worse, they turned a story about a powerful racist subculture into one about a “rift” over “opposition to diversity initiatives”.

There is no evidence of such a rift. Indeed, faculty members, for instance,  are appropriately aghast at the administration’s moral collapse in succumbing to racist criticisms.

To support their hypothesis that “some Aggies are questioning the direction of the university,” the reporters quote who? A conservative news website and the chairman of the university’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. That’s it.

The appearance of non-stories is something, like Froomkin, I’ve noticed lately, stories where at the end you ask yourself what the point was. Froomkin mentions one by the New York Times that suggests the Department of Justice is wasting resources investigating Donald Trump. It concludes, “These efforts, taken as a whole, do not appear to be siphoning resources that would otherwise be used to combat crime or undertake other investigations.”

Saguaro cacti are slowly dying as Phoenix, AZ, has seen 25 straight days of temperatures over 110°F as of July 26.

The plants, which are tolerant of heat and drought, typically cool off at night or when sprayed with mist. But evening temperatures haven’t dropped below 90°F.… pic.twitter.com/CYY2ZMVv3S

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) July 27, 2023

Saguaro cacti are collapsing in the prolonged, record-high Arizona heat. Stories on the impacts are likely to chalk it up to a heat wave, to temperatures heating up “over time” and to failure of summer monsoon rains to arrive. If mentioned at all as a factor, climate change might appear in the last paragraph.

Mustn’t ruffle delicate feathers on the climate change-denying right.

The youngest offspring at Zoo Vienna is hard to miss. On July 17, a female fur seal was born. When it’s hungry, it loudly draws attention to itself to get its mother’s care. “In the first few days, the mother and the young seal were in the backstage area, but now they can be seen by the visitors in a specially designed shallow water area. The little one is already making its first attempts at swimming. The mother is very experienced and takes good care of her offspring,” says Simone Haderthauer, the zoological curator. Fur seals can swim and dive from birth, but practice makes perfect! Once the young seal is confident both on land and in water, she will join the rest of the group.

The commented feeding of the fur seals is a highlight of every zoo visit for many visitors. However, it will take some time before the young seal exclusively eats fish and participates in the feeding. During the first six to eight months, seal pups are nursed by their mothers. Haderthauer says, “Currently, even the adult seals don’t have a big appetite for mackerel, sprats, and other fish. In the summer, after the pups are born, it’s also the mating season, and the male, who keeps a harem, has little time to eat.” The animal care team has also noticed that the recent heatwave has further reduced the seals’ appetite. It’s a good thing that cooling down is now the order of the day.”

Trump addressed the new superseding indictment:

Donald Trump on Friday defended the handling of surveillance footage at his Florida home that is at the center of major new criminal charges in the federal case over the former president’s retention of classified documents.

“These are my tapes that we gave to them,” Trump told a conservative radio host in his first public interview since being accused of the new crimes.

“And they basically then say, ‘That’s not enough,’” Trump said on “The John Fredericks Show.”

Trump, the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, also vowed to continue his campaign even if he is convicted and sentenced.

“Not at all, there’s nothing in the Constitution to say that it could,” Trump said when asked if being sentenced would end his presidential bid.

Later in the day, Trump fired off several social media posts raging against the Department of Justice.

He accused special counsel Jack Smith, the prosecutor leading the classified documents probe, of “attempting to destroy the lives of two fine people who have worked for me (and have done a great job!) for a long time.”

“This is textbook Third World intimidation by rabid, lawless prosecutors,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. In a follow-up post, he called for Smith, his prosecutors and Attorney General Merrick Garland to be jailed.

Waaaaah!!!!

Ruhle: Let’s remind our audience of some of the things Donald Trump once said about Hillary Clinton and a server pic.twitter.com/4qhKxNBKic

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 28, 2023

In light of the news that Trump ordered his minions to “erase the server” that held the surveillance footage outside the storage room at Mar-a-lago, I’m just going to leave that here for you to enjoy.

Trump projection 101.