Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

No, it’s not about the cat….

Late yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump published an item to his social media platform, declaring that he’s been “totally exonerated” in the classified documents scandal that led to his federal indictment. Of course, the former president has long struggled with the meaning of the word “exonerated,” so the missive wasn’t too surprising.

But as part of the same all-caps message — which included Trump suggesting the authorities should give him back the documents he stole from the White House — the Republican said he should now be in the clear thanks to “the Clinton Socks case.” He made the same point during his weird speech on Tuesday night in New Jersey:

“I had every right to have these documents. The crucial legal precedent is laid out in the most important case ever on the subject known as the Clinton socks case.”

When Trump references this in writing, as he often does, he invariably capitalizes “Socks.” This, of course, has led to questions about whether he’s confused about the grammatical rules — the former president tends to capitalize random words he finds important — or whether he thinks the story relates to the former Clinton family cat.

Either way, if Trump still thinks the “socks” case helps him, he’s mistaken.

Revisiting our earlier coverage from last summer, Bill Clinton, during his White House tenure, spoke at some length with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, and as part of the project, there were many recordings of their conversations. According to one 2007 account, tapes were at one point stored in a sock drawer.

A conservative group called Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit, demanding that Clinton be forced to turn over the recordings. In 2012, a federal court rejected the organization’s claims, concluding that the tapes were personal records, not official presidential materials.

Trump would now have people believe this precedent helps him. It does not.

As NBC News reported last year, the 2012 court ruling “explicitly states that the Presidential Records Act distinguishes presidential records from ‘personal records,’ defined as documents that are ‘purely private or nonpublic character.’”

In contrast, Trump took highly sensitive national security secrets to his glorified country club. To see the two as comparable is to overlook every relevant detail.

University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney and an MSNBC legal analyst, had a great Twitter thread on this yesterday, calling the former president’s argument “nonsensical”:

…Clinton’s recordings were from his own interviews, qualifying as diaries, which the Presidential Records Act says are not presidential records. No law precluded Clinton from keeping them. Trump is charged not with violating the Presidential Records Act, but instead with violating the Espionage Act. The records Trump is alleged to have illegally retained are agency records, such as records of the CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense, not presidential records.

How does any of this relate to “the Clinton Socks case.” It doesn’t. Trump will need to think of something else the next time he wants to pretend he’s been “exonerated.”

Like the world needs reminding?

American Bridge on Friday announced its new campaign: “This F*cking Guy”. The super PAC means to remind voters of the “chaotic moments from former President Trump’s first term in the White House,” The Hill reports.

Well, if you must, so long as rubbing our noses in Donald Trump gets under Dear Leader’s skin (The Hill):

“The American people already paid the price for Trump’s daily incompetence, inaction, and irresponsibility. He was just as much of a disaster in the White House as he is out of it, and American Bridge is here to remind voters just how much of a nightmare another four years of Trump would be,” Tom Perez, an American Bridge co-chairman who is joining the White House as the head of intergovernmental affairs, said in a statement to The Hill.

It’s clear which president has done more for the American people — @JoeBiden. pic.twitter.com/Df3pKOtDC6

— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) June 16, 2023

Russian troops struggle to adapt

A Ukrainian team had just exited their armored personnel carrier near Bakhmut in March when it came under Russian fire from multiple directions. One killed, nine wounded (New York Times):

The ambush was part of a patient, disciplined operation that was in contrast to the disorderly Russian tactics that marked much of the first year of the war, which began in February 2022. It was a deadly demonstration that the Russian military was learning from its mistakes and adapting to Ukrainian tactics, having grossly underestimated them initially.

Russians are adapting to Ukrainian tactics, reports say, as Ukraine begins its counteroffensive reinforced by NATO weapons and communications equipment.

But Moscow’s forces have improved their defenses, artillery coordination and air support, setting up a campaign that could look very different from the war’s early days. These improvements, Western officials say, will most likely make Russia a tougher opponent, particularly as it fights defensively, playing to its battlefield strengths. This defensive turn is a far cry from Russia’s initial plan for a full-scale invasion and Ukrainian defeat.

To be sure, along a roughly 600-mile front line, Russia’s military abilities remain uneven. Prison inmates have become part of its operations, having emerged prominently in the battle for Bakhmut, despite their lack of training. The Kremlin’s increasing reliance on “kamikaze” drones or airdropped glide bombs reflects an ammunition shortage as much as an innovative strategic shift.

And perhaps a shortage of prisoners as the Wagner mercenary group ran low and had to throw its more seasoned fighters into the battle for Bakhmut.

But?

Near the eastern Russian-occupied town of Svatove, Ruslan Zubariev, a Ukrainian soldier who goes by the call sign Predator, said the Russians used textbook tactics to try to break through his line of trenches in February.

“They have changed tactics in the last six months,” he said, describing an assault that relied on a certain degree of strategy atop brute force.

For four days, Russian shelling destroyed the foliage overhead to reveal Ukrainian positions. Then, he said, they advanced with an armored personnel carrier flanked by about a dozen soldiers.

But in an indication of the limits of tactical improvements, Mr. Zubariev said, the Russians did not have enough intelligence about the locations of the Ukrainian trenches. In the ensuing battle, which he captured on video, Mr. Zubariev, 21, managed to stop the Russian assault almost single-handedly.

“They did everything perfectly,” he said. “But something didn’t work out for them. Not enough information, as always.”

Things have a way of not working out for Russia, as this #Fail video flooding Twitter suggests:

Russians are even unable to build a copy of the Chinese car https://t.co/J2Jh2wtigo

— Taras Mishchenko (@tarasmi) June 17, 2023

But Russia knows how to leave a mess for others to clean up.

Russia’s full-scale invasion has contaminated approx. 30% of 🇺🇦 with landmines and explosive hazards. Now, Ukrainians face an even greater risk of floating mines uprooted by the Kahkovka Dam destruction. We support the brave personnel working daily to clear these mines while… pic.twitter.com/bgeS6qWx0w

— Ambassador Bridget A. Brink (@USAmbKyiv) June 14, 2023

“Ukraine is the world’s largest minefield,” tweets Ryan Hendrickson, founder of Tip of the Spear Landmine Removal. “This is going to take an effort by so many to make areas safe again for the civilian population. First step in this is awareness. The world needs to know the landmine crisis in Ukraine. Thank you @USAmbKyiv for spreading this message.”

I've been asked how we deal with the stress of demining. Well, through jokes and dark humor. Less stress the better in this job. Our mission is only possible through the amazing support from everyone so please continue spreading the word. https://t.co/qtW1GrTvGG pic.twitter.com/L5NMks6lsE

— Ryan Hendrickson (@tipofthespear42) June 15, 2023

Baby wolves!

A zoo in South Dakota has welcomed a litter of critically endangered red wolf pups — a litter vital to the existence of the species with only an estimated two dozen left existing in the wild.

The Great Plains Zoo in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said that they were “thrilled to announce the births of six critically endangered red wolves” on Thursday in a statement on the zoo’s website.

The six pups — two females and four males — were born to first-time parents Camelia and Uyosi, who only arrived at the Great Plains Zoo in October of last year from facilities in Washington and Texas, respectively.

These six pups are vital to the existence of the species with an estimated 23 to 25 red wolves remaining in the wild and only an estimated 278 alive in captivity, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program.

“Camelia and Uyosi are amazing parents, I wouldn’t expect anything less from them,” said Joel Locke, the Animal Care Director of the Great Plains Zoo. “We are fortunate to have vet staff and animal care staff that have worked with red wolves for more than 15 years. We had our last litter from our previous pair of red wolves in 2016, so the team is well-versed in red wolf care.”

Red wolves are currently the most endangered canid species in the world, according to the zoo, and the red wolves at the facility are part of the Red Wolf Species Survival Plan, which aims to “breed pairs with the greatest possible genetic diversity, with the goal of bolstering the wild population.”

“We will soon see the pups wandering around the exhibit, as they get bigger and braver,” the Great Plains Zoo said in the birth announcement. “However, zookeepers request that everyone in the area continue to use low voices, as new wolf parents can be especially susceptible to environmental stressors.”

The pups are now under close observation by the zoo’s veterinary and animal care teams and are also being monitored very closely by camera as well as regular check-ups on their health and wellbeing.

They have Anheuser-Busch bowing and scraping

Via Axios:

In a new bid to steady his rattled company, Anheuser-Busch U.S. CEO Brendan Whitworth vowed to protect the jobs of employees and those of independent wholesalers.

Why it matters: With conservatives in revolt over Bud Light’s courting of a transgender influencer, Whitworth’s statement is an effort to fight back and regain market share.

Axios has learned that Whitworth plans to go on the road around the U.S. this summer to listen to consumers, in connection with Budweiser’s MLB sponsorship.

The company’s summer ad campaign, which begins next week, will portray Bud Light as “easy to drink and easy to enjoy,” he added in the statement Thursday.

By the numbers: Sales of Bud Light, a new top target in the culture wars, are off as much as 25%.

After the right savaged Bud Light for its relationship with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, sales dropped so sharply that data out this week shows Mexican lager Modelo replacing Bud Light as America’s best-selling beer.

Between the lines: Whitworth’s latest statement stopped short of the apology that conservatives want. But that could alienate the consumers who have stuck with the brand.

“We recognize that over the last two months, the discussion surrounding our company and Bud Light has moved away from beer,” the statement says. “We are a beer company, and beer is for everyone.”

He must realize that he must not only apologize for ever allowing a trans influencer to hawk his beer on social media, he must denounce all transgender people, call out “groomers and PRIDE month and dedicate the company to rooting out all LGBTQ people, diversity and equity employees and anyone who even thinks of saying they support gay rights. And that’s just for starters.

They will very likely get back all those Bud-Light drinkers in due course in any case. But no amount of groveling will lure them back right now. They are wallowing in their hate and they are loving it.

By the way, you have to love it that a Mexican lager is taking up the slack. Lol!!!

This piece by Paul Waldman takes up one of my longest standing pet peeves, this notion that somehow rural and small town America is not only more authentically American, its values are far superior to those who live in urban America (where most of the people are.) This is taken as a given and is so accepted that they are allowed to bash cities mercilessly while screaming like wounded harpies if anyone criticizes their “way of life.”

I’m sick of it.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum did not announce his bid for the GOP presidential nomination by grabbing a guitar and crooning out the chorus to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” but he came awfully close. “I grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota,” he says at the opening of the video meant to introduce him to voters. After touting his business success, he concludes, “A kid from small town North Dakota: That’s America.”

Burgum is practicing a version of small-town identity politics. “Small-town values have guided me my entire life; small-town values are at the core of America,” he says. “And frankly, big cities could use more ideas and more values from small towns right now.”

I heard his speech and it made me want to throw something. What an arrogant fuck. This guy is a billionaire tech bro who thinks he has “small town” values when he’s just another rich Republican with too much money who arrogantly believe that he’s a master of the universe qualified to run America. Grrrrr.

The glorification of small towns is a familiar political trope, repeated so often that most of us don’t bother to question it. As one pair of scholars put it, “Rural America is sometimes viewed as a kind of safe-deposit box that stores America’s fundamental values.”

But it’s about time we do question it.

Imagine how refreshing it would be to hear a candidate touting their “big-city values” and explaining how important and useful the things they learned in the city can be. Plenty of U.S. presidents — William Howard Taft, Barack Obama, Donald Trump — came from cities. But they were more likely to extol the small towns they didn’t hail from than to argue that the city is where the tools of governing can also be cultivated.

What exactly are the small-town values that are supposed to be not only so admirable, but also so useful for governing? If you ask their advocates, you’ll usually get answers that are vague to the point of meaninglessness. In small towns, we’re told, people tell the truth, they work hard and they lend a hand. All of which are good things, but there’s no evidence that those virtues are any more common in small towns than in big cities or the suburbs (and when politicians praise “small towns,” they’re definitely not talking about the suburbs).

There are undoubtedly things that distinguish the small town from the city — and when it comes to the demands of governing, the distinctions favor the lessons one can gain in urban environments.

If you grow up in a city, you’ll learn to navigate a complex world. You’ll deal with people of diverse backgrounds, languages and religions — just like America. You’ll negotiate with their desires and interests, because when you’re all packed together, you have no choice. And you’ll learn to react to change.

That’s one of the central facts of urban life: Cities are and always have been about change. Immigrants come in from abroad, migrants flow in from other parts of the state and the country, and the changing population constantly remakes the city’s politics, its food, its music and every other part of its culture. Even the landscape is remade as old buildings come down and new ones rise up.

In the small town, by contrast, the slow pace of change is precisely what many people value. The rural ethos is saturated in nostalgia, the desire to hold on to or recapture the way things used to be. That nostalgia is often about simplicity, a yearning for a time when the world wasn’t so complicated, change didn’t happen so fast and you could count on life being pretty much the same for you as it was for your parents and grandparents.

Which might be fine for a person to value, but it won’t help you navigate the complexities of policymaking in a dynamic nation of almost 335 million people. For that, you’d do better to cultivate big-city values.

Let’s return to Burgum, who wants to bring his small-town values to D.C. He did come from a small town. But the most important factor in his business success is probably this: He left.

That’s true of ambitious people in small towns and rural areas everywhere: To find opportunity, they often have to go elsewhere. Cities are full of people who grew up in small towns but decided to leave, either to fulfill their economic ambitions or because they found small-town culture stifling and intolerant.

After finishing college, Burgum headed to Silicon Valley, attending Stanford Business School. After a stint as a management consultant in the big city of Chicago, he returned to North Dakota and started a software company — not in his hometown of Arthur (pop. 328), but in Fargo, the largest city in the state.

Democrats are constantly asked why they aren’t doing more to “reach out” to rural and small-town voters, to approach them with open ears and respectful hearts. Nobody ever asks Republican presidential candidates to do the same with urban voters. Maybe if they did, they’d learn a thing or two about the country they aspire to govern.

And maybe they’d learn a little humility while they’re at it.

Either way, ​L’état c’est lui

More on the subject of my earlier post. William Saletan at the Bulwark catalogues all the ways in which the right endorses his status as an autocrat:

Once again, Trump is testing America’s tolerance for autocracy. And once again, his allies on the right are backing him up with extreme and dangerous theories of vast presidential power. Here are some of their arguments.

1. A former president is entitled to obstruct investigators if he doesn’t trust them.

John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, says Trump’s lawyers can argue that “he didn’t initially cooperate with DOJ or the FBI because of the way he’d been mistreated by them.” Alan Dershowitz, who represented Trump at his second impeachment trial, goes further. According to Dershowitz, it doesn’t matter whether Trump was truly mistreated; his subjective perception is enough. In defense of Trump’s defiance of the FBI, Dershowitz asserts: “A president doesn’t have to cooperate with people he believes are trying to get him.”

2. A former president is entitled to withhold documents from investigators based on his belief that he declassified the documents.

Here, again, Dershowitz suggests that facts don’t matter; all that matters is the former president’s perception. According to Dershowitz, “If President Trump believes he had declassified the material before he left the White House, then he had no obligation to turn them over to the [National] Archives.”

3. Federal law grants a former president sole authority to decide what he can keep.

“The only statute that applies to Donald Trump on this is the Presidential Records Act,” says Christina Bobb, a Trump lawyer. The PRA “specifically says the president, and only the president, is the one who has authority to make this call.” Bobb is wrong. The PRA is one of several laws pertaining to such records; others are mentioned in the indictment. But like many other Trump apologists, she uses the PRA to reason that no other laws apply to Trump.

4. The mere act of taking documents makes them the former president’s rightful property.

According to Fox News host Jesse Watters, “When Bill Clinton took [certain] records from the White House back to Chappaqua, the act itself of taking them home—to his home—made them personal records,” beyond the government’s jurisdiction. Based on this premise, Watters asserts, Trump’s lawyers in the Mar-a-Lago case could have “squashed the subpoena immediately.”

5. A former president is entitled to hide documents from investigators, as long as he doesn’t destroy them.

On Friday, Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, reading from a summary of the indictment, explained to fellow Fox News host Mark Levin that Trump had allegedly directed an accomplice “to move boxes of documents to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury.” Levin replied that these evasive maneuvers weren’t important, even if the documents were under subpoena, since Trump apparently hadn’t destroyed them. “So he moved boxes around. . . . So what?” scoffed Levin. “Was there a subpoena out there? It doesn’t matter.”

6. A former president is entitled to destroy documents.

Jim Trusty, another Trump attorney, suggests that because Trump had the power to declassify documents as president—which is true, but no longer applies after he left office—he was entitled, at Mar-a-Lago, to destroy them at will. “You can’t even obstruct a non-crime,” says Trusty. Therefore, Trump “could have had a party throwing stuff in a bonfire, and it wouldn’t be obstruction.”

7. A former president can ignore rules about sensitive documents because the people who make and enforce those rules are corrupt.

“It’s the intelligence community that determines what our government secrets are and what the protocols are with that information,” says CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp. “This is the same community that corruptly and illegally spied on Trump,” Schlapp argues, and now “it’s the same intelligence community that, when Trump is out of power, is still trying to get him on jaywalking and parking tickets.” Many of Trump’s allies view the FBI this way: They think it’s biased and illegitimate, so Trump can defy it with impunity.

8. Former presidents are exempt from the classification system.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy argues that Trump can’t be prosecuted because “the classification scheme itself was defined not by statute, but by executive order,” and “executive orders, appellate courts have held, do not bind a U.S. president with the force of law.” By this logic, Trump’s entire argument about having declassified the documents is irrelevant because, according to Ramaswamy, the system simply doesn’t apply to Trump.

9. Congress can’t constrain a former president’s treatment of documents.

Jesse Binnall, yet another Trump lawyer, contends that even if Congress tried to make “former presidents subject to the Espionage Act for documents created during that president’s term of office,” such a law “may very well be found to be unconstitutional,” because “traditionally, presidents actually owned the presidential documents created during their term.” Francey Hakes, a former federal prosecutor, told Fox News that any law passed by Congress might be nullified by a president’s “inherent authority to take documents when he leaves office.” On this theory, nothing short of a constitutional amendment could hold Trump accountable to federal statutes.

10. No former president should be prosecuted.

Yoo says the feds should “let Donald Trump go” because America’s “institutional norm” is to “leave former presidents alone.” Prosecuting Trump would cause too much harm, according to Yoo, because it would “make future presidents worry about being prosecuted for their tough decisions.” Yoo hasn’t suggested that this defense should be applied to shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue. But in theory, it could be.

11. Prosecution of a former president who seeks re-election is like a coup.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump’s daughter-in-law-to-be, says the federal law enforcement officials who retrieved documents from Mar-a-Lago, and who are now prosecuting Trump, “are literally themselves leading an insurrection against this country, trying to do a coup against the president when he was in office and now trying to prevent him from getting in office again.” Even after voters expelled Trump from office, Guilfoyle portrays any threat to him as an attack on America.

Of course. But be advised that they will accuse a Democrat of many of the same crimes that Trump has committed (as they are doing with Biden) and insist that all of the above does not apply to him.

“Gaslighting” and “projection” are overused terms but they actually are the primary political tactics of the right wing. It’s enough to drive you mad. But that’s the point.

A tale of two blowhards

The Brits show that a political party doesn’t have to blindly back its leader even when he’s popular:

An angry, aggrieved former leader attacks the institutions he once led for accusing him of flouting the rules and lying about it. His allies whip up supporters against what they call a witch hunt. A country watches nervously, worried that this flamboyant, norm-busting figure could cause lasting damage.

There are obvious parallels in the political tempests convulsing Britain and the United States, but also stark differences: Former President Donald J. Trump faces federal criminal charges while Boris Johnson was judged to be deceitful about attending parties. And yet, Britain’s Conservative Party has regularly stood up to Mr. Johnson while the Republican Party is still mostly in thrall to Mr. Trump.

Conservative lawmakers in Britain form the majority on a committee that found Mr. Johnson, a former prime minister, had deliberately misled Parliament over lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Johnson’s conduct, they said, would have warranted a 90-day suspension from the House of Commons had he not preemptively resigned his seat in protest last week.

On Monday, the House of Commons will vote on whether to accept or reject the committee’s findings. The government said it would not pressure Tory lawmakers to vote one way or the other. That sets up a potential repudiation of Mr. Johnson by his party that could go far beyond the token number of Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in 2019 and 2021.

Even before the vote on Monday, the condemnation of Mr. Johnson by his Tory colleagues on the privileges committee was striking. Not only was it a stinging rebuke of a popular, if factually challenged, politician, but it was also a clarion call for the restoration of truth as the bedrock principle in a democracy.

“The outcome is much worse than expected,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington, who noted that the committee had been expected to recommend at most a 30-day suspension. “Its severity suggests the committee had a broader purpose in their decision: that of reaffirming the fundamental importance of truth in British politics.”

While a few Republicans, like former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, have called out Mr. Trump for his erroneous statements, many more have stayed quiet — implicitly or explicitly accepting his false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election, for example.

So far, the multiple indictments of Mr. Trump have yet to shake most Republicans from their support for him. His arraignment this week on charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice brought fresh cries from Republican leaders like Speaker Kevin McCarthy of the House that President Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department to go after his political enemies.

Mr. Johnson has deployed similar charges against the committee. In a vitriolic statement after its report was made public, he said, “This decision means that no M.P. is free from vendetta, or expulsion on trumped-up charges by a tiny minority who want to see him or her gone from the Commons.”

The language was vintage Trump, if clothed in an English accent. The committee’s report, Mr. Johnson declared, was “rubbish,” “deranged” and a “complete load of tripe.”

He accused a senior Tory committee member, Bernard Jenkin, of breaching lockdown rules by attending a gathering to celebrate a birthday. And he veered into obscure personal jibes, describing one of the report’s claims as “an argument so threadbare it belongs in one of Bernard Jenkin’s nudist colonies.”

“This is all straight out of the Trump playbook,” said Frank Luntz, an American political strategist, noting that Mr. Trump had influenced the language of other world leaders. “He’s condemning the messenger, similar to Trump in the U.S., Netanyahu in Israel and Bolsonaro in Brazil.”

Mr. Luntz, who knew Mr. Johnson when they were students at Oxford University, said he was surprised that Mr. Johnson had resorted to that language. Mr. Luntz has long resisted comparisons of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Trump, saying that “Boris has written more books than Trump has read.”

But having spent two days this week in Parliament, Mr. Luntz said his overriding sense was that Mr. Johnson had little support and that most Conservatives simply wanted to put the drama behind them.

Very few Conservatives have taken up Mr. Johnson’s cry of a political vendetta. Many pointed out that not a single lawmaker sought to block his referral to the privileges committee in April 2022, when the questions about the veracity of his statements to Parliament about the parties had reached a crescendo.

The committee reflects the party balance in the House, with four members from the Conservatives, two from the opposition Labour Party and one from the Scottish National Party. By tradition, it is chaired by a lawmaker from the main opposition party, in this case Harriet Harman, whom Mr. Johnson accused of having the “sole political objective of finding me guilty and expelling me from Parliament.”

Unlike Mr. Trump, whose personal attacks often go unanswered, the committee lashed back at Mr. Johnson. It accused him of “impugning the committee and, thereby, undermining the democratic process of the House” and “being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee.” It plans a special report into Mr. Johnson’s behavior during the inquiry.

[…]

“It’s the first time where he has finally been caught out,” said Sonia Purnell, who worked with Mr. Johnson in the Brussels bureau of The Daily Telegraph in the 1990s and wrote a critical biography of him. “If he hadn’t been caught out today, that would have been pretty much a mortal blow to British democracy.”

Sigh…

Johnson has not been the mortal threat that Trump is to our democracy but he arguably did something that was just as destructive by campaign for Brexit on a Big Lie. The Tories have to take their share of responsibility for that. But they are not tolerating the Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu full-blown descent into authoritarian cultism. Good for them. It would be really great if the Republican Party could do the same thing here.

Elise Stefanik, with no evidence whatsoever, on Fox & Friends asserts that Joe Biden "committed multiple criminal acts" pic.twitter.com/y8sxfc7A7d

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2023

If you ever wondered how it came to be that people loathed and despised Hillary Clinton on such a visceral level, this is how. They did this over and over and over again for eight years screeching about “the rule o’ law!” and calling them the Clinton Crime Family. It’s very effective. It makes people who don’t have strong feelings about the person or knowledge of the facts figure there just must be something to it. In the face of Trump’s obvious criminality, it also has the effect of feeding into the cynical “they all do it” attitude which leads to apathy.

The Republicans spent decades degrading Clinton and it was only by a fluke that she lost the election in 2016. And, yes, misogyny played a part. But the constant drumbeat that she was a criminal going all the way back to the 90s took its toll and Donald Trump, the instinctive asshole that he is, took advantage of it. And too many Democrats and independents bought into it.

Luckily Biden is an incumbent president and Trump is going to be on the ballot so those dynamics are not going to be very strong. But never think it’s just a reflexive reaction to the charges against Trump. This is a patented GOP strategy. Character assassination is their go-to.

Donald Trump gave them an opening

It stands to reason that once the Republicans succeeded in corrupting the Supreme Court confirmation process to pack it with far right justices they would turn their attention to the Justice Department. What good is having a partisan High Court if the Justice Department is going to refuse to do the bidding of whatever Republican is in the White House? If you want to corrupt a democracy you need to do it holistically to ensure that all the levers of power are working together.

It’s been a long time coming but it looks like they believe they’ve finally found their moment. They’re openly announcing their intention to discard all the rules and norms that have governed the arms length relationship between the president and the DOJ for the past 50 years. Donald Trump made that clear in his speech at his Bedminster Golf Club on Tuesday night:

Crowd chants “Lock him up!” after Donald Trump announces he will appoint "a real special prosecutor" to go after President Biden and his family if elected. pic.twitter.com/WR6ug04aGA

— The Recount (@therecount) June 14, 2023

Donald Trump has always said he intended to do this, of course. He cried throughout his presidency “where’s my Roy Cohn?” the execrable lawyer who mentored the young Donald Trump (when he wasn’t serving every nefarious character in American life from Joseph McCarthy to Richard Nixon to John Gotti.) When he ran in 2016 he told Hillary Clinton to her face in a national debate that he planned to put here in jail and constantly demanded that the Justice Department prosecute his enemies.

The Attorneys General knew what the boss wanted. The White House counsels all knew what he wanted. In fact, everyone in America knew what he wanted because he openly demanded it in speeches, on television and on social media. The DOJ didn’t entirely follow through but they made a stab at it. As I wrote the other day, he was plotting behind the scenes against the advice of White House lawyers to make it happen and eventually former Attorney General Bill Barr did relent and assigned a US Attorney to review all the Clinton investigations. (He found nothing new.) And in an unprecedented move, Barr also stepped in to save two of Trump’s top cronies, Former National Security adviser Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and named John Durham as Special Counsel to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Russian interference in the 2016 election.

But Trump was held back from doing his worst at various choke points in the system, particularly the rules and norms that have governed the relationship between the president and the Justice Department after the revelations that came out of the Watergate scandal. For 50 years the DOJ has operated as a quasi independent agency in which it was understood that the president would make general policy but would not be involved in individual cases. Now the Republican party has decided it’s time to change all that.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the new MAGA establishment, led by coup conspirator Jeffrey Clark and Russell Vought, Trump administration director of Office of management and budget (and Freedom Caucus guru) have some big plans:

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.

They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Republicans enamored of the “Unitary Executive” theory, such as Bill Barr, have always believed that those post-Watergate reforms were foolishly restrictive and unrealistic but they worried that the silly voters would react badly to blatantly hackish partisanship so they always kept up the pretense of an independent Justice Department. Both parties have complained about politicized DOJs over the years but it’s only the Republicans who’ve made it clear that they don’t even believe in the concept — when Republicans are in power, anyway.

Ironically, by engaging in blatant corruption and open criminal behavior as both a president and presidential candidate, Donald Trump has given them the opportunity they’ve been waiting for. The fact that he doesn’t try to hide his depraved indifference to rules, norms and laws means that the Justice Department under a Democratic administration was left with no choice but to completely abandon the rule of law or enforce it knowing that the Republicans will cynically stage a monumental tantrum so they can use it as an excuse to do what they want to do anyway. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

This goes way beyond Trump. In fact, I suspect they will be happy if Trump is convicted and they can wave the bloody shirt to justify removing any barriers to total control of the federal law enforcement. Certainly, the next generation of MAGA leaders are all-in on this idea. Take Florida Gov. Ron Desantis who has backed this vacuous claim of a “weaponized” Department of Justice and promised to follow the same program only on steroids:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working for months on plans to tear down and rebuild both the Department of Justice and the FBI, consulting with experts and members of Congress to develop a “Day One” strategy to end what conservatives see as the weaponization of the justice system. The governor has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel, reorganize entire agencies, and execute a “disciplined” and “relentless” strategy to restore the Justice Department to a mission more in line with what the “Founding Fathers envisioned.”

The plan is massively ambitious and apparently he believes he can do it all unilaterally:

This kind of innovation suits DeSantis, who takes a broader view of executive authority than is typical of constitutional conservatives and who has told advisors he “doesn’t buy” the idea that presidents can’t fire anyone on the federal payroll.

With a mind-boggling lack of self-awareness, the Governor who is banning books, abridging the speech of educators, firing elected prosecutors, creating his own police forces, attacking private businesses and much much more said, “You can’t have one faction of society weaponizing the power of the state against factions that it doesn’t like.”

The fact is that the Republican Party’s alleged hostility to the “Deep State” is nothing more than a set-up to co-opt state power for themselves. They’ve chafed under the rules and regulations that preclude them from behaving like crooks and liars such as Richard Nixon and Donald Trump for the last 50 years. They don’t want to get rid of the “Deep state”, they just want to get rid of all the impediments to using it the way they believe it’s meant to be used: against their political enemies. Trump’s flagrant criminality has perversely given them exactly the excuse they need to do it.

Salon