Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Brian Beutler’s newsletter today proposes the idea that in light of the Hunter Biden pardon statement, in which Biden alluded to serious prosecutorial abuses in the case, that Biden needs to tell everything they know about Trump’s and the Republicans’ abuses before he leaves office. He writes:

We don’t know what these Democrats chose to leave buried. But the Hunter Biden saga, culminating in his Sunday pardon, and his father’s accompanying statement justifying the decision, all suggest the party still fails to grasp the importance of sunlight, accountability, and clear communication. The election is over and they lost, but now the question is whether they will cede all power to the GOP in six weeks without doing everything they still can to inform and protect the country

Between the lines, it’s clear Biden knows quite a lot that never made big splashy headlines.

He knows Republicans in Congress and the first Trump administration broke rules—indeed, committed impeachable offenses—to target Hunter in retributory fashion; that their subversion of the rule of law tainted his son’s prosecution; and that his son won’t be safe from Republican harassment without broad presidential clemency.

I happen to understand his allusions, and think they’re completely correct. But they raise big, fundamental questions about what all he and his party have been doing about it these past four years. Why are these recent Republican abuses forbidden instead of common knowledge? And if the looming danger to the people Republicans intend to target is so severe, what more is Biden prepared to do to help them, and warn the country? Or does it end with one pardon for a member of his own family,

He believes that because the Democrats (especially in the Senate which had the majority the whole time) and the DOJ shrugged off the abuses that gave permission for the even worse abuses to come.

It fell instead to a handful of independent journalists, Marcy Wheeler most prominently, to track the provenance of the Hunter Biden investigation, the improper workaround Trump and his allies used in an attempt to frame him and his dad, and the compromised nature of David Weiss, the Trump U.S. attorney-cum-Merrick Garland special counsel who oversaw the case.

This “weaponization of government” could on its own have formed the basis of a concerted congressional inquiry, starting in the second half of Trump’s first presidency, continuing into Biden’s. On the basis of all this wrongdoing, Garland could’ve terminated the Hunter Biden investigation, or fired Weiss, or reassigned the case, or launched new investigations of criminal activity in the first Trump administration.

But for reasons peculiar to Washington Democrats—a paralyzing fear of backlash, or of “appearing” partisan—they decided both to let the Hunter case run its course and to sweep the Trump-era perversions of justice under the rug.

Prior to Biden’s election, Democratic oversight of the Trump DOJ was extraordinarily weak.

In one memorable exchange five and a half years ago, then Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked then-Attorney General Bill Barr, “Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?”

Barr responded: “Ahhhm… I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t… ahmmm! Could you repeat that question?”

This could, rather it ought, to have been the jumping-off point for an aggressive investigation of its own, rather than simply a feather in Harris’s cap. But Democrats just skipped past the breadcrumbs.

When one year later Trump, through Barr, tried to edge Geoffrey Berman out of his job as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and got caught, House Democrats held one hearing on the matter.

Naturally, in 2022, Berman published a tell-all full of extraordinarily damning detail about the Trump-Barr effort to harass and even prosecute Trump’s enemies. The midterms arrived quickly thereafter, but Democrats retained control of the Senate, and still did nothing with this information.

Without publicly litigating all the Trump DOJ’s aberrant ways, how its investigations of people like Hunter were tainted by partisan politics and corruption, there was no public, common-knowledge basis to set things right. And so they woke up on November 6, learned that Trump had been elected to a second term, and will have live with the fact that they could’ve done more, but chose not to.

The pardon is one of the consequences.

Beutler says that Biden should lay it all out before he goes and I think that’s right. Needless to say, all the handwringing over the pardon and Biden “lying” when he said he wouldn’t pardon his son (rather than changing his mind after Orange Hitler was elected) I’d imagine that’s a long shot. If anything I’m watching the Democrats’ spines melting before our eyes and much of the press seems to be resigned to submission.

This old Yiddish joke I’ve posted many times in the past illustrates how the Democrats tend to behave.

There is a joke about three Jews who are about to be executed by firing squad. The sergeant in charge asks each one whether he wants a blindfold. “Yes,” says the first Jew, in a resigned tone. “OK,” says the second Jew, in a quiet voice. “And what about you?” he enquires of the third Jew. “No,” says the third Jew, “I don’t want your lousy blindfold,” followed by a few choice curses. The second Jew immediately leans over to him and whispers: “Listen, Moshe, take a blindfold. Don’t make trouble.”

For quite a while the Democrats and the media showed some resistance in the face of Trump but since the election I’m seeing more and more “don’t make trouble.”

Beutler’s newsletter is one of the best. He writes a lot and it’s always interesting. Highly recommend.

Those of you who have been following this blog over the years will remember how the Freedom Caucus has blown up one “deal” after another, often to the dismay of Republicans who realize that getting most of what you want is better than getting nothing at all. They can always be counted upon to refuse to take yes for an answer.

Mike Johnson, with his tiny majority, is facing the same old challenge and I’m not sure even Donald Trump will be able to control them:

Speaker Mike Johnson is in talks when his own conference about how to fund the government. But he’s got at least two “no” votes no matter what he does.

Reps. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), two House Freedom Caucus members, told POLITICO they would oppose any short-term government funding bill, known as a continuing resolution or a CR, regardless of whether Johnson attaches disaster aid to it. The Freedom Caucus took an official position this week that any disaster relief needs to be paid for and limited to what is “absolutely necessary” right now. President Joe Biden requested nearly $100 billion in emergency disaster aid.

“I have never voted for a CR and I don’t intend on concluding my time here by voting for one now. We have a $36 trillion dollar national debt and Congress has failed to do its job by funding government through the appropriations process, as mandated by the Budget Act of 1974, again,” said Rosendale, who is retiring at the end of this term.

GOP aides already expect there are enough Republicans who will vote against a CR no matter that Johnson will need to depend on Democrats to avoid a shutdown. The deadline to pass funding legislation is Dec. 20.

This will not be the last time he confronts this. These people are fanatics and they love to pose and preen — and lose. Freedom Caucus politics are much more performative than substantive. And they all love to be on camera.

Good luck, Mike. You’re going to need it.

Bolts has another of their “Ask Bolts” Q&A features up right now, this time on immigration. You can still get in on it:

Donald Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” looms over millions of people who live in the United States. But the infrastructure to detain and incarcerate immigrants didn’t start with Trump.

U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 people per night, often partnering with sheriffs who hold immigrants in their local facilities in exchange for a profit. This practice has a long history that predates ICE and other modern federal immigration agencies: For over a century, the U.S. government has relied on local jails to detain immigrants, creating a vast network of incarceration that operates with minimal oversight. The incoming Trump administration is likely to tap into this network in coming years.

Historian Brianna Nofil traces these developments in her new book, The Migrant’s Jail. From the detention of Chinese migrants in New York in the early 1900s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in the South in the 1980s, her writing explains how federal authorities and local law enforcement have helped each other create a patchwork of policies that incentivizes incarceration. 

We suspect you have questions about these issues in the wake of Trump’s victory, so we asked Nofil if she would be willing to answer them—and she agreed. 

By the way, did you know that the US Government used Zyklon B on migrants at the border to disinfect them? They did:

Zyklon B arrived in El Paso in the 1920s courtesy of the US government. In 1929, for example, a Public Health Service officer, J.R. Hurley, ordered $25 worth of the material–hydrocyanic acid in pellet form–as a fumigating agent for use at the El Paso delousing station, where Mexicans crossed the border from Juárez. Zyklon, developed by Degesch (short for the German vermin-combating corporation), was made in varying strengths, with Zyklon C, D and E representing gradations in potency and price. As Raul Hilberg describes it in The Destruction of the European Jews, “strength E was required for the eradication of specially resistant vermin, such as cockroaches, or for gassings in wooden barracks. The ‘normal’ preparation, D, was used to exterminate lice, mice, or rats in large, well-built structures containing furniture. Human organisms in gas chambers were killed with Zyklon B.” In 1929 Degesch divided the Zyklon market with an American corporation, Cyanamid, so Hurley likely got his shipment from the latter.

As David Dorado Romo describes it in his marvelous Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground History of El Paso and Juárez: 1893-1923 (Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso), Zyklon B became available in the United States when, in the early 1920s, fears of alien infection were being inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists, most of them political “progressives.”

Donald Trump is a eugenecist. So is Stephen Miller. Just saying.

I know it’s hard to accept but there it is. They love him more than ever. And it’s not just that they hate Democrats, which they do. They affirmatively voted for Trump. Maybe it’s time to stop asuming they don’t support what he says and does?

By the way:

Trump won and hasn’t called fraud so that means it was fair. Like him his voters are happy to accept the election results — if they win.

Oh, the stories behind these stories

It’s getting noticed, that story I mentioned Tuesday about Judge Jefferson Griffin, the losing Republican N.C. Supreme Court candidate’, and his desperate attempt to cancel 60,000 votes in an effort to narrow the 734 vote gap between himself and sitting Justice Allison Riggs.

Judd Legum’s Popular Information:

The contest between Griffin and Riggs was very close. The initial count showed Riggs with a lead of 734 votes out of 5.5 million cast. Griffin then exercised his legal right to request a machine recount of all ballots. After that recount, Riggs was still ahead by the same margin. Griffin has now requested a second recount of the ballots, this time by hand. Under North Carolina’s procedures, there will first be a hand recount of 3% of the ballots cast. If the North Carolina Election Board determines that the partial hand recount revealed a sufficient number of discrepancies to suggest the outcome could change, a full hand recount will take place.

There is nothing particularly unusual about requesting recounts in close elections. But Griffin is also taking a page out of President-elect Donald Trump’s playbook and claiming that tens of thousands of votes were cast illegally. Griffin’s campaign sent postcards to the voters whose ballots it is seeking to invalidate, alerting them of the protest. Popular Information obtained a photo of one of the postcards. [See above]

Riggs’ campaign says the “postcards have sowed confusion, anger, and frustration among voters who cast their ballots in good faith to make their voices heard.” Among those receiving a postcard notifying them that their vote was under protest were Riggs’ parents.

The now four friends on my county’s list have had a rude awakening. I don’t think they got the postcards. They were contacted by me. Griffin has challeged nearly 1,600 voters in my county alone.

The Asheville Watchdog’s Peter Lewis (formerly senior writer, editor, and columnist with The New York Times and more) quotes campaign spokespersons:

“Our priority remains ensuring that every legal vote is counted and that the public can trust the integrity of this election,” state Republican Party spokesperson Matt Mercer said in a news release. Embry Owen, Riggs’s campaign manager, said Griffin’s protests were a “last-ditch effort to deny the will of voters across the state.”

Those unfamiliar with election proccesses may not grasp the weediness of the challenge.

The bulk of the challenges involve the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which in North Carolina requires voters to provide the last four digits of their Social Security number or their NC driver’s license number. Anyone attempting to vote in 2024 whose voter registration records did not already include the ID numbers should have been required at the polls to provide those numbers. 

Under state law, all voters in 2024 were required to show proper identification before being allowed to vote. But there is no uniform method among the counties for capturing that information on voter forms. Even if a poll worker requested and verified a voter’s ID, precinct computers are not linked to any database for security reasons, so no corrections or additions to the registration could be made.

That’s correct. It’s not as if these people never presented that information. The state has no process outside the local board offices for logging it. Not the voters’ problem. But that’s the loophole Republicans now want to drive a bus through to narrow the vote gap and overturn the election results.

Republicans insist we need more accurate voter rolls but won’t pay for making it happen. As in so many other cases, they’d rather have the issue to run on than fix the problem. But they will exploit the problem to cancel people’s votes, including their own. There are 300 Republican voters on the challenge list in my county alone.

Oh, the stories behind these stories. But that’s for another time.

Resistance could be fruitful

Step back from the ledge. Take a break from news about the punishments the Jan. 20 Revolution plans to roll out against its enemies, and against friends who won’t publicly abase themselves before the king. “That wasn’t humiliating enough. Grovel lower!”

Need a redoubt against Trumpism that doesn’t require a passport? Fifteen blue states, especially those in which Democrats control both executive and legislative branches, are preparing to hold the line against the incoming Trump administration’s predations. Their weapon of choice? Federalism. What a concept.

Democrats and their lawyers have laid plans to defend reproductive rights and hold the line against mass deportations. But more than that, they’ve outlined “a new progressive vision of federalism—pugilistic and creative, audacious and idealistic.” They mean to “filch tactics” deployed to punishing effect by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who has perfected a form of “hegemonic federalism” to work his will and annoy Democratic state governments.

Franklin Foer explains at The Atlantic:

I have heard a few hastily sketched ideas for how Democrats could mimic Abbott’s coercive ploys. Blue states might aggressively recruit ob-gyns from states with severe restrictions on abortion, leaving behind a red-state shortage of medical care. Women in those states, even ones who aren’t especially passionate about abortion, might begin clamoring to ease abortion bans—or punishing the Republican politicians who installed them in the first place. The goal is to apply pressure on Republican governors by provoking a political backlash from within.

Another set of proposals involves deploying massive public-employee pension funds that Democratic states control to make strategic investments in red states. By sinking money into Texas’s wind industry, for instance, blue states would do more than just expand alternative-energy options in the state. They would unleash a powerful interest group, which might help reshape the political dynamic in the state.

Muahahaha!

The goal, Foer writes, is to get blue state governors “to think sensationalistically in order to call attention to the failures of Republican policies.” But there’s a more virtuous side too. Think Progressive Era Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette and his “Wisconsin Idea.”

Consider: California’s economic clout and population size mean that policies like auto emission standards born there eventually migrate east, not by force of ideology, but by force of the Almighty American Dollar.

The innovation that the new federalists propose is that the blue states begin to leverage their big budgets—and their outsize influence—by acting in concert. Banding together into a cartel, they can wield their scale to bargain to buy goods at discount. There are drafts of plans to form a collective of states that would purchase insulin and other prescription drugs, which might help mitigate the higher costs of living in their states. (After the Dobbs decision, California Governor Gavin Newsom spearheaded an alliance that began to stockpile the abortion pill misoprostol.) Or they could cooperate to buy solar panels en masse, with the hopes of transforming clean-energy markets.

It’s not just about teaming up for the sake of bulk purchases. They can collaborate on creating a joint set of standards, which becomes the basis for legislating and regulating. By creating uniform rules for, say, corporate governance or animal welfare or the disclosure of dark-money contributions to nonprofits, they stand a chance of shaping the standard for the entirety of the country, because it’s cumbersome for a national corporation to adhere to two sets of guidelines for raising chickens.

Whether Democrats can get their acts together enough to act in concert is the trick.

Oh great, another one:

Donald Trump’s pick to head the Internal Revenue Service pressed the agency to investigate and consider stripping the country’s leading animal welfare group of its tax status after it supported an initiative to protect dogs, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

If former Missouri Republican Rep. Billy Long is confirmed to run the Internal Revenue Services (IRS), he would be in a position to strip — and effectively shut down — the tax status of such nonprofit groups whose missions he disagrees with. And Long could have new powers to do so if Congress enacts a pending House-passed bill to grant the Trump administration new powers to rescind the tax status of groups it deems “terrorist supporting organizations.”

In 2011, Long signed a letter pushing the IRS to launch a probe of the tax-exempt status of the Humane Society of the United States, a nonprofit that focuses on animal welfare and opposes animal cruelty. The letter followed the Humane Society’s support of a successful Missouri ballot measure strengthening regulations on dog breeders.

The letter, which was signed by Long and five other members of Congress, claimed that public documents showed “beyond question that lobbying is a ‘substantial part’ of [the Human Society’s] activities, and feel the IRS’s failure to act is attributable to the politically sensitive nature of [the society’s] activities,” they argued. “Due to this, we write to request investigations by the Inspector General into [the Human Society’s] apparent improper activities and its tax-exempt status.” 

He’s a far-right, Trump worshipping troll. His twitter feed might as well be some Q-Anon freak’s hobby and he’s clearly on it night and day. He even believes that shutting down cruel puppy mills is a socialist plot.

Kakistocracy: government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.

Idiocracy: a society or group that is controlled by or consists of people of low intelligence.

"You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring, he’ll say you’re wonderful." – Ron DeSantis, literally a week ago. pic.twitter.com/gOq3hBOzGw

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) January 21, 2024

Whether Trump abandons Pete Hegseth for Ron DeSantis, the reports that he’s been in talks with DeSantis about a cabinet position since last summer is a sad comment on Ron Desantis. Like so many others, he abandoned all sense of personal pride and integrity to suck up to a man who humiliated him in the most grotesque ways possible:

Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage takedown of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars out of the presidential race after just one contest and left him to pick up the pieces of his political future.

In front of enormous rally audiences, Mr. Trump painted Mr. DeSantis as a submissive sniveler, insisting that he had cried and begged “on his knees” for an endorsement in the 2018 Florida governor’s race.

In a series of sexually charged attacks, Mr. Trump suggested — without a shred of proof — that Mr. DeSantis wore high heels, that he might be gay and that perhaps he was a pedophile.

He promised that intense national scrutiny would leave Mr. DeSantis whining for “mommy.”

Mr. DeSantis shied from fighting back, which only inflicted more pain on his campaign. The governor had portrayed himself as one of the Republican Party’s fiercest political brawlers, but he pulled his punches in the most important race of his life.

Ick. I will never understand how people can be so willing to come crawling to this disgusting bully after he does that to him. There are other jobs, other paths in life than politics. The fact that they are so willing to completely debase themselves for this monster says everything about their character. They’re the last people I would want to see in charge of national security. They’re cowards.

Look who’s complaining about partisan manipultion of the courts:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vented his displeasure Monday after two Democratic-appointed federal judges reversed their decisions to retire in what appear to be efforts to stop President-elect Trump from nominating their successors.

McConnell called the unusual decisions to forgo retirement following Trump’s sweeping victory last month a “partisan” gambit that would undermine the integrity of federal courts.

“They rolled the dice that a Democrat could replace them, and now that he won’t, they’re changing their plans to keep a Republican from doing it,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.

You cannot make this shit up. McConnell is the guy who held open a lifetime appointment Supreme Court seat until Trump could fill it and then rushed through another one so that he could again allow Trump to fill it. Shamelessness is their superpower.

As Digby wrote earlier, Republicans ought to think twice about confirming Kash Patel, “Hoover had everyone under his thumb, not just the liberals. ”

On Cliff Schecter’s Youtube channel today is a video about Kash Patel, “a very emotionally and intellectually damaged “person,” has long been a fave of Trump’s bc he’s a Stalinist to the core. Not very bright, but very vengeful & very loyal to whichever authoritarian he serves. He was installed at the Defense Dept in 2020 to help w Trump’s coup. Gee, why would Trump want him running “his” FBI??”

Yesterday I watched hours of Kash Patel videos on Rumble and YouTube. The things that people on the left find horrifying, the right LOVES. “Drain the SWAMP! Fire everyone! Prosecute TRAITORS!” But what we have seen is that what upsets the RW is the only way we can stop Trump’s nominees. In the video I watched, Patel on The Shawn Ryan Show September 2, 2024, I found the comment that will get the RIGHT to push him out.

Patel’s plan is to take a way the money making power of 51 intelligence community people by revoking their security clearance.

I think THIS is what will crush his nomination. The intelligence community won’t be obvious that they want to protect their revenue streams, but they will find something bad enough to upset the GOP. Like how they got rid of the DEA sheriff nomination because he was too tough on some mega church pastor in Florida that didn’t follow the COVID laws.
THAT is how you get rid of someone on the right. YOU SHOW the times they were too LEFTY.

What people need to prepared for is that Patel will blame the LEFT for losing the nomination for FBI. But he won’t go away. Just like Matt Gaetz won’t go away. I expect Patel to lash out at EVERYONE, so the RW won’t want their fingers on the leaks/ story. But this is one way government employees will protect themselves against Trump’s nutballs.

As I said on the Nicole Sandler show, we need to keep finding ways to knock down Trump MAGA, the media isn’t going to do it for us. The Dems are afraid, the Republicans are afraid. So we look for who will LOSE money because of Trump’s minions. They can see this as a zero sum game for revenue and play the hardball that we can’t.