Amash is Wrong, Pelosi (So Far…) is Right on Articles of Impeachment
Even as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tries to put impeachment talk on the back burner within her own party, Justin Amash became the first Republican Congressman to call for it. This weekend on Twitter, as the Founders intended, Amash wrote “Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.”Amash goes on to say impeachment simply requires “an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct.”
Of course tweets are not Articles of Impeachment to be voted on, Mueller’s Report specifically does not indict Trump for obstruction, the Report does not state the reason for not indicting Trump is because he is president, and the Constitution does not include “careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct” as grounds for impeachment.
People may not like any of that, but those are the starting and ending points on impeachment and simply repeating an alternate version cannot change things. So this all may be little more than grandstanding by Amash.
But alongside Amash’s tweets are dozens of similar bleats from politicians and blasts from the media demanding Trump be impeached. Cheerleaders gloat impeachment isn’t a judicial process but a “political” one, their main takeaway being less rigorous standards apply (Amash stated there is no obligation to show even probable cause a crime was committed to impeach, you can just accuse willy-nilly) and somehow that’s a good thing. Many express near-joy the constitutional requirement for impeachment, “high crimes and misdemeanors,” isn’t defined in the law so it can be anything a partisan House wants it to be heading into an election. Somehow that’s also a good thing for a democracy they otherwise see under threat.What the calls for impeachment show in amplitude they lack in detail, the specifics Trump must be impeached for. You know, like when a case goes to court instead of when one is trying to make headlines? The so-called best versions, as with Amash, simply refer back to Mueller’s own didn’t-reach-indictment non-conclusions and leave it there, as if the Report says something clearly it does not even say obliquely. The worst ramble about the end of democracy, damage to the Constitution, corruption, and cite the libretto from Hamilton as their snappy summation. What they all do, from Amash to Trevor Noah, is rely on assumed agreement with their audience Trump is guilty. Of something.
The only specific pseudo-justification comes from a sub-group who kinda admits the Mueller “road map” is a bit fuzzy on actual guilt, but who sees impeachment proceedings as some sort of super-investigative process that would take another shot at finding chargeable crimes.
This strategy becomes clearer when one looks at the real road map: Democrats and the media have been trying to remove Trump from office even before he took office. The Electoral College was going to not vote him in, or the Emoluments Clause or the 25th Amendment would shove him aside. The path forward jelled in early January 2017, even before the inauguration, as strategic leaks from the intelligence community pushed Russiagate to the fore. Trump was a Russian agent, the Manchurian Candidate. The nice folks in the Deep State would investigate, and their Report would segue smoothly into impeachment proceedings just in time for the 2020 election season.
After the Report showed there was no collusion or conspiracy with the Russkies, the Democrats and media pivoted as one, literally overnight, claiming (failed) obstruction of a Report which cleared Trump of treason, that was the real crime all along. The only problem was the Report did not support obstruction as grounds for impeachment either. So in a wink of an eye, the new plan was for the House to subpoena documents, call witnesses, and conduct a re-investigation into whatever it was Mueller failed to uncover.
This belief in the investigative magic of the House ignores the vast powers already brought to bear, including the surveillance which proceeded Mueller’s work and provided the fodder for those early perjury traps against Flynn, Papadopoulos, et al. Mueller used the threat of jail time to pressure people into cooperating, in the end producing little actionable material. The House thinking it will find the smoking gun Mueller missed also ignores the entrapment ops the FBI ran against the Trump campaign, which also produced little beyond excuses for more surveillance.
The Democratic/media actions post-Report — making up their own versions of what Mueller meant to say — beg the question of why not just ask Bob Mueller? The White House is not blocking his testimony, and the House has not subpoenaed him. Still, no testimony is scheduled while “negotiations” take place between Mueller and the Committees. For a nation supposedly in crisis there doesn’t seem to be too much of a rush. The Report has been out for close to two months.
Or maybe Democrats are not in a hurry to call Mueller because they don’t want to hear him answer why he did not indict anyone new. Maybe Dems don’t want to have Mueller say how early he realized the Steele Dossier was garbage but still kept silent? Maybe Dems don’t want Mueller talking about the origins of the Russia investigation? Maybe the Dems really don’t want Mueller to testify at all. Leave him off-stage, where they can put words into his mouth. Those are sharp questions when the simple answer, just ask Mueller, is replaced by a complex set of subpoenas and judicial challenges under the shadow of impeachment proceedings.
And with that it is time to take a deep breath and consider what impeachment is really about.Impeachment allows Congress to overturn an election. And that is a very, very big deal. The Constitution vests ultimate power in The People. Throwing their choice out via impeachment is in a way the ultimate undemocratic act.
What impeachment also is not is a midterm check of “fitness.” It is not a constitutional pause for a referendum on how the president is doing. It is not a way to resolve differences of opinion, policy or propriety. The Founders were well aware how parliamentary systems could easily expel leaders with votes of no confidence in such situations, and chose something very different for America. They gave great sanctity to having a president serve his full term. And in our entire history no president has been forced from office.
Impeachment is also not a way to bypass other investigative tools to allow a partisan House to poke around inside a president’s decisions, pre-election business deals, and personal life, or to amass info short of actual impeachable evidence as campaign dirt on the public dollar.
This final conception of impeachment, an expedient to get around Trump refusing to comply with various subpoenas, is particularly odious. The claim we are in a constitutional crisis because the White House is contesting document requests, what Nancy Pelosi calls Trump’s “self impeachment,” is nonsense. Contesting subpoenas thought to be too broad or irrelevant is an inherent part of due process and is nothing new or unique to the Trump administration. What would be unique is to open impeachment hearings as a work around to having the courts rule, as they anyways have, on the muscle-tussle between executive and legislative branches.
The closest the United States ever came to forcing a president out of office was with Richard Nixon in 1974, and much is being made in 2019 that one of the charges against him was obstruction of justice. But the two are very different.
Nixon’s obstruction had clear underlying crimes behind it, as Republican operatives broke into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate building, and made a similar break in to Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. The latter, often left out of “Watergate” history, was to gather blackmail material or discrediting information to use against the Pentagon Papers’ leaker.
Amash is playing you with a straw man argument; anyone who went to law school, read the Mueller Report which explains this or Googled obstruction knows an underlying crime is not required. Underlying crimes are not necessary to charge obstruction per se, but their presence indicates the seriousness and depth of what obstruction sought to hide. In the absence of underlying crimes, i.e., in Trump’s case no collusion with Russia, you’re left to wonder what the president would have sought to obstruct the investigation for. Unlike in Nixon’s case, there was nothing for it to find. That raises the question of evil intent, the “why” which is necessary to charge obstruction. If there was no underlying crime why obstruct? The lack of underlying crime also raises the political stakes. The House really thinks it will be supported in trying to impeach the president over a… process crime?
Nixon’s obstruction took the form of paying cash from a slush fund to the operatives to buy their silence or to have them commit perjury. Nixon sought information from the CIA to use against his enemies. He personally and unambiguously ordered a cover-up. His own White House counsel testified against him. Watergate burglar James McCord stated in writing his testimony, some of which was perjured, was compelled by pressure from the Attorney General. Audio tapes of Nixon actually committing these acts existed. Nixon defied a Supreme Court order to release the tapes, erased some especially discriminated audio “accidentally,” considered destroying the tapes entirely, fired the Special Prosecutor who drove that process, and attempted to seize control of the investigation via a new prosecutor in what has come to be called the Saturday Night Massacre. Now that is what real obstruction, and the evidence to prove it, looks like.
All of the above preceded actual Articles of Impeachment. By the time the case was moving to the Senate for a decision, there was no need for pundits to speculate on road maps, no need for explainer articles, no dots left to connect, and Nixon was pressed to resign by a bipartisan group. It makes the current situation — a Report which does not charge obstruction, with no underlying crime, serving as the basis for the House to re-investigate those same non-events via a scattershot of subpoenas and testimony — seem silly.
Nancy Pelosi is right to put the brakes on impeachment. Not because of some political calculation, but because turning the Constitution’s provision for over-turning an election into a hunt for dirt, or as a way around the check and balances of the courts, chips away at the foundation of democracy.
BONUS
I admire Amash for his principles. So I would very much welcome him laying out reasons for his opinion Trump committed an impeachable offense in obstructing justice, a conclusion Mueller, Barr, and Rosenstein did not reach. All Amash did was send out a couple of tweets. I, too, have read the whole Report, as have many others, and do not see chargeable crimes. So Amash needs to do more than tweet a conclusion because the clarity he sees in the Report text is not shared widely enough to allow him to just say trust me on this.
Amash in his tweets also criticizing the Attorney General for writing a misleading summary of the Report. This is weak. We now have the Report, and so Barr’s summary two months ago is old, old news. The portions of the Report dealing with obstruction have few substantive retractions, and are apparently clear enough Amash himself has read them and concluded Trump is guilty. So explain why, Justin, and stop distracting with criticism of water passed under the bridge.
Showing how far down the rabbit hole Derangement Syndrome can take someone, here an author is suggesting Congress arrest Attorney General William Barr for failing to hand over the full Mueller Report, or fine him. And if he doesn’t pay the fine, she suggests Treasury withhold his paycheck. Like someone with that illness that makes you involuntarily shout and curse at people, I really don’t think the people who write these articles understand how silly they look, and how the voters who struggle with healthcare, earning a living, and all that, hold them in contempt for being so out of touch.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Dear Nancy Pelosi:
This could all be over in an afternoon.Nancy Pelosi, subpoena Mueller. Ask him one question: “Why didn’t you indict Trump for obstruction?”
If Mueller says “the evidence was not there,” this is over. Shut up and have the 2020 election.
If Mueller says “I intended Congress to weigh the evidence via impeachment hearings,” open the hearings that same hour.
For the rest of us, ask yourselves why the Dems ignore the simple resolution above in favor of endless name calling, contempt motions, legal challenges, and a likely Supreme Court fight. Are they afraid of Mueller’s answer?
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A Short History of Impeachment, 2016-2019
After Mueller failed to deliver a smoking gun on Russia, the media and progressives pivoted to a whole new arena, obstruction. Forget the last two years of Russia-baiting, our bad!
When Mueller failed to charge Trump with obstruction, they made up a string of explanations: road map, hidden duty call to Congress, he would have except president, etc., none of which Mueller actually made explicit when he could have.
The Report has been out for two months. Nothing has come of it. Reality stands as no charges filed. About the most noise has come from various Dems announcing this is a constitutional crisis as they try to restock the warehouse of broken impeachment dreams.
Reminder: It’s been almost three months since Michael Cohen‘s public testimony about Stormy Daniels, much longer since his behind-closed-doors version to Congress. Nothing has come of it. The big flip was a flop.
Mueller doesn’t want to testify. Maybe he has no interest in people trying to put words into his mouth for partisan purposes under the guise of information gathering. He might just point to the Report as his final word.
Anyway, no matter, impeachment is the only answer. Delete Trump’s account to save the United States! Trump is Hitler, etc., etc.
The new meme is the House will need to re-investigate obstruction, delve into taxes and pre-election business, and with Putin gone, dig around looking for something Mueller missed to impeach on. Maybe a perjury trap for Don Jr? Disbar Sekulow? Cohen said Trump under-valued some real estate in the 1980s! Deutsche Bank, that sounds nasty. Fine Bill Barr, no arrest him. Gotta be something.
That’s called Going Back to Square One.
OK, OK, the taxes. Let Twitter see Trump’s taxes and they’ll find all the crimes the IRS audits have missed. We swear there’s something in the taxes, please let us have just a peak.Nancy Pelosi calls this all a cover-up, without any specifics of exactly what the president is covering up. Something. The Mueller Report took two years, is based on FISA surveillance, FBI undercover work, 500 witnesses, more than 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 230 orders for communications records, and 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence. Pretty bad cover-up. Taxes? What crime or action are you accusing Trump of hiding? Pelosi doesn’t know. She’s claiming a cover-up of something she believes must be hidden there, without any evidence anything is there, and without acknowledging the IRS has had the taxes forever and charged nothing. The FBI can get a warrant for the taxes today, if they can show probably cause. Which Pelosi apparently cannot.
When Trump invokes due process to block that overly-broad process, they claim that is a new form of obstruction and maybe they can impeach on obstruction of investigation into the investigation of obstruction.
So, a process crime as the basis for overturning the 2016 election three years into Trump’s term. Even impeaching over a blow job seems to make more sense.
While fretting over the end of the rule of law, Dems signal they might open impeachment hearings as an expedient way of going around the courts’ ruling on the validity of their scattershot subpoenas. The justification is the Supreme Court justices are now partisan hacks who can’t be fair. Blocking Merrick Garland’s appointment was unfair. Also the Senate are partisan hacks who won’t vote against Trump no matter what and that’s not fair. Trump didn’t even win the popular vote. None of this is fair to Dems.
Meanwhile, per a Reuters poll, 57% of Americans think impeachment is preventing the government from addressing other issues of concern, the kitchen table stuff that drives elections.The mania over an impeachment process which will end in a political whimper will drive a deep sense of failure within Dem voters. The 24/7 urgency will be paid off with… nothing much. Discouraged voters are not motivated voters, especially if Biden is the best they are offered.
Someone at the DNC might also ask how this unabashed desire to see blood drawn from someone surnamed Trump will play out with potential 2020 purple voters. It is entirely possible that the electorate is weary and would like to see somebody actually address immigration, health care, and economic inequality now that we’ve settled the Russian question.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Write ‘Yer Own Trump Article: The OpEd-o-Matic
With all the talk of how many jobs have been created during the Trump administration, little attention is paid to one vibrant industry his time in the White House spawned: writing apocalyptic Op-Ed pieces.
You know the ones, articles predicting whatever the news of the day is will be The End of Democracy. Alongside the New York Times and Washington Post, whose Op-Ed pages are pretty much daily End of Days each day, practitioners include chicken little regulars Maddow, Lawrence Tribe, Malcolm Nance, David Corn, Benjamin Wittes, Charles Pierce, Bob Cesca, and Marcy Wheeler.
You’d have thought after almost three years of wrong predictions (no new wars, no economic collapse, no Russiagate) this industry would have slam shut faster than a Rust Belt union hall. You would have especially thought these kinds of articles would have tapered off with the release of the Mueller Report, but it ended up while Mueller wrote no conspiracy and charged no obstruction, the dang report turns out to be chock-a-block with hidden messages, secret road maps, and voices speaking in tongues (albeit only to Democrats) about obstruction.
We’ve gone from thinking the president is literally a Russian agent (since 1987, the last year your mom and dad dated!) to worrying the attorney general is trying to obstruct a House committee from investigating a completed investigation into obstruction by writing a summary not everyone liked of a report already released. But the actual content is irrelevant. What matters is there is another crisis to write about! The Op-Ed industry can’t keep up with all the Republic-ending stuff Trump and his henchworld are up to.
Help has arrived. Now anyone can write their own fear mongering article, using this handy tool, the OpEd-o-Matic. The GoFundMe for the AI-driven app version will be up soon, but for now, simply follow these simple steps to punditry!
Start with a terrifying cliche. Here are some to choose from: There is a clear and present danger; Dark clouds gather, the center cannot hold; It is unclear the Republic will survive; Democracy itself is under attack; We face a profound/unique/existential threat/crisis/turning point/test. Also, that “First they came for…” poem is good. Be creative; WaPo calls the present state of things “constitutional nihilism.” Snappy!Be philosophical and slightly weary in tone, such as “I am in despair as I have never been before about the future of our experiment in self-rule.” Say you’re sad for the state of the nation. Claim time is short, but there just may be a chance to stop this. Add “…by any means necessary.”
Then choose a follow-on quote to reinforce the danger, maybe from: The Federalist Papers, especially Madison on tyranny; Lincoln, pretty much anything about “the people, government, test for our great nation, blah blah;” the Jack Nicholson character about not being able to handle the truth; something from the neocons like Bill Kristol or Max Boot who now hate Trump. Start with “even” as in “even arch conservative Jennifer Rubin now says…”
After all that to get the blood up, explain the current bad thing Trump did. Label it “a high crime or misdemeanor if there ever was one.” Use some legally-like words, such as proffer, colorable argument, inter alia, sinecure, duly-authorized, perjurious, and that little law book squiggly thingy (18 USC § 1513.) Be sure to say “no one is above the law,” then a dramatic hyphen, then “even the president.” Law school is overrated; you and Google know as much as anyone about emoluments, perjury, campaign finance regulations, contempt, tax law, subpoenas, obstruction, or whatever the day’s thing is, and it changes a lot. But whatever, the bastard is obviously guilty. Your standard is tabloid-level, so just make it too good to be true.Next, find an old Trump tweet where he criticized someone for doing just what he is doing. That never gets old! Reference burning the Reichstag. If the crisis you’re writing about deals with immigration or white supremacy (meh, basically the same thing, amiright?), refer to Kristallnacht.
Include every bad thing Trump ever did as examples of why whatever you’re talking about must be true. Swing for the fence with lines like “seeks to destroy decades of LGBTQIXYZ progress” or “built concentration camps to murder children.” Cite Trump accepting Putin’s word over the findings of “our” intelligence community, his “very fine people” support for Nazi cosplayers, the magic list of 10,000 lies, how Trump has blood on his hands for endangering the press as the enemy of the people, and how Trump caused the hurricane in Puerto Rico.
And Nixon. Always bring up Nixon. The context or details don’t matter. In case Wikipedia is down, he was one of the presidents before Trump your grandpa liked for awhile and then didn’t like after Robert Redford showed he was a clear and present danger to Saturday Night Live, or the Saturday Night Massacre, it doesn’t matter, we all agree Nixon. Jeez, Nixon.
Focus on the villain, who must be unhinged, off the rails, over the edge, diseased, out of control, a danger to himself and others, straight-up diagnosed remotely mentally ill, or under Trump/Putin’s spell. Barr is currently the Vader-du-jour. The New York Times characterized him as “The transformation of William Barr from respected establishment lawyer to evil genius outplaying and undermining his old friend Robert Mueller is a Grand Guignol spectacle.” James Comey went as far as describing Trump people as having had their souls eaten by the president. That’s not hyperbole, it’s journalism!But also hold out for a hero, the Neo one inside Trumpworld who will rise, flip, or leak to save us. Forget past nominees like the pee tape, Comey, Clapper, Flynn, Page, Papadopoulos, Manafort, Cohen, Mattis, Kelly, Barr, Linda Sarsour (replace with Ilhan Omar,) Avenatti, and Omarosa to focus on McGahn. He’s gonna be the one!
Then call for everyone else bad to resign, be impeached, go to jail, have their old statues torn down, delete their accounts, be referred to the SDNY, be smited by the 25th Amendment, or have their last election delegitimized by the Night King. Draw your rationale from either the most obscure corner of the Founders’ work (“the rough draft, subsection IIXX of the Articles of Confederation addendum, Spanish language edition, makes clear Trump is unfit for office”) or go broad as in “his oath requires him to uphold the Constitution, which he clearly is not doing.” Like Pelosi, mention how Trump seems unlikely to voluntarily cede power if he loses in 2020.
Cultural references are important. Out of fashion: Godfather memes especially about who is gonna be Fredo, ‘bots, weaponize, Pussy Hats, the Parkland Kids, Putin homophobe themes, incest “jokes” about Ivanka, the phrases the walls are closing in, tick tock, take to the streets, adult in the room, just wait for Mueller Time, and let that sink in. Period. Full Stop.Things you can still use: abyss, grifter, crime family, not who we are, follow the money. Also you may make breaking news out of Twitter typos. Stylistically anyone with a Russian-sounding name must be either an oligarch, friend of Putin, or have ties to the Kremlin. Same for anyone who has done business with Trump or used the ATM in the Deutsche Bank lobby in New York. Mention AOC somewhere because every article has to mention AOC somewhere now.
Finally, your OpEd should end either with this House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler faux Kennedy-esque quote “The choice is simple: We can stand up to this president in defense of the country and the Constitution and the liberty we love, or we can let the moment pass us by. History will judge us for how we face this challenge” or, if you want to go old school, this one from Hillary saying “I really believe that we are in a crisis, a constitutional crisis. We are in a crisis of confidence and a crisis over the rule of law and the institutions that have weathered a lot of problems over so many years. And it is something that, regardless of where you stand in the political spectrum, should give real heartburn to everybody. Because this is a test for our country.”
Crisis. Test. Judgment of history. Readers love that stuff, because it equates Trump’s dumb tweets with Lincoln pulling the Union together after a literal civil war that killed millions of Americans in brother-to-brother conflict. As long as the rubes believe the world is coming to an end, you might as well make a buck writing about it.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Social Media is Not Real Life: A Tale of 2020
(I fully support a woman’s right to abortion. The following is about how power works.)
Repubs: We installed two Supreme Court judges, and Ginsberg won’t live forever. We have 2-6 more years to get a third on the court.Dems: We cosplay Handmaiden Tale costumes. You can buy them on Amazon. And the rat in the Arthur cartoon is gay, major victory for LGBT rights, yes.
Repubs: During the Obama terms, we won back 1,000 state seats (including governorships) that have allowed for abortion bans to be enacted in multiple states. At the beginning of Obama’s term, you Dems controlled 59% of state legislatures, while now it’s only 31%, the lowest percentage for the party since the turn of the 20th century. Same for governorships: when Obama took office Dems held 29 governor’s offices and now have only 16, the party’s lowest number since 1920.
Dems: Obama was the first black president you know.
Repubs: We passed legislation in Alabama and other states in line with our goals.
Dems: Didn’t you see Left Twitter erupted over that? Late night tore Alabama apart. Did you see Sam Bee’s fierce rejoinder?
Repubs: We won important races in Georgia and Florida.
Dems: We protested on social media how that was unfair.
Repubs: We held the line on gun control for our base.
Dems: The Parkland Kids were on the cover of Time magazine in the dentist’s office.
Repubs: You guys are all about checking boxes — first black this, first openly gay that, and calling those achievements. OK, they are, in a way, but they are often empty in the long run if they don’t produce actual legislative change alongside symbolic change. Obama, in one example, did too much by executive action and altering the ways rules are interpreted inside the bureaucracy. As with DACA, it was all too easily unwound as soon as he left office. Power works in certain ways, under certain systems. In the U.S., getting laws passed means understanding where action resides to get something changed, and securing that seat or office. Dems have for too long relied on the deus ex machina of the Supreme Court to impose from above what is often opposed, or at least not broadly supported, from below. This creates a reverse wave of anxiety, which will find its outlet in events like the election of a guy like Trump.
Dems: We made same-sex marriage the law of the land whether you pigs like it or not. We’re gonna force open borders, too.
Repubs: People are anxious over immigration. They worry about jobs, and they worry about societal change being forced on them. They worry the government has no policy on all this, and these things are just left to happen to them.
Dems: Abolish ICE. Anyone who doesn’t support open borders is a racist fascist hater. We don’t need them in our party.
Repubs: Trump’s gonna run on his record you know, strong economic growth —
Dems: Obama did that.
Repubs: — got the wall, lots of things his supporters like. You’re scaring more voters away than influencing them by prioritizing legislated social change too fast over kitchen table economic issues —
Dems: Trans rights are human rights, you pig.
Repubs: — You’re alienating members within your own party with crazy ideological and race hate memes. You’re telling white people they are unwanted. You’re throwing away too many potential voters in swing states.
Dems: We’re not done fighting over 2016 yet so don’t talk about swing states. Trump is now obstructing the investigation into the last time he obstructed! We’re going to arrest Bill Barr! Just ask AOC!
Repubs: You let the media choose the face of your party, and so you end up with people who talk and look “right” but accomplish little — Linda Sansour, AOC, Beto, Mayor Pete. There’s a new one all the time. It’s hard to take you seriously.
Dems: Um, Biden.
BONUS ADVICE
Dems must create — quickly — a broadly supported, positive agenda, something people can vote for, get excited about, rally around. A negative agenda, essentially destroy Trump or elect whichever old white guy they throw up as the nominee who is not Trump, divides the party and is uninspiring to voters. The certainty Trump is guilty of something (obstruction, tax things, whatever) is not shared across the country, and the clarity of evil the media sees in the Mueller report does not exist for many purple state voters. The Obama lesson (lost on Hillary) was inspire or retire.
Biden, running on nothing but he’s not Trump, does not inspire. Bernie is Bernie, looking kind of goofy and sounding repetitive when in 2016 he looked fresh and inspiring. The rest are flashes in the pan, media-made K-Pop wanna be’s, or at best immature and reaching too high too soon and should be running for Senate seats.
The Dems seem to be betting the house on impeachment even as the number of Americans who say Trump should be impeached is at 45%. Some 42% said Trump should not be impeached.
But at the same time, 57% said multiple congressional probes of Trump interfered with important government business, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. That 57% included about half of all Democrats and three-quarters of all Republicans.
Do Dems really want to bet those odds against the economy? There have been more job openings than job seekers for 13 straight months. Workers without college degrees have seen significant gains in their wages. Productivity growth is up, unusual at this point in an almost decade-long expansion. There are no obvious bubbles in tech, real estate or other industries, and the stock market has mostly recovered from last year, and last week.
The reality is captured in a NYT headline The Economy That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen. Unemployment is 3.6%, a 50-year low. Average hourly earnings are up 3.2% over last year. Inflation is a low 1.6%.
The standard drone of the media/Dems Trump would crash the economy, or that any positives only the few, or that gains would not last, or that all credit is due to Obama have proven weak. About as weak as claiming, still, post-Mueller, Trump won because of Russia and still needs to be impeached for, well, something, just wait, we’ll find it.
But don’t leave out the ultimate Dem kamikaze ticket, where Hillary is called in from the cheap seats at the convention when no vote can chose a winner. Biden slides right into his traditional VP slot beside her. They’ll make a nice couple at Trump’s third and fourth inauguration.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Mueller Press Conference?????
Mueller: There was no conspiracy. I’m not charging anyone with obstruction. That’s it, thanks everyone.
Media: But there was a conspiracy, right? And you meant to charge obstruction, correct?
Mueller: No, it’s all written down. No and no.
Media: You meant to create a road map? Intended Congress to unfriend and impeach? See, it’s all in this footnote you wrote, here, on page 86. If you transpose every other letter it spells it out in Latin…
Mueller: You didn’t read the report, did you?
Media: Well, no. But we knew what it was SUPPOSED to say, so we made up our own version that ignores the broad conclusions, using selective out-of-context quotes other people told us about. The ending came out more correct that way.
Mueller: I’m leaving, you people are crazy.
Media: We’d also like to argue about the summary from a couple of weeks ago that doesn’t matter anymore.
(sound of flask opening, then door slamming as Mueller leaves)
Media: This is a Constitutional crisis.
(sound of keys jingling, shiny object seen in foreground)
Media: Trump’s taxes from 1984!
FADE TO BLACK. VERY DARK BLACK.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Democrats Need to Stop Dry Humping the American Dream
Economic inequality could be the signature issue for Democrats, one that speaks to purple voters, progressives, and maybe even some current Trump supporters. But the Dems do not seem to understand this. They need to decide if they are running as a party of governance, or just one of protest.
On economics, an issue voters reliably care deeply about, Trump’s approval rating is 58%. Rarely is an incumbent defeated under a strong economy. While many factors affecting the economy are long waves, with decisions made one or five administrations ago rippling forward, the reality is the president in office gets the credit on election day. That payoff is due to be collected by Donald Trump. Throw in his tax changes, that he is the only president since the fall of the Soviet Union to not start a new war, and his red-meat-to-the-base wins on immigration and Supreme Court appointments, all coupled with the whimpering end of Russiagate, and you have a candidate with lots to crow about.
On the other side, “Not Trump” will be enough for the Whole Foods base. But Democrats appear willing to punt too many other votes for lack of a message about what they might do if elected. The recent Politico headline “Biden Goes Light on Policy, Heavy on Emotion” is not good.
Meanwhile, economic inequality, the disparity at the heart of our nation, is shaping whether America will remain something of a pluralistic democracy, or complete its descent into a modern form of feudalism where 0.01% of Americans effectively control the rest of us. That’s could be a very powerful anti-Trump message.
Yet the Democrats’ version is erroneously based on economic inequality being a minority POC issue, maybe something to address via reparations or more social justice programs. Dems scold into deep resentment the vast numbers of white midwesterners stuck in poverty (who lean Trump) as too stupid to vote in their own self-interest. They lean on tell-us-what-we-want-to-believe books like Hillbilly Elegy (due out as a Ron Howard film for 2020) to reinforce the concept of meth-addled yokels.
The Democrats are simultaneously throwing away an issue that resonates with progressives: economic inequality drives the search for scapegoats, the handmaiden of racism and hate. It has to be someone else’s fault I’m not doing well, because “they” get free food from the government or because of immigration policies which take my job away to give to “them.” Reduce economic inequality and you will reduce its societal ills is a very powerful anti-Trump message.
Using government money to reduce economic inequality goes against the ethos of many. But we have underestimated the societal disruption economic inequality created in America even as we mark a surge in deaths of despair from alcohol, suicide, and opioids, Robert Merry, writing in The American Conservative, calls our time “definitional” and wonders if the polity will hold. While we wait for everyone to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, we are missing what a volatile people we are, and have ceded our darkest tendencies to those who manipulate them for their own gain. We have become too violent and too well-armed and too goaded by social media to let the market sort this out.
Yet according to a CNN poll, 71% of Americans still rate the nation’s economic conditions favorably. Democrats must explain to Americans while things are not visibly bad on the surface, they are fundamentally not good for about 90% of us. Silliness like “Trump might still crash the market” or “Obama deserves the credit” simply encourage the short-term thinking that drives that CNN poll. Democrats need to explain the long term — the top 0.1% of households now hold about the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%, and it is only getting worse. The share earned by the top 0.01% rose from 0.5% in 1973 to 3.3% in 2010. Something that threatens the financial life of 90% of us is a majority, not minority, problem.
Economic anxiety, more than what the left imagines as racial or cultural uneasiness, lies deep in the Heartland. Trump spoke to it in 2016 in the guise of promises to bring back coal mining’s glory days, raise tariffs, and slow immigration. Democrats should speak sense to that anxiety. The answer should be infrastructure.
Bernie Sanders loves infrastructure. Elizabeth Warren wants to rebuild the middle class. Biden’s liked it since he was VP. Infrastructure underlies other candidates’ plans for guaranteed incomes and assured jobs. It’s hard to find anyone against infrastructure. But no one has presented something sweeping, linear, and encompassing enough to reach at economic inequality. This isn’t about jobs per se – unemployment is at a near-50 year low – but about how we live. Earnings for non-management, private-sector workers reached their peak in 1973, the high water mark of the middle class out there in Youngstown and South Bend, left today dry heaving about what’s still called the American Dream.
The response comes from the last time economic inequality was this bad. America needs a new version of the 1935 Works Progress Administration (WPA) to build roads, bridges, and rail lines. A new WPA to create jobs people can do without significant training (not everyone can learn to code) and which pay living wages with real healthcare. Get echelons of people too used to chronic under-employment used to working for a living again. People working multiple jobs should not need food aid as many do today.
Almost every community in the United States got a new park, bridge, or school under the WPA, never mind airports, train stations, over 600,000 miles of roads, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Hoover Dam. Upgrading all that after 80 years to improve lives is a powerful message. Fight growing racism and hate with the self-respect work gives. You don’t need to create an enemy if you don’t see yourself as a victim.
The Democrats flirted with something like this recently, after Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi met with Trump to “agree” on a $2 trillion infrastructure initiative. But peek behind the curtain and it’s just rhetoric. Despite knowing the House controls the budget, Pelosi almost immediately crossed her arms and declared it is Trump’s job, not hers, to figure out how to pay for it. The whole thing appears to be a cynical ploy to claim “Because Trump” we can’t have nice things.
Let how to pay for it become part of the Democratic platform. But the message better be more sophisticated than “were gonna tax the rich” because voters have been burned too many times, when “the rich” ended up being themselves paying higher taxes while the benefits fell to those below. The real rich, the 0.01%, seem to always have a loophole. This simplistic message is particularly dangerous in 2020 when many purple voters fear what progressives might do unfettered (Free medical care! No more college loans! A pony for everyone, just look under your seats!)
The thing is the money is already there, or at least has been when we wanted it to be. The WPA over eight years used about 6.7% of the era’s GDP to pull the nation out of a full-blown depression with some 20% unemployment. Currently the U.S. spends about 3.3% of its GDP on military.
But we don’t need that much. The U.S. spends $70 billion a year on food aid for 40 million Americans; repurpose some of that into living wages so people can earn their supper. During the last few wars, reconstruction and the building of infrastructure for Iraqis ate up $60.45 billion. The total for the same failures is more than $154 billion in Afghanistan, with the counter still running at about $9 billion a year on such projects. Only the most inane pundit could call such re-appropriation “anti-military” instead of pro-American; no much-needed bridge for you, Middleton, Ohio, we’re gonna build it in Helmand Province instead. The Obama-era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with its more modest goal of a short-term stimulus not intended to address inequality, spent $105.3 billion on infrastructure. Unemployment is obviously much lower today, and the goal – better jobs to nudge economic inequality – is different. Those numbers would make an accessible start.
Some 64% of Americans agreed with an earlier Trump proposal to improve U.S. infrastructure (75% support spending federal money to improve infrastructure when the idea was polled without Trump’s name.) Infrastructure spending also has bipartisan support: 78% of Republicans and 54% of Democrats agree with the need for more.
Democrats must tell voters what they’ll do, instead of just saying one day it may be Not Trump in the White House. Infrastructure has bipartisan support, will reach purple voters and progressives, and address fundamental problems. The impact of the WPA is long, a bright moment in our history when government raised people out of depression. Imagine the power of owning that legacy.
BONUS:The Gini coefficient is a measurement of the income distribution within a country which shows the gap between the rich and the poor. Zero represents perfect equality (everyone has the same income) and one representing perfect inequality (one person earns the entire country’s income and everyone else has nothing.) A higher Gini coefficient number means greater inequality. America overall (GDP) earns money in the same range as most European nations, but has a Gini number more in line with Russia, China, and chunks of the third world. That is an unique situation globally. Here are some more hard numbers.
This article by Paul Krugman in the NYT goes to great lengths to create the spurious argument it is Republicans who despise the slack jawed yokels even more than the Democrats do.
Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way put it clearly “There are things about this economy that are very popular — low unemployment, a lot of jobs, there’s been some real wage increase. We attribute zero of that to good Trump policy. But he will claim credit. What that means is that [Democrats] need a very clear economic narrative that resonates deeply with the voters that we have to win, and we better not be caught up in our own blue bubble world.”
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
15 Questions for Robert Mueller
You know that movie with Bruce Willis and the kid who says “I see dead people?” In the end it turns out everyone is already dead. Now imagine there are people who don’t believe that. They insist the story ends some other way. Maybe there’s missing footage! Spoiler Alert: the Mueller Report ends with no collusion. No one is going to prosecute anyone for obstruction. That stuff is all dead. We all saw the same movie.
Yet there seem to remain questions to be answered. And while it is doubtful the stoic Robert Mueller will ever write a tell-all book, or sit next to Seth and Trevor dishing, he may be called in front of Congress. Here’s some of what he should be asked.
1) You charged no “collusion,” obstruction, or any other new crime. In simple words tell us why. If the answer is “The evidence did not support it,” please say “That one.”
2) Your Report did not refer any of the crimes in the first question to Congress, the SDNY, or anywhere else. Again, tell us why. If the answer is “The evidence did not support it,” please say “That one again.”
3) Despite you making no specific referrals to others for action, the Report states “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.” Why did you include such restating of a known fact instead of either a direct referral or nothing? Many people have read that line to mean you could not indict a sitting president and so you wanted to leave a clue to others, in Congress, to exercise some role. You could have spelled it all out — “this all is beyond my and the AG’s Constitutional roles and must/can only be resolved by Congress” would have worked. Why not?
4) Many readers of the Report believe they see clues (one footnote looms as the grassy knoll of your work) the specific reason you did not indict Trump was because of DOJ/OLC guidance against indicting a sitting president. In other words, absent that specific guidance, would you have indicted the president? If so, why didn’t you say so unambiguously and trigger what would be the obvious next steps.
5) When did you conclude there was no collusion/conspiracy/coordination between Trump and the Russians such that you would make no charges or indictments? You must have closed at least some of the subplots — Trump Tower meeting, Moscow Hotel project — months ago. Did you give any consideration to announcing key findings as they occurred? You were clearly aware inaccurate reporting continued, damaging to the public trust. You allowed that to happen. Why?
6) But before you answer that question, please answer this one. You did make a rare pre-Report public statement saying Buzzfeed’s story claiming Trump ordered Cohen to lie to Congress was false. You restated that in the Report, where you also mentioned (Vol I, p 198) you privately told Jeff Sessions’ lawyer in March 2018 Sessions would not be charged. Since your work confirmed nearly all bombshell reporting on Russiagate was wrong (Cohen was not in Prague, nothing criminal happened in the Seychelles, etc), why was it only that single instance that caused you to speak out publicly? And as with Sessions, did you privately inform any others prior to the release of the Report they would not be charged? If only some but not all were informed, why was that? What standard did you apply to these decisions?
7) A cardinal rule for prosecutors is not to publicize negative information that does not lead them to indict someone — “the decision does the talking.” James Comey was strongly criticized for doing this to Hillary Clinton during the campaign. Yet most of Volume II is just that, descriptions of actions by Trump which contain elements of obstruction but which you ultimately did not judge to rise to the level of criminal chargeability. Why did you include all that so prominently? Some say it was because you wanted to draw a “road map” for impeachment. Did you? Why didn’t you say that? You had no reason to speak in riddles.
8) There is a lot of lying documented in the Report. But you seemed to only charge people early in this investigation with perjury (traps.) Was that aimed more at pressuring them to “flip” than justice per se? Is one of the reasons several of the people in the Report who lied did not get charged with perjury later in the investigation because by then you knew they had nothing to flip on?
9) In regards to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, where derogatory information on Clinton was offered (but never given) you declined prosecution, citing in part questions (Vol I, p 186) over whether such information constituted the necessary “thing of value” that would have to exist, inter alia, to make its proffer a campaign finance violation. You don’t answer the question in the Report, but you do believe information could be a “thing of value” (the thing of value must exceed $2,000 for a misdemeanor, $25,000 for a felony.) What about the withholding of information? Could someone saying they would not offer information publicly be a “thing of value” and thus potentially part of a campaign law violation? Of course I’m talking about Stormy Daniels, who received money not to offer information. Would you make the claim silence itself, non-information, is a “thing” of value?
10) You spend the entire first half of your report, Volume I, explaining it was some combination of “the Russians” who sought to manipulate our 2016 election via social media and the DNC email hacks. Though there is a lot of redacted material, at no point in the clear text is there information on whether the Russians actually did influence the election. Even trying was a crime, but given the importance of all this (some still claim the president is illegitimate) and for future elections, did you look into the actual effects of Russian meddling? If not, why not?
11) Everything the Russians did, in Volume I, they did during the Obama administration. Did you investigate anyone in the Obama administration in regards to Russian meddling, what was done, what was missed, could it have been stopped, and how the response was formed? Given Trump’s actions toward Russia would follow on steps Obama took this seems relevant. Did you look? If not, why not?
12) Some of the information you gathered against Michael Flynn was initially picked up inadvertently under existing surveillance of the Russian ambassador. As an American person, Flynn’s name would have been routinely masked in the reporting on those intercepts to protect his privacy. The number of people with access to those intercepts is small and list-controlled, and the number inside the Obama White House with the authority to unmask names, i.e., reveal it was Michael Flynn, not AmPerson1, is even smaller. Yet details were leaked to the press and ended Flynn’s career. Given the leak may have exposed U.S. intelligence methods, and given that it had to have been done at a very high level inside the Obama White House, and given that the leak directly violated Flynn’s Constitutional rights, did you investigate If not, why not?
13) The NYT wrote “some of the most sensational claims in the [Steele] dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove. Mr. Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out.” Given the central role the Steele Dossier played in parts of your work, and certainly in the portion of the investigation which commenced as Crossfire Hurricane in summer 2016, why did you not include any overall assessment of why so much did not check out inside such a key document?
14) Prosecutors do not issue certificates of exoneration, and have no obligation to “exonerate” people they consider for charges. The job is to charge or drop a case. That’s what constitutes exoneration in any practical sense. Yet you have as the final line in a report that does not charge anyone “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Can you explain why that line was included, and so prominently?
15) Near the end of the Report you wrote “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” You argue elsewhere in the Report because Trump is a sitting president he cannot be indicted, so therefore it would be unjust to accuse him of something he could not go to court and defend himself over. But didn’t you do just that? Why did you leave the taint of guilt without giving Trump the means of defending himself in court? You must have understood such wording would be raw meat to Democrats, and would force Trump to defend himself not in a court with legal protections, but in a often hostile media. Was that your intention?
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Mueller Report, Anti-Climatic Climax Edition
With the release of the redacted report, #MuellerTime should be over. There was no collusion with Russia. No one is going to indict anyone for obstruction or anything else. Believing there are still more questions than answers at this point means one refuses to accept the answers. Trump is going to serve his full term and voters will decide if he gets another.
Mueller ended conclusively the three year Russiagate tantrum, and choose not to pursue obstruction via indictment or a direct referral to Congress for action. He could have, but he did not. That should be it.
But it won’t be. Mueller’s inclusion of dissenting information on obstruction, information that portrays unbecoming conduct by the president which does not rise to the level of evidence of any indictable crime, allows Democrats to decide where to take this next. Mueller has not tossed the ball to a Democratic Congress to play out its Constitutional check and balance role so much as he handed dirt to Democratic politicians to use as they see fit. It’s an odd end for the righteous Robert Mueller, twisting the tools of justice and the state to slander.
Everything that happened over the last two years was because Democrats, the media, and the FBI falsely conflated Russia’s actions with Trump’s, and then imagined Trump committed serial acts of obstruction to cover up something he never did.
The Report was issued in two “volumes” of roughly equal length. Volume I focuses on Russian interference in the election. Volume II focuses on obstruction of justice.
RussiagateVolume I concludes two important but mutually exclusive things are true: 1) the Russian government, under Obama’s watch, tried to influence the election via social media and by obtaining the Democratic National Committee emails and 2) no American, including members of the Trump team, colluded, cooperated, or coordinated with that effort. The Report (Vol I, p 2) is clear the Trump campaign reacting to or even anticipating released materials was not criminal. Any crime would have required coordinated interaction, not merely two parties, in Mueller’s words, Vol I, p 2 “informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.”
Though the report does not mention it, an analogy might involve the Clinton campaign and the infamous Access Hollywood tape. The campaign may have heard the tape was going to leak, and certainly exploited its release, but that does not create “collusion” (used here as shorthand, not as a legal term, which of course it is not) between Clinton and the leaker.
The Report also means there is no credibility left to the Steele Dossier or almost all of the reporting on Russiagate. None of the subplots matter outside the Washington-Twitter-New York corridor because they didn’t happen or they did not constitute a crime. Not the Trump Tower meeting, the Moscow Hotel Project, the polling data, the Alfa Bank server, the changed Republican platform on Ukraine, Jeff Sessions meeting Ambassador Kislyak, the meeting in the Seychelles, Dmitry Klokov (not) Putin’s go-between, Cohen (not) in Prague, Manafort (not) meeting Assange, Trump (not) ordering Cohen to lie to Congress. The contacts between Russia and Trump associates were exaggerated, falsely reported or proved to be of no consequence.
All that should be in the headlines but isn’t, because of a new focus on obstruction of justice.
Obstruction of JusticeVolume I of the Report deals with actions taken independently by the Russians that had no coordinated connection to Trump’s own actions or decisions. The second half of the Report deals with obstruction of justice, events that happened because there was an investigation into collusion which itself never happened. Obstruction, like a perjury trap, is a process crime, which only exists because an investigation exists. As with most of Mueller’s perjury convictions in this saga, there was no underlying crime.
And as with collusion, we already know the ending on obstruction. Mueller did not indict because the evidence did not support it. Attorney General Barr, and his deputy Rod Rosenstein, by law the actual intended recipients of the Report, agreed with Mueller. Some of Trump’s actions were lawful or, while troublesome or even immoral, were not criminal. Most significantly, Mueller could not indict on obstruction because it was not possible to determine Trump showed the legally required corrupt intent. All of that precedes any consideration given to DOJ/OLC advice a sitting president cannot be indicted.
If Mueller had a obstruction case he could have made he would have made it. Mueller could have specifically recommended indictment and made explicit the complex legal issues around presidential obstruction meant a decision was beyond his and the Attorney General’s Constitutional roles and must be addressed by Congress via impeachment or through the Supreme Court. He could have indicted any number of people in Trump’s inner circle, with a sealed indictment against post-White House Trump. He could have said DOJ will not charge a sitting president so I couldn’t indict because of that alone, therefore I explicitly created this road map for impeachment to guide the next step.
None of that happened. Mueller had no reason to speak in riddles, show restraint, send signals, embed hidden messages or hint at things. Mueller could have swung in any number of ways but instead found reason to leave the bat on his shoulder. Volume II should have ended there.
DissentBut it seems obvious from reading the Report stories some of Mueller’s team saw evidence of obstruction which they found “alarming and significant” were true. Barr did a great disservice in omitting at least mention of this from his summary, as it forms the bulk of Volume II and will fuel nearly everything that happens next.
Despite no indictment, the Report outlines ten instances containing elements of obstructed justice by Trump, with a big suggestion (Vol II, p 8) someone may want to look again. Apparently not everyone on Mueller’s team agreed with the boss’ conclusion the evidence was insufficient, and Mueller chose to allow what is essentially dissent Talmudically contradicting his major Volume II conclusion to be baked into his own work.
Mueller was tasked with making an unambiguous decision to prosecute or not. He made it, and then included pages of reasons suggesting he might be wrong even as he also found space to say the dissent might also be missing the key element of intent. There is no explanation (save perhaps politics) for this confusing, ambiguous, and jumbled departure from traditional prosecutorial judgment. The final line (Vol II, p 182) reads like a Twilight Zone script: “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Are there prosecutors somewhere in America who do issue specific statements of exoneration when they drop a case?
Firing ComeyOne focus of the dissent is on Trump firing FBI Director James Comey. For this is be obstruction, Trump would have to have fired Comey with the corrupt intent to impede the investigation. The Mueller Report is clear that was not what happened. Despite the public messaging the firing was related to Comey’s mishandling of the Clinton email case, the Report shows Trump was angry at Comey for stating to him privately he was not under investigation but refusing to say that publicly, as Comey had done (once) for Hillary. Vol II, p 75 “Substantial evidence indicates that the catalyst for the president’s decision to fire Comey was Comey’s unwillingness to publicly state that the president was not personally under investigation.” That’s not obstruction of justice, it’s presidential rage.
Yet elsewhere the Report says something more… leading to set up the argument for obstruction post-Comey. Vol II, p 7: “Some of [Trump’s] actions, such as firing the FBI director, involved facially lawful acts” but then adds “At the same time, the President’s position as the head of the Executive Branch provided him with unique and powerful means of influencing official proceedings, subordinate officers, and potential witnesses — all of which is relevant to a potential obstruction-of-justice analysis.” It was even clearer elsewhere. Vol II, p 157: “[we] found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.”
Mueller’s team concluded Trump lawfully fired Comey, did not break the law in doing so because the intent was not to obstruct, but it was still dirty play, “undue influence,” not a crime but still something that Vol 2, p 2 “presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.”
Trump Post-ComeyThat serves as the introduction to the second argument for obstruction, Trump’s actions post-Comey. Ironically, while Trump was not under investigation when he fired Comey for refusing to say that publicly, Trump was placed under investigation by the FBI (for obstruction) after he fired Comey.
The Report suggests Trump’s post-Comey actions (broken down into ten episodes) would have constituted obstruction if seen as a pattern of behavior, not as the discrete acts the law focuses on, and if they had included the critical element of corrupt intent. Those “if” words are doing all the work because there was no corrupt intent. Mueller said so.
So if Trump could not take his obstructive actions to cover up his crimes with Russia because they did not exist to be covered up, i.e., corrupt intent, why did he act in ways that appear designed to disrupt the investigation? Mueller answers the question. Vol 2, p 61 “Evidence indicates that the President was angered by both the existence of the Russia investigation and the public reporting that he was under investigation, which he knew was not true based on Comey’s representations. The President complained to advisers that if people thought Russia helped him with the election, it would detract from what he had accomplished. Other evidence indicates that the President was concerned about the impact of the Russia investigation on his ability to govern. The President complained that the perception that he was under investigation was hurting his ability to conduct foreign relations, particularly with Russia.”
If you will believe Mueller, Trump was concerned about his ability to govern, about as far from corrupt intent as you can get. At the pre-release press conference, Barr agreed with Mueller’s assessment. Trump knew, and Mueller came to know, that he did not collude with the Russians. To show corrupt intent, Mueller would have had to prove Trump was trying to stymie the process which would clear him. And yes there can be obstruction without an underlying crime but that requires even clearer evidence of corrupt intent, which on its face is counterproductive.
EndgameProsecutors don’t issue road maps for others. They make a binary decision, to charge or drop a case. Not charging is a conclusion and the only one that matters in the end. The Report is not a pretty picture of power being exercised. But Trump did not commit a chargeable crime, and in between some muddled dissent text, Mueller the prosecutor said so by not indicting him.
Politicians, however, are bound by a different code. They can conduct investigations, hold hearings, and file articles of impeachment whose only purpose is to drag Trump through the Benghazi-like muck. They desperately seek but will never achieve a climax to this desperately anti-climatic Report. The Democrats know they have no chance of impeaching Trump. The question is, by playing at trying, do they think they have a better chance of defeating him in 2020?
BONUS REDACTION-O-RAMA
For more complete lists of Russiagate stories which were once headlines but are now debunked by the Mueller Report see here and here.
No matter how much guessing about what’s under those black redcation bars may emerge, this will never be the horcrux that defeats the unacceptable 2016 election. Trump is going to serve his full term (for good measure there won’t be any Emoluments Clause prosecution or invocation of the 25th Amendment, either) and the voters under the same Electoral College system that’s been in place for over 200 years will decide if he gets another four years.
At his news conference before releasing the Report, Attorney General Barr said any campaign interaction with WikiLeaks could not amount to a criminal conspiracy because WikiLeaks’ publication of the emails was not a crime so long as it did not help Russia hack them. That is the same standard the United States applied to the New York Times, et al, and Wikileaks for nearly a decade. It is the standard being used publicly against Julian Assange; his indictment focuses on his helping hack classified materials, not publishing them. Anything else impinges the First Amendment.
The redacted information covers a standard four categories generally kept from the public: grand jury details, classified information, material related to ongoing investigations, and passages that could defame third-party figures (i.e., those investigated and cleared) caught up in Mueller’s probe. Demanding those things be made public is a strawman argument by Dems. A judge has already denied a preliminary injunction requiring the Justice Department to release the report. The Justice Department will make a less redacted version of the report, with more information on the pending Roger Stone case, available to a limited number of Congresspeople. Democrats have refused to look at it, demanding the full, unredacted report or nothing.
Transparency in government is always a good thing. But in this instance, Dems motives in demanding the unredacted report are making two statements, neither supported by facts, just rage: Barr has been partisan and unprofessional in making these standard redactions, a coverup, to protect the president, and Mueller has missed something important hidden in the redactions the Dems will catch. In reality, the purpose of seeing the unredacted report, and the underlying data, and the… (there will never be enough) is to provide fodder for leaks Democrats hope will score political points or serve as good-enough excuses to keep the investigations going until the election. Classification and proprietary have the value of a paper bag in the rain to them. Trump, they believe to their core, had to have said or done something at least embarrassing and the Dems wants to see that in the Washington Post. The same thinking, by the way, applies to efforts seeking Trump’s taxes.
And as for the gunman-on-the-grassy-knoll theory that the real evidence is hidden in the redactions, no matter how light they are, much of the obstruction investigation did not involve grand jury testimony. White House officials cooperated with Mueller specifically to avoid grand jury appearances. That means that information from key officials, including former White House counsel Don McGahn, former White House strategist Steve Bannon, and former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus, could be included in the report. The White House did not invoke executive privilege to block the release of any of that information. Asked by Senator Jeanne Shaheen at a hearing last week if he would redact information to protect the interests of Trump, Barr said he would not. As for those such redactions, “I’m talking about people in private life, not public officeholders.” Lastly, Mueller and his team assisted with the redactions and could have pushed back at any point, including leaks. They have not done so.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Is 2020 Already Decided?
Does anyone in the Democratic Party understand the 2020 election is going to hinge on purple voters in a handful of key states? After years of culture warfare the red and blue bases are set. Electoral College, not midterm, math applies. It is easy to predict a close vote deciding the election.
If the Dems have any inkling of all this, then it is unclear why their primary candidates are talking about things like reparations, Mayor Pete’s hubby, why we must have a woman president, that AOC/Omar (D-Late Night) are the future (and maybe they are; all flash and no substance, D-Late Night), how Stacey Adams got cheated and so deserves to be at least a Senator, identity politics, trans- anything or #MuellerPutinTaxGate. While many purple voters do care about LGBT rights and having a woman in the White House, it is less clear they will vote that way when other issues are of concern.
Democrats run a real risk of under-emphasizing the gulf between social media and the real world. If you fell from outer space and only had Twitter to help you understand this election, you would be convinced the electorate is demanding a female, black, left-handed nominee to drive through a legislative agenda centered on banning hate speech. A significant portion of the MSM lives in that world, so disgusted by Trump that some three years into his administration they still cannot accept the idea that people actually voted for him (Esquire’s political columnist adds an asterisk to the word president* to signify the election was bogus.) Post “Trump is literally Hitler ya’all” and thousands will “like” and agree into a self-reinforcing coma. They’re missing that Democrats who do not share political content on Twitter are more likely to identify as moderate or conservative. In fact, early polls suggest gender and race are not decisive factors for Democratic voters. Too few people talking to each other create narrow, and wrong, impressions that may prove fatal for 2020.
The central Democratic plank — Trump Bad Man — is not what Dems expected it to be at this point in the 2020 campaign. Russiagate collapsed. There will be no obstruction trials, no impeachment hearings on afternoon TV. Trump is still the only president since the end of the Soviet Union who hasn’t yet dragged the country into any new war, and he has toned down some of the pre-existing ones. The economy did not collapse. A trade war did not devastate any place. Trump got 57 miles of the wall paid for, and had the Supreme Court validate his “Muslim Ban.” Trump continues to enjoy strong ratings on the economy and for combatting terrorism, two issues of heightened importance in family-oriented suburbs. The Resistance piffed away, achieving little while its Hollywood heroes molested each other. The Women’s March ate itself over infighting. And all the Dems have to go into Michigan with is “we still haven’t seen his taxes.”
Dems did take control of the House and have done what… with that power? Pelosi, who has tamped down the impeachment rabble and dropped shade on her angry freshmen, seems to have a better sense of this than most. All purple voters who chose Dem in the midterms been is more empty talk of socialism, demands for less white supremacy, and a need for more investigations. Plus a quickly-failed Green New Deal alongside lots of anti-Israel chatter that can alienate a potential Jewish voting block in battleground Florida. The Dems could have made a decent DACA-for-the-Wall deal, and gone into 2020 with a popular victory for some of the most vulnerable immigrants. Instead they got just the wall, and watched Trump declare a national emergency over their dead body to get it. At the same time, what Obama recently labeled a “circular firing squad” haunts the party, with the guns aimed right now at Joe “I’m Your Handy Man” Biden. Who is pure enough? Let’s ask Al Franken!
House Democrats pushing for the release of the Mueller report say they are oddly not hearing much interest on the subject from their constituents back home. “The vast majority of what I hear is about kitchen-table issues,” a Michigan representative said. Because while the Dems may not have much to offer up, the voters indeed have their own lists.
People are anxious over immigration, and many uncomfortable with Trump’s actions. But unless the Dems come up with specific answers to that anxiety they will punt away the issue. There is no doubt communities across the midwest and elsewhere have been dramatically affected by immigration. Some for the better, some less so. Cultural values have been challenged without anyone seeming to care. It is not a new story in America, but it does matter, because purple voters understand the impact on their communities and they see it daily. They are well-aware the New York Times pundit’s great-grandfather came over from Poland with five dollars in his pocket, hell, their grandfather came over from Poland with two dollars in his pocket. Even if the media won’t ask the hard follow up questions, they’ll still exist in voters’ minds.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is traveling here and there announcing she is today “ashamed” of immigration positions she supported just a few years ago, solid Trumpian things from blocking certain benefits for undocumented immigrants to establishing English as an official language. She proclaims her 180 degree change of view hoping to win the primary so she can downplay in the general election how she proclaimed her 180 degree change of view. It is unlikely purple voters will see this as the serious leadership on immigration issues they crave.
Multiple candidates say they will abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. Every country on earth controls its own borders in some fashion. So abolish ICE. And then?
Purple voters don’t live in the multicultural holiday camp of Brooklyn, and know it is not 1900 anymore with an economy demanding millions of new farmers and manual laborers. They understand not everyone agrees, but also know you can’t tell groups of people what they believe is just wrong, racist, and un-American, at least not and expect their votes. Dems tried and failed to enact gun control legislation by saying people who owned a hunting rifle in Iowa were complicit in killing children in Florida. Nobody wants to see kids in cages. But “We’re not Trump” by itself only goes so far.
Claiming the economy is in shambles is also a bad strategy when it plainly is not. It makes Dems look out of touch. The economy is doing very well for the band of purple voters who have 401ks; the DOW was at 18,000 when Trump took office and it’s above 26,000 now. Yes, yes, Obama helped but that’s not how credit gets apportioned on the ballot. You don’t have to agree with them or even understand it fully, but many are convinced they accept food stamps because they have to while other people accept them because they are lazy. It’s not about jobs, it’s about good jobs somehow still isn’t the message. Got infrastructure plans? Less well-off purple voters understand economic inequality at a gut level; most Dems sell it as a minority problem pandering for black support and forget many of those purple voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania are poor and very white.
Many voters know there is no such thing as a mass of POC as white Dems imagine it. This is a false construct Dems are wasting energy on. There is, in just one example, a real cleavage between established later-generation Hispanics and new arrivals (55% of Hispanics believe immigrants’ illegal crossing of the border with Mexico is an important problem. Some 97% of foreign-born Hispanics in America identify as Hispanic, while only 50% of fourth-generation or higher Hispanics do.) Few Asians outside of social media traps imagine they have much in common with urban blacks. Every Asian immigrant, for example, expects his kids to live in the suburbs someday. He’s too busy with three jobs to spend time complaining about how unfair things are.
People need help with healthcare. But at some point Medicare for All has to move beyond a tweeted slogan and explain how the government will simply do away with the multi-billion dollar private insurance business, force doctors to change how and how much they are paid, explain how to legislate drug prices, and institute price controls for all medical services to keep the system from going broke (you need all those parts, that’s how it works in other countries.) And of course, explain how to pass the legislation and then fund all this. “We’ll tax rich people” makes as much sense as “We’ll ask Beyonce to set up a really big GoFundMe.” “Check my web page for the details” is not going to be 2020’s killer debate line.
In 2016, both Sanders and Trump stood out from other candidates for their willingness to frame the campaign as an existential struggle, using terms like “revolution” and “movement” to drive home their anti-establishment credentials. With Democrats now seeking to redefine themselves after more than two decades of dominance by the Clintons, such terms have become the norm. Purple voters may easily see such words as code for too-left, too-progressive ideological politics they are wary of backing.
While the effect on purple voters is unclear at present, “Whither Bernie” looms large. The 2016 Bernie never imagined he’d do much more than use the primary to air his signature issues of healthcare and economic reform. That’s why in the beginning he didn’t run against Hillary so much as alongside her, always gentle on her tender spots like those damn emails. But his message about Wall Street excesses and income inequality resonated. Bernie 2020 starts with a large block of serious supporters and some good ideas. But it is very hard to see how a guy five years older than Trump who talks about socialism is going to fare. Last time around the Dems buried Sanders in a rigged primary and lost many of his supporters. It is unclear how the eventual Democratic nominee (you don’t really think the DNC will run an independent old man with no corporate love, do you?) will handle him this time around to try and retain those voters. It is also unclear how many voters will be hesitant to back Bernie, wondering in the end which other candidate they’ll be traded to this time.
It’s a primary, so candidates think they are talking mostly among friends to the Base. But in a 24/7 always-on world statements now are amplified and will be remembered. This is an old story for Republicans, who in the past used to say crazy racist things to small rural groups to win primary votes, and then try to clean up their act back in town. The old “must do X to get nominated and then renounce X to get elected” paradigm doesn’t work anymore.
A good example is Mayor Pete, who has made a little set piece out of calling out Mike Pence. Pete recently said “If you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is with my creator.” Who is Pete talking to here? Homophobes are not going to change their minds, and evangelicals are not going to be brought over by being told their reading of God’s word is wrong. Nope, Pete is pandering to a small segment of the Democratic base focused on LGBT issues. Once upon a time that was a workable strategy, different approaches for different audiences. But not today. How is his approach going to play to purple voters worried about a broad range of pocketbook issues? If Mayor Pete, who so desperately wants to be this year’s Plain Spoken Warrior Poet from the Heartland, ends up in front of possible Trump voters in Ohio explaining he won’t be The Gay President, he’ll lose. Ask around; how’d that I’m going to be The Woman President thing work out in 2016?
So here it is: Democrats, if you want a better chance at winning in 2020 instead of just congratulating yourselves you were right while recounting the popular vote, tone down the Trump hate. Stop emphasizing identity politics. Have specific plans to offer on immigration, infrastructure, and healthcare. Talk about economic inequality more broadly, and STFU about socialism. Be very careful what you feed the base in the primaries lest you have to walk it back in the general election. Pay more attention to real life purple voters and less to social media. Get your angry freshman women off and your candidates on the front pages. Resolve your Bernie problem well. Stop alienating the very voters who can push you to victory.
At this early stage, Joe Biden (age 76 to Trump’s 72, lost twice) and Bernie (lost once, age 77) seem like the best the Democrats have and that’s pretty sad. It’s still very early days, but we’re watching Dems set the stage to blow it.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Lessons for Afghanistan: My Time in Iraq 10th Anniversary Edition
I recently spoke with some college students. They were in fifth grade when I first got on a plane to Iraq, and now study that stuff in classes with names like “Opportunities and Errors: 21st Century America in the Middle East.” I realized about halfway through our conversation it’s coming up on ten years ago I first went to Iraq.
I was a Foreign Service Officer then, a diplomat, embedded with the U.S. Army at a series of forward operating bases. I was in charge of a couple of reconstruction teams, small parts of a complex failure to rebuild the Iraq we wrecked. I ended up writing a book about it all, explaining in tragic-comic terms how we failed (those “Errors.”)
The book was and wasn’t well-received; people laughed at the funny parts but my message — it didn’t work and here’s why — was largely dissipated by a cloud of government and media propaganda centered on The Surge, David Petraeus’ plan to pacify the Sunnis and push al Qaeda away while clearing, holding, and building across the country, apparently to make room for ISIS and the Iranians to move in. Meanwhile the new American president, elected in part based on his “no” vote to go to war in 2003, proclaimed it all a victory and started bringing the troops home even while I was still in Iraq. When I got home myself, my employer from not long after I was taking classes called “Opportunities and Errors: America in the Middle East Since WWII,” the U.S. Department of State, was unhappy with the book. Over a year-long process State eventually pushed me into early retirement. My career was history.
People asked in line at Trader Joe’s and in interviews on semi-important TV shows “Was it all worth it to you?” and I always answered yes. I wasn’t important, I said, the story was. We’re making the same mistakes in Afghanistan, I ranted at cashiers and pundits, and there is time to change.
See, my book wasn’t aimed at cataloguing the failure in Iraq per se, but in trying to make sure we didn’t do the same thing in Afghanistan. The initial title wasn’t the unwieldy We Meant Well: How I Lost the War for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People but Lessons for Afghanistan from the Reconstruction of Iraq. The early drafts were pretentious scholarly stuff, outlining our mistakes. Harvard Business School-like case studies. Maps. Footnotes. It would have sold maybe five copies, and so my editors instead encouraged me to write more funny parts. NPR’s Fresh Air actually added a laff track to my interview. They were all right, and I figured I’d get the lessons across with humor more effectively anyway. In such situations you have to think that way. You can’t believe what you went through didn’t matter and keep getting out of bed every morning checking if it was yet Judgement Day.
I now know officially it did not matter. It was pointless. SIGAR shows I accomplished nothing.
SIGAR is the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, a government oversight body that is supposed to prevent waste, fraud, and mismanagement of the billions of dollars being spent rebuilding Afghanistan but which has its hands full just recording a CVS-receipt length list of what’s wrong. Sounds familiar? SIGAR just released The 2019 High-Risk List which points out especially egregious things that will follow in the wake of any peace agreement in Afghanistan. Here are some highlights:
— Without financial support from international donors, the government of Afghanistan cannot survive. [Peace] will come at an additional price that only external donors can afford.— There are over 300,000 Afghans currently serving in the security forces, most of whom are armed. If, because of a loss of financial support, their paychecks were to stop coming, this could pose a serious threat to Afghanistan’s stability.— A failure to peacefully reintegrate as many as 60,000 heavily armed Taliban long-term would threaten any peace agreement as disaffected former Taliban who may have been expecting a peace dividend may return to violent and predatory behavior.— Effective policing will require a force that gives citizens the presumption of innocence, rather than anticipating and taking preemptive offensive operations against perceived threats… There is no comprehensive strategy for a competent civil police force backed by the rule of law.
— Failure to effectively address systemic corruption means U.S. reconstruction programs, at best, will continue to be subverted and, at worst, will fail.
— The lack of sustained institutional capacity at all levels of government undermines the country’s development and ability to address the production and sale of illegal drugs. The opium trade plays a significant role in the Afghan economy and it is difficult to see how a peace accord between the Afghan government and the insurgency would translate into the collapse or contraction of the illicit drug trade.
— If the U.S. reduces its presence in Afghanistan but feels compelled to provide significant financial support for reconstruction, there may be little choice but to provide a greater proportion of funding as on-budget assistance. But if that road is taken and conditions are lacking, we may as well set the cash ablaze on the streets of Kabul for all the good it will do.
That last line really got me; in my book I’d written “While a lot of the money was spent in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no one could find a match to set it on fire…” Had SIGAR read what I’d written or was the joke just so obvious that we’d both come to the same punchline ten years and two countries apart?
A former State Department colleague is on her fourth (or fifth?) tour in Afghanistan. She likes it over there, says Washington leaves her alone. Her job has something to do with liaising with the few NATO military officials still around. It’s pretty easy work, they’ve known each other for years. She harbors no illusions, and in a sober moment would likely agree with SIGAR that after over 17 years of American effort, Afghanistan has almost no chance of survival except as a Taliban narcoland with financial support needed indefinitely to avoid whatever “worse” would be in that calculus.
We all know but try not to talk too much about the over 6,900 U.S. service members, 7,800 contractors, and 110,00 uniformed Iraqi and Afghan “allies” who died for that, and its companion Iranian client state in Iraq. A tragically high percentage of veterans have also died since returning home of drug overdoses, car accidents (?) or suicide. Nobody really knows how many civilians died, or even how to count them. Bombs and bullets only? Hunger and cold? Abandoned kids and enslaved women? Do we count deaths in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, and wherever too?
Iraq wrecked me, too, even though I initially somehow didn’t expect it to. I was foolish to think traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, being in a war, learning how to be mortared at night and decide it doesn’t matter I might die before breakfast, wasn’t going to change me. In the military units I was embedded in three soldiers did not come home, all died at their own hands. Around us Iraqis blew themselves up alongside children. Everyone was a potential killer and a potential target, sides appearing to change depending on who was pointing the weapon even as we were all the same in the end. I did this once, at age 49, on antidepressants and with a good family waiting at home for me. I cannot imagine what it would have done to 18 year old me. And I had it easier than most, and much, much easier than many.
The only way to even start to justify any of it was to think there was some meaning behind it all. It didn’t do anything for me but fill my soul with vodka but maybe it… helping someone? A buddy I saved? No, I didn’t save anyone. The Iraqis? Hah, not one was better off for my presence. Maybe America? Please.
Around the same time as the SIGAR report, the Army War College released its official history of the Iraqi Surge, a quagmire of dense prose I’m only about halfway through, but so far no mention of the impact of reconstruction. The theme so far seems to be the Army had some good ideas but the politicians got in the way. Fair enough, but they often misspelled Vietnam as i-r-a-q all through the book. The Army seems committed to calling things like suicide bombing and Shiite militias running whole neighborhoods as crime syndicates “challenges” instead of the more vernacular “failures.” That answers all questions about whether anyone will be held responsible for their work.
The post-9/11 wars spread across three presidencies so far. Pick the thing you detest most about Bush, Obama, and Trump, and complain how it was never investigated enough, and how there weren’t enough hearings, and how he got away with it. And then I’ll disagree, for most everything that happened and continues to happen in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone uninvestigated, unheard, and unpunished. It’s all ancient history.
All those failures have had no consequences on the most significant decision makers. Bush is reborn as a cuddly old goof, Obama remembered as a Nobel peace prize winner. Trump is criticized bizarrely both as a war monger and for talking about reducing U.S. troops in Middle East. The State Department ambassadors and senior leaders responsible retired, many to sweet university teaching jobs or think tanks. The generals found similar hideouts in pseudo-academia or as consultants; some are still in the military. I’d like to hope they have trouble sleeping at night, but I doubt it, and that kind of thinking doesn’t do me any good anyway.
Oh, and on April 8 four Americans were killed in a suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan, including a New York City firefighter (9/11, Never Forget!) The incident occurred when an IED exploded in a vehicle near Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul. Taliban forces claimed responsibility for the deadly attack, which also wounded three additional U.S. servicemen.
We all want to believe what we did, what we didn’t do, the moral injury, the PTSD, the fights with spouses, the kid at home we smacked too hard when she wouldn’t eat her green beans, all of what we saw and heard and smelled (oh yes, the smells, you know there’s a body in that rubble before you see him) mattered. You read that SIGAR report and tell me how. Because basically I’m history now.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Julian Assange Will Die Alongside Your 1st Amendment Rights
(Reprinted from December 2018 following Assange’s arrest in London April 11, 2019)Accidentally disclosed information confirms the U.S. is actively planning to prosecute Julian Assange. What happens to Assange will almost certainly change what can be lawfully published in our democracy. This threat to our freedoms is being largely ignored because the Assange, once a progressive journalist, is now regarded as a hero-turned-zero. At stake? The ability of all journalists to inform the public of things the government specifically wants to withhold.
A clerical error revealed the Justice Department secretly has filed criminal charges against Assange. Court papers in what appears to be an unrelated case used cut-and-pasted language from documents prepared previously against Assange.
Though the new information makes clear prosecution is planned if Assange can be delivered to American custody, no further details are available. Assange is under scrutiny at a minimum for unauthorized possession of classified material going back to at least 2010, when Wikileaks burst on to the international stage with evidence of American war crimes in Iraq, and exposed years worth of classified State Department diplomatic cables. More recently, Assange has been accused of trying to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election with his release of emails from the Democratic National Committee server. The emails, some believe, came to Wikileaks via hackers working for the Russian government (Assange denies this) and are deeply tied to the claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow otherwise known as “Russiagate.” Less publicized in the media but of critical concern inside the U.S. government is Wikileaks’ publication of the so-called Vault 7 materials, CIA hacking and malware tools, which revealed American technical intelligence skills and methods. Assange has hinted on at least one occasion he may have “Vault 8” materials as yet unreleased.
When Assange is prosecuted, on trial with him will be a key question concerning the First Amendment: do journalists actually enjoy special protection against national security charges? Can they publish classified documents because the national interest creates a 1A shield to do so? Or only when the government allows it?
Under the current “rules,” you get caught handing me a SECRET document, you go to jail. Meanwhile, I publish to millions, including any Russian intelligence officers with Internet access, and end up on Kimmel next to Taylor Swift. I whisper “I’m a freedom fighter, you know” into Taylor’s moist ear and she sighs.
Ask Edward Snowden, in dark exile in Moscow. Talk to Chelsea Manning, who spent years in Leavenworth while journalists for the New York Times and the Washington Post won accolades for the stories they wrote based on the documents she leaked. See how many stories today cite sources and reports, almost all of which are based on leaked classified information, stuff the government doesn’t want published yet accepts as part of the way journalism and the 1A work.
Yet despite widespread practice, there is no law rendering journalists immune from the same national security charges their sources go to jail for violating. There is no explicit protection against espionage charges written between the lines of the First Amendment. It is all based on at best an unspoken agreement to not prosecute journalists for revealing classified data, and it appears it is about to be thrown away to nail Julian Assange.
In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, to the New York Times. Reporters at the Times feared they would go to jail under the Espionage Act but published anyway, even as the Washington Post wimped out. The Nixon administration quickly found a court to order the Times to cease publication after initial excerpts were printed, the first time in U.S. history a federal judge censored a newspaper.
The Supreme Court then handed down New York Times Company v. United States, a victory for the First Amendment which allowed the Papers to be published, but an opinion which sidestepped the larger question about whether the 1A protects journalists publishing classified in favor of simply affirming the government couldn’t censor the news in advance. The Court left the door open for the government to prosecute both the leakers (by dismissing Ellsberg’s leaker case on technical grounds and ignoring his public interest defense) and the journalists who publish them (by focusing narrowly on prior restraint.) The Justices avoided saying the 1A offered a specific shield to journalists in matters of national security.
The Pentagon Papers case has governed everything about national security journalism from that day until the moment the U.S. government finally gets Julian Assange into an American courtroom.
On the source side, the Obama administration was especially virulent in prosecuting leakers. Trump continued the policy by throwing the book at Reality Winner. Both administrations made clear there was nothing to distinguish between taking classified documents to inform the public and taking them say with the intent to hand over secrets to the Chinese. On the other side of the equation, the journalists, the government (including, to date, Trump despite all the noise about attacking the press) has chosen not to prosecute journalists for publishing what leakers hand over to them.
The closest step toward throwing a journalist in jail over classified information came in 2014, when Obama Attorney General Eric Holder permitted subpoenaing New York Times reporter James Risen regarding a former CIA employee. After much legal muscle tussle, the Supreme Court turned down Risen’s appeal, siding with the government in a confrontation between a national security prosecution and infringement of press freedom. The Supreme Court refused to consider whether the First Amendment includes an unwritten “reporter’s privilege” in the free press clause. The Court instead upheld existing decisions finding the Constitution does not give journalists special protections. The door was w-a-y open to throwing Risen in jail.
But instead of becoming the first president to jail a journalist for what he published, Obama punted. Happy with the decision affirming they could have prosecuted Risen, with no explanation prosecutors asked the U.S. District Court to simply leave Risen alone. Risen’s alleged source went to jail instead for leaking classified. The unspoken rules stayed intact.
Unspoken rules are useful — they can be read to mean one thing when dealing with the chummy MSM who understands where the unspoken lines are even if they need the occasional brush back pitch like with Risen, and another when the desire is to deep-six a trouble-maker like Assange. Julian Assange poked the Deep State — he exposed the military as war criminals in Iraq (ironically in part for gunning down two Reuters journalists), the State Department as hypocrites, laid bare the CIA’s global hacking games in the Vault 7 disclosures, and showed everyone the Democratic primaries were rigged. None of those stories would have come to light under the MSM alone. And if Assange does know something about Russiagate (did he meet with Manafort?!?), what better place to silence him than a SuperMax.
The government is likely to cite the clear precedent from the Obama years it damn well can prosecute journalists for revealing classified information, and keep the established media happy by offering enough thin exceptions (natsec journalism groupies have already started making lists) to appear to isolate Assange’s crucifixion from setting broad precedent. Say, start with the fact that he wasn’t covered by the 1A outside the U.S., that his sources were Russian hackers seeking to harm the U.S. instead of misguided chaps like Ellsberg and Manning. Assange had no national interest in mind, no sincere desire to inform the public. He, a foreigner no less, wanted to influence the 2016 election, maybe in collusion!
Shamefully, those stuck in journalism’s cheap seats are unlikely to side with Assange, even though they wrote stories off what he published on Wikileaks. They’ll drift along with the government’s nod and wink this is all a one-off against Julian, and those who play by the government’s unspoken rules are still safe.
They’ll self-righteously proclaim Assange going to jail a sad but unfortunately necessary thing, claiming he just took things too far dealing with the Russkies, ignoring while the door to prosecute a journalist for national security has always been carefully left open by administrations dating back to Nixon, it is only under their watch that it may be slammed on the hands of one of their own whom they refuse to see, now, for their own misguided self-preservation, as a journalist. The Daily Beast’s take on all this, for example, is headlined a TMZ-esque “Unkempt, Heavily Bearded Julian Assange No Longer Has Embassy Cat For Company.”
They will miss where previous cases avoided delineating the precise balancing point between the government’s need to protect information, the right to expose information, and the media’s right to publish it, an Assange prosecution will indeed create a new precedents, weapons for the future for clever prosecutors. It will be one of those turning points journalists someday working under new press restrictions will cite when remembering the good old days.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Rachel Maddow is Russiagate’s Poster Child
“We start tonight’s show with an urgent warning: the nation is in danger, things are moving fast. Following some of the worst journalism since the McCarthy era during the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, we said we would not do it again. We not only did it again with Russiagate, but did it worse. I’m Rachel Maddow, and I’m responsible for much of it.”
Though she doesn’t often bring it up these days, Rachael remembers the media abetted the Bush administration’s lies justifying the 2003 Iraq invasion. They spent months serving as stenographers for the push to war, reporting every carefully-timed leak without question. They pushed skeptics aside as disloyal, and spiked stories which would have raised questions about the narrative. When they got caught they pleaded never again.
Yet with Rachel Maddow as their poster child (nominations were also considered for the entire staff at CNN, David Corn, Luke Harding, Chris Hayes, Ken Dilanian, and hundreds more) journalists over the last two years did everything wrong their predecessors did in 2003.
They treated gossip as fact because it came from a “source” and said to trust them. They blurred the lines among first-hand knowledge, second/third-hand hearsay, and “people familiar with the matter” to build breaking news out of manure. They marginalized skeptics as “useful idiots” (Glenn Greenwald, who called bull on Russiagate from the beginning, says MSNBC banned him after he criticized Rachel Maddow. He’d been a regular during the Bush and Obama years.)
They accepted negative information at face value and discarded information which did not fit their preconceived narrative of collusion (WaPo never ran a story about how its reporters came up dead empty after working for months to prove Michael Cohen met with Russian agents in Prague.) They went all-in with salacious headlines, every story a sugar high. They purposefully muddled the impact of an indictment versus an actual conviction, or even a prosecution. They conflated anyone from Russia with the Russian government. They never paused to ask why there weren’t “Sources: Trump is Innocent” stories that later needed to be walked back; the errors were all on one side of the story.
They used each other as sources, creating info loops originating from nothing. A NYT article based on “persons with knowledge” appeared on some other outlet as “the NYT confirms…” Nothing became facts became evidence in their minds — Maddow turned a Politico report of a legal meeting with the Russian ambassador in “evidence of a quid pro quo” with Trump.
Maddow was also not afraid to employ some Russiagate-related good old fashioned fear mongering. In response to fake reports of Russians hacking into the power grid, she said “And it is like -50 degrees in that Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed the power in Fargo today? Alright. What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux Falls just poofed on the coldest in recent memory and it wasn’t in our power whether or not to turn them back on? What would you do if you lost heat indefinitely as the act of a foreign power on the same that the temperature matched the temperature in Antarctica? What would you and your family do?”
Like followers of Insane Clown Posse, Maddow did also love her some pee tape. Despite no one on earth having actually seen the video, she knew how important it was, announcing to her viewers ““How Vladimir Putin stopped being just a KGB guy and got political power in the first place was by producing, at just the right time and in just the right way, just the right sex tape to use for political purposes.” She called Trump’s presidency “effectively, a Russian op.” If you need a refresher, here’s a neat video compilation.
They became a machine as trustworthy as the politicians they relied on. In one critic’s words “In purely journalistic terms, this is an epic disaster.”
Though the death toll across the Middle East the media helped midwife is beyond sin, the damage to journalism itself is far worse this time around with Russiagate. With Maddow in the lead, they went a step further than just shoddy reporting, instead proudly declaring their partisanship (once the cardinal sin of journalism) and placing themselves at the center of the story.
So there was Maddow, night after night in front of her serial killer’s burlap board, Trump and Putin surrounded by blurry images of Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, running twine between pins so her viewers could keep up with her racing intellect. Anyone with a Russiany surname “had ties to Putin,” “connections to Russian intelligence,” or was at least an oligarch. She nurtured an unashamed crush on Deep State clowns the Rachel Maddow of a few years back would have smirked at — Brennan, Clapper, Comey — to feed her fake facts.
She ignored or downplayed other news (Maddow devoted over 50% of her airtime to Russiagate alone. The Muslim visa ban got less than 6%.) She worked to convince Americans the cornerstone of justice was not “innocent until proven guilty” but “if there’s smoke there’s fire.” She lead journalists in knowingly publishing material whose veracity they doubted, centering on the Steele dossier. There’s gobs from every corner of the media. But it was Maddow who pressed the most extreme version of the Russiagate narrative.
Maddow became Infowars. She moved beyond the simpleton advocacy journalism of Bush-lie peddling journo tools. Maddow was going to save the country. She sought to create a story out of whole cloth that matched her own political beliefs and then convince people it was true. And it was all justified because the fate of the Republic itself hung in the balance; any day Trump might peel off a rubber mask Scooby-do style to reveal he was Putin all along.
Carrying the burden of being democracy’s Messiah was not Maddow’s alone. The Washington Post proclaimed “democracy dies in the darkness” and appointed itself the light. Marcy Wheeler, a once flawless analyst on national security, actually outed one of her sources to the FBI to blow the collusion story wide open, claiming along the way her life was in danger.
The story was Trump could never have beaten Hillary fairly. Some Russians hacked the DNC and bought Facebook ads, and that must have been what caused her to lose. Ergo, Trump was working with the Russians! Starting from a conclusion allows all sorts of stupid leaps of illogic, and Maddow did not miss any of them. Trump wanted to build a hotel in Moscow so that had to involve Putin so Putin the chessmaster used the deal to manipulate Trump. Unless it was the pee tape, the kompromat (remember how many faux-Russian spy words Maddow employed?) And there was even a dossier (not a report) and super-cool spy code names like Crossfire Hurricane. Indictments and accusations were conflated with convictions, and every action, from firing Comey to some typo on Twitter could be repurposed into proof. She could trace it all back, like the singularity of the Big Bang (though the champion of that line of unreasoning is Jonathan Chait, who explained how Trump was recruited by the Russkies who were then still the Soviet Union in the 1980s.)
Along the way pure fiction filled in the empty afternoons. Maddow briefed us the Russians had not just stolen the election, but our very government. “We are also starting to see what may be signs of continuing influence in our country,” she warned over something that no longer matters because it wasn’t true. “Basically signs of what could be a continuing operation.” How many times was our day interrupted by breaking news Mueller was going to be fired and we needed to take to the streets? How many reports speculated Trump would never leave the Oval Office voluntarily, that he would invoke a national emergency, use troops to retain power? The media gave unusual credence to what in any other era would have been termed nut jobs, people like psychiatrist Bandy Lee, who claims Trump is literally insane and a danger to himself and others? They fanned the flames of liberal fantasies such as using the 25th Amendment or the Emoluments Clause or Hamiltonian Magic Fairy Powder, anything, to end a presidency they did not want to happen. Maddow was there for every twist and turn; watching her show, one came away with the certainty everything in the past two years was a piece of the larger puzzle, and only she was able to see it all (Maddow said the same thing about Trump’s taxes; what the IRS has missed over the last four decades, she alone will parse out given the chance.)
Held aloft over the years by the enchanted spell of “just wait for Mueller Time,” one day it all fell apart. The Mueller report summary was short, but answered the most important question ever asked about a president: Trump was not a Russian asset. There was no Russiagate. No conspiracy, collusion, cooperation, or indictments for any of that and none to come and none we don’t know about sitting around sealed, no treason or perjury charges over the Moscow hotel or the Trump Tower meeting or anything else. Those accusations were explicit. They. Did. Not Happen.
The great progressive hope — America was run by a Russian stooge — was over and done. Maddow’s response? Break another cardinal rule of journalism, and bury the lede. OK, sure Barr says Mueller says no collusion if you wanna believe that, but what matters now is after Robert Mueller did not find evidence of obstruction he could charge, and the FBI before him did not find any, and after Bill Barr confirmed he did not find it, Maddow knows obstruction took place. And if only she can see the full Mueller report, she will explain it all to you (Maddow is promoting a “day of action” for Americans to take to the streets and demand the report.) It wasn’t the Russians; it was old man Barr in the drawing room with the candlestick after all!
Maddow says the same thing about Trump’s taxes; what the IRS missed over the last four decades, she will parse out given the chance (even though she was mocked for a nothing reveal on Trump taxes in 2017). Like a compulsive gambler, she’s sure the next bet will pay off. Just you wait.
In the interim while ticks tock Maddow hacks up little blobs of political phlegm — after waiting two years for Mueller, two weeks for Barr to release the report is unconscionable. But two days for Barr to write the summary was too fast, proof the fix was in. Trump threatens the rule of law, but when the system works according to the law and the Attorney General makes a decision, it’s all an insidejobcoverupcrisis.
A big focus this week for Maddow was a foreign government-owned company resisting an old Mueller subpoena. The case is in front of a grand jury, so the public does not know what company it is, what government is involved, what the case itself concerns, or whether it has any connection to Trump, Russia, or the Spiders from Mars. But watching Maddow spin it all out it seems VERY BIG.
Over the course of a recent evening she tied what she dubbed The Mystery Case into Watergate (the case being heard in the same court used in 1974 was about the only connection) and because the Watergate judge released some grand jury testimony to help drive Nixon from office this bodes ill for Trump keeping the dirt Rachael just knows is there secret. It could break this wide open!
The whole thing was delivered Howard Beale-like in what seemed like one long breath, with the certainty of someone who sees ghosts and is frustrated you can’t see them too. It got so bad recently Maddow was being corrected by her own producers in real-time.
More after this commercial break. And don’t go away, there’s too much at stake.
It took the New York Times over a year after the Iraq war started to issue itself a mild “mistakes were made” kind of rebuke. At some point with Russiagate most people will come to understand there aren’t more questions than answers. They’ll abandon the straw man of waiting for prosecutors to issue a magic Certificate of Exoneration because they understand prosecutors end things by deciding not to prosecute.
But it’s hard to see Maddow coming back into planet earth orbit. Instead of a reflective pause, she is spinning ever-more complex and nonsensical conspiracy tales, talking faster and faster to cover the gaps in logic. It is sad, but there are psychiatric terms for people who refuse to accept facts, and insist they alone understand a world you can’t even see. Delusional. Denial. Psychotic. Obsessive. Paranoid.
Maddow is a sad story. Others playing the game never had her intellect, and just fed the rubes for clicks (looking at you, Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo.) They were weekend Vichy, showbiz grifters. But Maddow believed. Rachel Maddow’s goal was to end the Trump presidency on her own. And to do so she devolved from what Glenn Greenwald called “this really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.”
There’s a difference between being wrong once in a while (and issuing corrections) and being wrong for two years on both the core point as well as the evidence. There is even more wrong with purposely manipulating information to drive a specific narrative, believing the end of personally saving democracy justifies the means.
In journalism school, the first is called making a mistake. The second, Maddow’s offense, is called making propaganda.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Russiagate: “Why did this ever start in the first place?”
The end of the Special Counsel’s investigation into the non-existent conspiracy between Trump and the Russians has created an army of “Mueller Truthers,” demanding additional investigations. But Republicans are also demanding to know more, specifically how the FBI came to look into collusion, and what that tells us about the tension between America’s political and intelligence worlds. In Rudy Giuliani’s words “Why did this ever start in the first place?”
The primordial ooze for all things Russia began in spring 2016 when the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, through a company called Fusion GPS, hired former MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele to compile a report (“the dossier”) on whatever ties to Russia he could find for Donald Trump.
Steele’s assignment was not to investigate impartially, but to gather dirt aggressively – opposition research, or oppo. He assembled second and third hand stories, then used anonymous sources and Internet chum to purported reveal Trump people roaming about Europe asking various Russians for help, promising sanctions relief, and trading influence for financial deals. Steele also claimed the existence of a “pee tape,” kompromat Putin used to control Trump.
Creating the dossier was only half of Steele’s assignment. The real work was to insert the dossier into American media and intelligence organizations to prevent Trump from winning the election. While only a so-so fiction writer, Steele proved to be a master at running his information op against America.
In July 2016 Steele met with over a dozen reporters to promote his dossier, with little success. It could not be corroborated. Steele succeeded mightily, however, in pushing his information deep into the FBI via three simultaneous channels, including the State Department, and via Senator John McCain, who was pitched by a former British ambassador retired to work now for Christopher Steele’s own firm.
But the most productive channel into the FBI was Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr. Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS, the front company for Steele, having previously done contract work for the CIA. Nellie passed the dossier to her husband, along with her own paid oppo research, so that he could use his credibility at DOJ to hand-carry the work into the FBI. Bruce Ohr, despite acknowledging it broke all rules of protocol and evidence handling, did just that on July 30, 2016. He stressed to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe the material was uncorroborated and had been compiled by Christopher Steele, who wanted it used to stop Trump.
The dossier landed in welcoming hands. The FBI immediately opened an unprecedented investigation called Crossfire Hurricane into the Trump campaign. It sent agents to London to meet Australian ambassador Alexander Downer, who claimed to have evidence George Papadopoulos, one of Trump’s junior-level advisers, was talking to Russians about Hillary’s emails. The FBI’s timing of the new investigation into Trump – only days after they closed their investigation into Clinton’s email server – can be considered a coincidence by those of good heart.
Peter Strzok, the senior FBI agent managing the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and Lisa Page, a lawyer on his team (the two were also lovers), purposefully kept investigation details from political appointees at DOJ to the extent that only five people actually knew the full measure of what was going on, ostensibly to prevent leaks.
In fact, the point seems to have been to avoid oversight, given how weak the evidence was supporting something as grave as the Republican nominee committing treason. If you are looking behind the headlines for why Trump fired Andrew McCabe, besides his personal sympathies for Hillary, look there. Strzok and Page appear to have had an agenda of their own. In a text they wrote “Page: ‘[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: ‘No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.’”
With a wave of a hand the dossier the FBI was warned was partisan bunk was transformed into evidence. Steele himself morphed from paid opposition researcher to paid clandestine source for the FBI, with the fact that he had recently retired from a foreign intelligence service, British or not, ignored. It was all just an excuse anyway to unleash the vast intelligence machine against Trump, the imagined Manchurian Candidate.
Papadopoulos, the man in London, as a linchpin was also preposterous. He was a kid on the edges of the campaign, who “bumped into” a shady Russian professor who just happened to dangle the most explosive thing ever, Hillary’s emails. Papadopoulos then met the Aussie ambassador to Britain, Alex Downer. Papadopoulos gets drunk, tells the tale, which then falls whole into the FBI’s lap. Ambassador Downer, by the way, had previously arranged a $25 million donation to the Clinton Foundation. Papadopoulos was introduced to Downer by an Australian intelligence agent who knew him through her boyfriend, stationed at the Israeli embassy as a “political officer.”
Carter Page’s case was more of the same. Page, as a key actor in the Steele dossier, wold serve as an early excuse to get FISA surveillance eyes and ears on the Trump campaign. The FBI had a paid CIA asset, University of Cambridge professor and American citizen Stefan A. Halper, contact Page and dangle questions about access to Clinton emails.
Halper had earlier been trying separately to entrap Papadopoulos (the professor offered the inexperienced campaign aide $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London to write a white paper about energy), and also met with Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis in late August, offering his services as an adviser. Clovis declined. Ultimately both Papadopoulos and Page also rebuffed Halper, though both would later encounter a young woman in London claiming to be Halper’s assistant who tried to reinterest the boys.
Though to obtain multiple FISA warrants the FBI characterized him as an “agent of a foreign power,” Carter Page was never charged with anything. Halper dropped off the media’s radar, but is almost certainly a U.S. intelligence asset. He had earlier worked with British intelligence to pay for Michael Flynn to visit the UK. Halper’s main U.S.-based funding source is an internal Pentagon think tank. The Washington Post reported Halper had in the past worked for CIA directly. Halper was implicated in a 1980s spying scandal in which CIA officials gave inside information on the Carter administration to the GOP. Halper also married into a senior CIA official’s family.
It is clear the FBI was desperately trying to infiltrate Halper into the Trump campaign as part of a full-blown intel op, recruiting against Trump’s vulnerable junior staff. Even though the recruitment failed, the bits and pieces learned in the process were good enough for government work. At issue was that Steele’s dossier formed a key argument in favor of a FISA warrant to spy on Trump personnel. The dossier was corroborated in part in the warrant application by citing news reports that later turned out to be themselves based on the Steele dossier. In intelligence work, this is known as cross-contamination, a risky amateur error the FBI seems to have taken a chance on hoping the FISA judge would not know enough to question it. The gamble worked.
The FBI needed something as backup, so their investigation into Trump, now focused on the FISA surveillance, could be said not to have rested entirely on the dubious Steele dossier. Surveillance, intended and incidental, would eventually include Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, Michael Cohen, and likely Trump himself.
Had Hillary won the story would have ended there, in fact, likely would never have come to light. But with Trump’s victory, the dossier had one more job to do: prep the public for all to come.
There has been no discussion as to why, in possession of information the FBI seemed to believe showed the Russians were running a global full-court press to themselves recruit inside Trump’s inner circle, Trump was never offered a defensive briefing. Such a warning – hey, you are in danger – is common inside government. But in Trump’s case it never happened. Instead, in echo of the dark Hoover years, the FBI used its information to try and take down Trump, not protect him.
Though the dossier had already been widely shared inside the media, the State Department, and the intelligence community, it was only on January 6, 2017 Comey briefed it to president-elect Trump. No one really knows what was said in that meeting, but we do know after holding the dossier since summer 2016, only four days after the Trump-Comey meeting Buzzfeed published the document and the world learned about the pee tape. Many believe someone in the intel community gave “permission” to the media, signaling Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, et al, would begin making public statements the dossier “could be true.”
John Brennan was a regular on television and other media claiming over two years there was evidence of contacts between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, pimping off his time as CIA director to suggest he had inside information. He went as far as testifying before Congress in May 2017 that there was evidence of contacts between Russian officials and Trump campaign figures, though now says he might have been given “bad information.”
After that, no item that could link the words Trump and Russia was too small to add to the pile of pseudo-evidence.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as a wacky conspiracy theory if it wasn’t in fact the counter-explanation to the even wackier, disproved theory Donald Trump was a Russian asset. It is possible to see Russiagate as a political assassination attempt, using law enforcement as the weapon. Someone might do well to double-check if Christopher Steele was in Dealey Plaza during the Kennedy assassination.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
So Why Did Trump Fire Comey?
A media themelet is Trump fired then-FBI director James Comey because Comey would not let Michael Flynn off the hook. Flynn was caught in a perjury trap, lying about a legally-allowed meeting he held with the Russian ambassador. The FBI had the meet under surveillance and knew Flynn was not telling the truth later in an interview. Comey’s firing also forms a core tenet of the “obstruction truther” movement.We know a lot more about what was going on then now than we did then. Time for some thinking out loud.
I think the Comey firing is tied to the Christopher Steele dossier. We may someday learn Trump fired Comey because the FBI acted on the dossier to surveil Trump’s team from July 2016 to January 2017 without giving Trump a defensive briefing the Russians might be inside his campaign, signaling the FBI wanted to take Trump down, not protect him or America. No president could have confidence in his FBI director after that.
There has been no discussion as to why, in possession of information they seemed to believe showed the Russians were running a global full-court press to recruit inside Trump’s inner circle, Trump was never offered a defensive briefing by the FBI. Such a warning – hey, you may not know it, but here’s how you are in danger – is common inside government. But in Trump’s case it never happened and no one seems to want to formally ask (say at a Senate hearing) why.
That the FBI withheld the dossier from Trump, did not provide him with a defensive warning, and then used the information to collect against him did happen, and Comey was in charge. It is a shameful episode that harkens back to the J. Edgar Hoover days of an FBI that used its power to manipulate government. While referring by name only to Comey’s equally shameful handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation(s), Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in his letter recommending Comey be fired wrote:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has long been regarded as our nation’s premier federal investigative agency. Over the past year, however, the FBI’s reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage, and it has affected the entire Department of Justice. That is deeply troubling to many Department employees and veterans, legislators and citizens.
Donald Ayer, who served as Deputy Attorneys General under President HW Bush, along with former Justice Department officials, was “astonished and perplexed” by [Comey’s] decision to “break with longstanding practices followed by officials of both parties during past elections.” Ayer’s own letter noted, “Perhaps most troubling… is the precedent set by this departure from the Department’s widely-respected, non-partisan traditions.”
Both men wrote only of Comey-Clinton, but one wonders if they did not have Comey-Steele-Trump in mind as well.
On May 11, 2017, in an NBC News interview two days after firing Comey, Trump said perhaps more to the point of why he got rid of Comey “I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”
The media at the time was emphatic Trump was referring to firing Comey to end the investigation, when in hindsight another explanation is possible. Trump didn’t fire Comey to end the investigation; anyone would be aware the new FBI director or a Special Counsel would continue it. Trump may have fired Comey for his actions dating back to 2016.
My guess is history will show by January 2017 the FBI likely knew there was nothing to the dossier (one of the first things to read for in the full Mueller report is a clue as to how early he came to understand there was no collusion.) It was only then Comey unveiled the dossier to then president-elect Trump in a 1:1 brief in Trump Tower. That was on January 6, 2017, some three months after using the dossier in part to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump aide Carter Page. Comey almost certainly mentioned while Trump may not have heard of it, the dossier had already been widely shared inside the media, the State Department, and the intelligence community.
No one really knows what was said in that meeting, but we do know that after holding the dossier since summer 2016 four days after the Trump-Comey dossier meeting Buzzfeed published the whole document and the world learned about the pee tape and you had to explain what Golden Showers are to your mom. Many believe someone in the intel community gave “permission” to the media, signaling Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, Comey, et al, would be making supporting statements that the dossier “could be true.”
It is possible Trump, paranoid, embarrassed, and defensive, saw Comey’s moves in their January 2017 meeting as a blackmail attempt. Or at least a show of force — look what the FBI can do if you make trouble. Comey’s firing may have had a lot more to do with the dossier than it did with Michael Flynn.
That leaks about Flynn and the Russian ambassador, believed to be from the Obama White House after advisors Susan Rice and Samantha Powers unmasked the identities of various American persons inside intercepts collected incidentally, only added to a sense of paranoia.
Jeff Sessions was similarly incidentally surveilled, as was former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, whose conversations were picked up as part of a FISA warrant issued against Trump associate Carter Page. Paul Manafort and Richard Gates were also the subjects of FISA-warranted surveillance: they were surveilled in 2014, the case was dropped for lack of evidence, and then they were re-surveilled after they joined the Trump team and became more interesting to the state. We now know Michael Cohen, Trump’s own lawyer, was surveilled for years in an operation that walked very close to violating the once-sacrosanct attorney-client privilege. Until more FISA paperwork is released, we do not know the full extent the FBI penetrated the Trump campaign.
Officials on the National Security Council revealed that Trump himself may also have been swept up in the surveillance of foreign targets. Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, claims multiple communications by Trump transition staff were inadvertently picked up. Trump officials were monitored by British GCHQ with the information shared with their NSA partners.
Trump’s March 2017 claims to have been “wiretapped” by Obama, ridiculed by the media at the time, take on new credibility. That surveillance was spearheaded by James Comey and Trump fired him for it.
BONUS:
A good guess is Mueller took over as Special Counsel already knowing the dossier itself was garbage, but that it had done its job(s) to inflame the media and of course secure the FISA warrants. On Day One Mueller had the intel take from those warrants, which showed no collusion, on his desk. Mueller is a careful guy, so my speculation is he needed a month or two to assure himself. I’ll call it summer 2017 when he had a pretty good idea he was not going to uncover any smoking gun.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Media, Suck My Balls
A short, personal note…
Dozens of news sources — including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Salon, The Washington Post, The Intercept, and, why not, Stormy Daniels’ ex-lawyer Michael Avenatti — all claimed Trump was the Manchurian Candidate, controlled by Putin.When we demanded evidence, you attacked us. You told us we were wrong. You said democracy was in peril, the Republic facing a clear and present danger. You kept us off your shows, wouldn’t print our skepticism.
When we appeared on smaller stages, you tried to silence us claiming what we said was “hate speech” or was sowing discord or supporting white supremist nazis and should not be protected by the First Amendment. You purged us from your social media. The MSM blacklisted us in favor of Twitter stars (Abramson, Tribe, Steyer, Wheeler) and Deep State scum (Brennan, Clapper, Comey) making ever more outrageous claims with never anything but paranoia to corroborate them. Ever-more faux “fact checks” were deployed to make it seem we were the ones saying things which were untrue.
When asking for proof is seen as disloyal, when demanding evidence after years of accusations is considered a Big Ask, when a clear answer somehow always needs additional time, there is more on the line in a democracy than the fate of one man.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Mueller: End Game, Das Reckoning Gotterdammerung Fin Apocalypse
The short version? Mueller is done. His report unambiguously states there was no collusion or obstruction. He was allowed to follow every lead unfettered in an investigation of breathtaking depth.
It cannot be clearer. The report summary states “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election… the report does not recommend any further indictments, nor did the Special Counsel obtain any sealed indictments that have yet to be made public.”Robert Mueller did not charge any Americans with collusion, coordination or criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The special counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign “coordinated,” a much lower standard defined as an “agreement, tacit or express,” with Russian election interference activities. They did not.
Everything – everything – else we have been told since the summer of 2016 falls, depending on your conscience and view of humanity, into the realm of lies, falsehoods, propaganda, exaggerations, political manipulation, stupid reporting, fake news, bad judgment, simple bull or in the best light, hasty conclusions.
As with Dorothy’s ruby slippers, the proof of no collusion has always been with us. There was a guilty plea from Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, on one count of perjury unrelated to Russiagate. Flynn lied about a legal meeting with the Russian ambassador. Rick Gates, deputy campaign manager, plead guilty to conspiracy and false statements unrelated to Russiagate. George Papadopoulos, a ZZZ-level adviser, plead guilty to making false statements about legal contact with Russians. Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, plead guilty to lying to Congress about a legal Moscow real estate project. Paul Manafort, very briefly Trump’s campaign chair, plead guilty to conspiracy charges unrelated to Russiagate and which for the most part occurred before he even joined the campaign. Roger Stone, who never officially worked for Trump, awaits a trial that will happen long after Mueller turns the last lights off in his office.
Mueller did indict some Russia citizens for hacking, indictments which in no way tied them to anything Trump, and which will never see trial. Joseph Mifsud, the Russian professor who supposedly told Papadopoulos Moscow had “thousands of Hillary’s emails” was never charged. Carter Page, subject of FISA surveillance and a key actor in the Steele dossier, was also never charged with anything. After hours of testimony about that infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting to discuss Hillary’s email, and other meeting around the Moscow hotel, no one was indicted for perjury.
The short version of Russiagate? There was no Russiagate.
What Will Happen Next is already happening. Democrats are throwing up smoke demanding the full Mueller report be made public “rushing to judgment” on Mueller’s black and white conclusions. Speaker Pelosi announced whatever AG Barr would release as a summary of the Mueller report would not be enough even before he released the summary. One Dem on CNN warned they would need the FBI agents’ actual handwritten field notes.Adam Schiff said “Congress is going to need the underlying evidence because some of that evidence may go to the compromise of the president or people around him that poses a real threat to our national security.” Schiff believes his committee is likely to discover things missed by Mueller, whose report indicates his team interviewed about 500 witnesses, obtained more than 2,800 subpoenas and warrants, executed 500 search warrants, obtained 230 orders for communications records, and made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence.
Mueller may still be called to testify in front of Congress, as nothing will ever be enough for #TheResistance cosplayers now in charge. Overnight, Mueller’s findings, made by Mueller the folk hero, the dogged Javert, the Marine on his last patrol suddenly aren’t worth puppy poo unless we can all look over his shoulder and line-by-line second guess him. Joy Reid for her part has already accused Mueller of covering up the crime of the century.
The New York Times headline “As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York” says the rest — we’re movin’ on! Whatever impeachment/indictment fantasies diehard Dem have left are being transferred from Mueller to the Southern District of New York. The SDNY’s powers, we are reminded with the tenacity of a bored child in the back seat, are outside of Trump’s control, the Wakanda of justice.
The new holy land is called Obstruction of Justice, though pressing a case Trump obstructed justice in a process that ultimately exonerated him will be a tough sell. In a sentence likely to fuel discussion for months, the Attorney General quotes Mueller “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”It sounds dramatic, but in fact means while taking no position on whether obstruction took place, Mueller concluded he did not find enough evidence to prosecute. Mueller in the report specifically turns any decision to pursue obstruction further over to the Attorney General; Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein meanwhile have already determined the evidence does not support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.
Mueller also specifically noted obstruction of justice requires proof of intent, and wrote since he found Trump, et al, did not conspire with Russia, there can be no intent to obstruct an investigation Trump knew could not lead to anything. The case is thus closed judicially (Mueller essentially telegraphed the defense strategy), though Democrats will likely Quixotically poke at pursuing it.
This is developing as a major talking point among those seeking to dilute how clear this is. So, in simple language:
— Mueller had to see if he had enough evidence to prosecute obstruction. He did not find sufficient evidence. The choices are sufficient to prosecute, sufficient to exonerate, or neither. He chose neither. That’s where his job ends. Insufficient to exonerate does not equal “guilty.”
— At that point any future decisions go to the AG and DAG. They have already said there is not enough evidence to prosecute, the exact same decision Mueller made. They confirmed Mueller saying there was not sufficient evidence to prosecute.
— Mueller then telegraphs the real point: Mueller found no collusion. Trump of course knew he did nothing wrong with Russia (dammit, that is proven now). So how can anyone show Trump intended to block an investigation he knew would find nothing wrong? You’re going to try and impeach him for supposedly trying to block an investigation he knew would find him innocent?
–Since no intent, there can be no prosecution. The rest does not matter.
— Ok, ok, even s l o w e r. Mueller makes clear the Trump campaign did not conspired, collude or coordinate with the Russians. It is impossible to show a corrupt motive to obstruct an investigation into a crime that did not occur.
— Also, grownups charged, appointed and/or elected are doing their jobs. The Constitution does not require concurrence from Twitter, or for you to shout “Release the report!” that those people have already read so you can look over their shoulder and come to a conclusion based on your undergraduate degree in Spanish. The report should of course be released for historians and scholars, but not simply to second guess its conclusions on social media like dumbasses.
That leaves corruption. Politico has already published a list of 25 “new” things to investigate about Trump, trying to restock the warehouse of broken impeachment dreams (secret: it’s filled with sealed indictments no one will ever see.) The pivot will be from treason to corruption; see the Cohen hearings as Exhibit One. Campaign finance minutia, real estate assessment questions, tax cheating from the 1980s, a failed Buffalo Bills purchase years ago… how much credibility will any of that now have with a public realizing it has been bamboozled on Russia?
Will Dems really try to make the case maybe sorta fudging a loan application to a German bank years ago based on differing interpretations of “goodwill and brand value” before running for office is an impeachable offense in 2019? That is what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the rules for driving an elected president out of office?
Then there’s the argument (which Mueller did not make) the investigation had to spare Trump because dang it, some nancyboy spoiled everything by saying a sitting president can’t be indicted. But one can’t conspire alone; even if Trump got a Get Out of Jail Free card, Mueller didn’t take down anyone around him. Same with all the perjury charges which weren’t filed over the Moscow Hotel or Stormy or any meeting(s) with Russians. If Mueller couldn’t indict Trump for the conspiracy so many insist still exists, why didn’t Mueller at least indict someone besides Trump for lying to cover it up?
At some point even the Congresswoman with the most Twitter followers is going to have to admit there is no there, there. By digging the hole they are standing in even deeper Dems will only make it more obvious to everyone but Sam Bee’s interns they have nothing. Expect to hear “this is not the end, it is only the end of the beginning” more often most people check their phones, even as it sounds more needy than encouraging, like an ex- who doesn’t get it is over checking in to see if you want to meet for coffee.
Someone at the DNC might also ask how this unabashed desire to see blood drawn from someone surnamed Trump will play out with potential 2020 purple voters. It is entirely possible voters are weary and would like to see somebody actually address immigration, healthcare, and economic inequality now that we’ve settled the Russian question.
That is what is and likely will happen. What should happen is a reckoning.Even as the story fell apart over time like a cardboard box in the rain, a large number of Americans, and nearly all of the MSM, still believed the president of the United States was a Russia intelligence asset, in Clinton’s own words, “Putin’s puppet.” How did that happen?
A mass media which bought the lies over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again!” did it again. The New York Times, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, et al, reported falsehoods to drive a partisan narrative. They gleefully created a serial killer’s emptywheel-like bulletin board covered blurry photos of everyone in Russiagate connected by strands of yarn.
Another generation of journalists soiled themselves. They elevated mongerers like Seth Abramson, Malcolm Nance, and Lawrence Tribe, who vomited nonsense all over Twitter each afternoon before appearing before millions on CNN. They institutionalized unsourced gossip as their ledes — how often were we told the walls were closing in? That it was Mueller time? How many times was the public put on red alert Trump/Sessions/Rosenstein/Whitaker/Barr was going to fire the special prosecutor? The mass media featured only stories which furthered the collusion tall tale and silenced those skeptical of the prevailing narrative, the core failure from the Iraq War.
The short version: There were no WMDs in Iraq. That was a lie, the media promoted it shamelessly while silencing skeptical voices. Mueller indicted zero Americans for working with Russia to influence the election. Russiagate was a lie, the media promoted it shamelessly while silencing skeptical voices.
Same for the politicians, alongside Hayden, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, who told Americans the president they elected was a spy working against the United States. None of that was accidental or by mistake. It was a narrative they desperately wanted to be true so they could politically profit regardless of what it did to the nation. And today the whitewashing is already ongoing. Keep an eye out for Tweets containing the word “regardless” to trend.
And someone should contact the ghost of Consortium News’ Robert Parry, one of the earliest and most consistent skeptics of Russiagate, and tell him he was right all along. That might be the most justice we see out of all this.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trying to Understand the Democratic/Media Argument…
I’m trying to understand the Democratic/Media argument:
— There was no Russiagate, treason, conspiracy, etc, like we said for two years. I guess Putin doesn’t control us. Meh. Movin’ on!
— We’re gonna nail Trump on obstruction into an investigation into something that wasn’t a crime, an investigation that concluded without fetters, and which proved he was telling the truth about no collusion all along. Yes, he tried to obstruct the investigation he knew would clear him!
— We’ll forget Mueller could have recommended obstruction charges but did not. If Mueller found the evidence insufficient, he could have continued looking as long as he liked but instead voluntarily shut the investigation down.
— We’ll forget Mueller, even if he could not charge the president, could have charged others around him with obstruction, perjury, conspiracy, etc. but did not, because the evidence did not exist.
— We’ll ignore that in real life jurisprudence when the prosecution says the evidence isn’t there and declines to pursue the case, the defendant goes home a free man and the show is over. Courts do not issue some magic certificate of exoneration.
— We’ll forget in the summer of 2016 we all said about Hillary that when the FBI did not indict her over her emails that meant officially she did nothing wrong and not speak again of hypocrisy.
— We’ll ignore that AG Barr actually did little more than CONFIRM Mueller’s conclusion not to charge, indict, or continue. The two men agreed, coming to the same conclusion.
— We who love the Rule of Law will ignore that it is indeed Barr’s Constitutional role to do this, and instead without evidence accuse him of favoritism because we lost this.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Economics, POC, and Who You Should Support in 2020
“See, in America we have this thing about ‘people of color.’ POC. I think you’re one.” I was explaining things American to a visitor. He was actually from Spain, so he was Spanish, not Hispanic. We were trying to figure out if he was a POC.
This was not some sort of intellectual Sudoku to pass the time; core Democratic strategy is based on this POC idea. The U.S. is poised to become a non-majority nation (“minority white”) within 25 years, meaning about half of us will be POC. The Democratic party believes these POC will vote for their candidates, while the Republican party will wither away cherry picking voters from the dwindling cesspool of deplorable whites.
My Spanish friend considered himself European. “So I guess I am white, yes?” he offered. But his skin was clearly a few shades darker than mine, though he pointed out that was only because my relatives came from the cold part of Europe and he came from the sunny part. But he spoke Spanish. At least in America my new friend qualified as a POC.
His Seamless order arrived. He said gracias to the delivery guy and handed over a one dollar tip. “What do I have in common with him?” the Spaniard asked, “except the rudimentary ability to speak the same language, same as 560 million others.” I rolled my eyes at the delivery guy, a universal gesture of “people don’t tip, right?” solidarity.
I noted to my friend as I pulled into traffic, headed back to his hotel, the Democrats in 2020 would likely have at least POC vice presidential candidate who “looked like him.” But the whole POC thing did not sit well. Why did Americans, he asked, want leaders who physically looked like them? “Didn’t it used to be wrong to judge people by the color of their skin,” he said. “Why is it OK to choose someone because they’re black but racist to choose someone because they aren’t?” I shared in 2019 a candidate named Richard who graduated from Columbia needed to go around saying “call me Beto” to lighten his whiteness.
Things really got confusing when I explained the Democratic strategy of it’s-our-turn when white people drop below 50% seemed to be based on the idea that a newly arrived Chinese migrant and a 70-year-old Mexican-American CEO and people from Trinidad, Ghana, and the Bronx with three different levels of education all had something inherently in common. And something inherently not in common with everyone tainted various shades of pink.
I mentioned reparations; until slavery was ended in the United States, human beings were legally considered capital, just like owning stocks and bonds today. But the Spaniard knew enough about history to wonder what reparations would be offered to the thousands of Chinese treated as animals to build the railroads, or the 8,000 Irish who died digging the New Basin Canal. Or the whole families of Jews living on the Lower East Side of New York who were forced to employ their children to make clothing for uptown “white” stores. Later in the same century, wages were “voluntarily” cut to the bone at factories in Ohio to save jobs which disappeared anyway after the owners wrung the last profits out.
The more we talked, the more it all seemed to be about labor, low paid or never paid, and less about the C of the P doing the work. Inequality unequally distributed by race changes little about the base reality that for about 90% of us it is the controlling factor in our lives. It was like we were missing the thing behind the thing. Or someone was trying to hide it.
“I think,” my friend said, “Americans spend so much time worried about race they miss what we Europeans understand in our bones. It is class which divide societies. Look at Britain, once nearly 100% white, yet a person just had to say a few words and you’d know who worked for who by the accent. Or India, where everyone is a POC as you Americans would say, and where they created a caste system that survived the departure of the white people.”
It did seem silly to think a Caucasian on food stamps in West Virginia had more in common with a Caucasian in L.A. producing multi-million dollar movies than a black person on food stamps in say, West Virginia again. Blacks are lazy and get free welfare, whites don’t have to try because of free privilege. “No, your Democrats are drawing the lines the wrong way,” said the Spaniard. “It is about money not melanin.” We had to look up the last word from the Spanish melanina.
We’d been driving for awhile, since right after the Seamless guy first met us. We’d arrived at The Plaza. My Spanish friend paid me for the ride through the Uber app, but with a generous cash tip. Privilege, I guess. I pocketed the $10.
As I set off to my other job, it started to make more sense about money even as the idea of POC made less sense. Color masks the lines that really matter, and those lines are all colored green.Since 1980, incomes of the very rich (the .1%) grew faster than the economy, about a 400% cumulative increase. The upper middle class (the 9.9%) kept pace with the economy, while the other 90% fell behind. Race? You can be confident the .1% are mostly white, likely the 9.9%, too. But the other 90% of America is every color. Whether your housing is subsidized via a mortgage tax deduction or Section 8, you’re still on the spectrum of depending on the people really in charge to allow you a place to live.
The birth lottery determines which of those three bands we’ll sink or swim together in, because there is precious little mobility. In that bottom band 81% face flat or falling net worth (40% of Americans make below $15/hour) and so aren’t going anywhere. Education, once a vehicle, is mostly a tool now for the reproduction of current status across generations and worth paying bribes for. Uplifted by virtue of a choking mortgage, the indentured servitude of college loans, credit cards, pay day loans, and the hope of lottery tickets, is still poor. Class is sticky.
Money, not so much. Since the 9.9% have the most (at least the most the super wealthy do not yet have) they have the most to lose. At their peak in the mid-1980s the managers and technicians in this group held 35% of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that fell 12%, exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1% rose. A significant redistribution of wealth – upward — took place following the 2008 market collapse as bailouts, shorts, repossessions, and new laws helped the top end of the economy at cost to the bottom. What some label hardships are business opportunities to those above.
See, the people at the top are throwing nails off the back of the truck to make sure no one can catch up with them; there is a strong zero sum element to all this. The goal is to eliminate the competition. They’ll have it all when society is down to two classes, the .1% and the 99.9% and at that point we are all effectively the same color. The CEO of JP Morgan called it a bifurcated economy. Historians will recognize the endstate as feudalism.
You’d think someone would sound a global-climate-change level alarm about all this. Instead we divide people into tribes and make them afraid of each other by forcing competition for limited resources like healthcare. Identity politics sharpen the lines, recognizing increasingly smaller separations, like adding letters to LGBTQQIAAP.Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, herself with presidential ambitions, is an example of the loud voices demanding more division. Contrast that with early model Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention pleading “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
The divisions can always be jacked up. “My opponent is a white nationalist!” and so he doesn’t just think you’re lazy, he wants to kill you. Convince average Americans to vote against their own interests by manipulating them into opposing any program that might benefit black and brown equally or more than for themselves. Keep the groups fighting left and right and they’ll never notice the real discrimination is up and down, even as massive economic forces consume all equally. That consumption is literal as Americans die from alcohol, drugs, and suicide in record numbers.
Meanwhile, no one has caught on identity politics is a marketing tool for votes, fruit flavored vape to bring in the kiddies. Keep that in mind as you listen to the opening shouts of the 2020 election. Listen for what’s missing in the speeches about inequality and injustice. The candidate who admits we created an apartheid of dollars for all deserves your support.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
State to Be First to Build Government-Funded Shanty Towns!
It’s a Hooverville revival, now better with pretty sunsets and nearby beaches!
With its homeless problem veering out of control, Hawaii has come up with the wave of the future crashing onto its beaches: build shanty towns on the outskirts of its better neighborhoods, warehousing the homeless in vast communities no one will ever have to see the inside of. Except homeless people! This urban feature is a third world mainstay, with rings of such “communities” around Nairobi, Manila, and Delhi. Now it will be All-American for the first time.Hawaii is experiencing a 12% growth in the number of unsheltered homeless. Owing to its year-round warm weather, general cool attitude toward overly aggressive enforcement, and plenty of park space, many unhomed people have created tent cities around the islands. Parks on the Windward side, near places like Waianae and Waimanalo are more or less unavailable to homed people just looking for a day in the sun. It can look like this:
Many of these folks will not move into regular shelters. In addition to the crime in those shelters, they do no accommodate families, pets or the large amount of portable refuse many beach dwelling homeless prefer to tote around. In addition, many of the homeless suffer from untreated mental illness and/or serious drug and alcohol problems and don’t “fit in” to the shelter lifestyle.
Hawaii’s answer is to build shanty communities. Sorry, no, not shanties, they will be “tiny houses” without toilets or kitchens. Those “amenities” will be communal, along with tidy gardens for the homeless to tend and meeting places for their book clubs. You can see the illustration, above.
But best of all, according to delusional Hawaii Lieutenant Governor Josh Green, these communities of up to 300 mentally ill homeless drug and alcohol addicts will be self-governing. “The communities would make their own rules,” said Green. “It will be accepting people whether they come with their dogs or if they are in a relationship or single.”
There is no chance these communities could become loci for crime, disease, or sanitation problems. Hawaii has no rabies on the islands, so that’s cool. What could go wrong?
The first community is expected to open in 2020. Next month, leaders from both the city and the state will meet to pick the parcels of land. No doubt the project will be popular enough that nearly ever city in Hawaii will be bidding on the chance to have 300 self-governing homeless people set up shop. Each village is expected to cost between $2 and $5 million which could not possibly be spent better anywhere else.Protip: in the real third world, most shanty towns are located near the city dump for convenient scavenging. Keep that in mind, Hawaii.
The idea of these government-build shanty towns has come up in Seattle, but it looks like Hawaii is going to implement it first. The shanty idea may or may not be better than something tried in the past, literally flying homeless people out of Hawaii and dumping them on the mainland U.S. of A. Or a 2015 plan to build “tiny homes” out of old shipping containers on an island off Oahu and export the homeless there. Maybe the next idea will be a two-fer: require each already hated AirBNB owner to house a homeless person one week a year as a kind of tax.
So pay attention, America. As the distribution of wealth continues to strangle 99.9% of us, the need for the super-wealthy to get us out of the way will only grow. We’re currently only allowed to live sort of near them as a source of cheap labor and perhaps soylent green. But someday soon enough AI will take care of that and we’ll all be mentally ill and sucking the pipe on a beach somewhere. It’s nice to know they have plans for us.Aloha!
BONUS: For those unfamiliar with the term, a Hooverville was a shanty town built during the Great Depression by the homeless in the United States (below.) They were named after then-president Herbert Hoover. There were dang near hundreds of Hoovervilles across the country during the 1930s and hundreds of thousands of people lived in these slums. In Steinbeck’s famous The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family briefly settles into a Hooverville in California. So bringing the idea back in modern times is a neat olde timey thing, like Colonial Williamsburg.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Who Said This? Fun Quiz!
Fun quiz! Who said the following on TV this week? (The answer is below and will surprise you!)
“Nature abhors a vacuum, and if we are not involved in international conflicts, or trying to quell international conflicts, certainly the Russians and the Chinese will fill that vacuum. And we will step away from the world stage in a significant way that might destabilize the world, because the United States, however flawed, is a force for good in the world in my opinion.”
Answer: Stephen Colbert, who supposedly is a comedian with a silly late night show, but instead ends up reading neocon talking points to millenials.
The ever-sharp Caitlan Johnstone has the whole story here; Colbert was in the process of tearing apart Tulsi Gabbard for daring oppose American interventions.
The correct answer is reading what Gabbard said:
“The United States should not be intervening to overthrow these dictators and these regimes that we don’t like, like Assad, like Saddam Hussein, like Gaddafi, and like Kim Jong Un. There are bad people in the world, but history has shown us that every time the United States goes in and topples these dictators we don’t like, trying to end up like the world’s police, we end up increasing the suffering of the people in these countries. We end up increasing the loss of life, but American lives and the lives of people in these countries. We end up undermining our own security, what to speak of the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that’s spent on these wars that we need to be using right here at home.”
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Paul Manafort is the End of Act I. What’s Next?
No one weeps for Paul Manafort. He goes to jail for Donald Trump’s sins. The irony is his sad but uneventful end of a life lived as a parasite of a corrupt political system would not have mattered a jot if special counsel Robert Mueller didn’t think he could bring down the president alongside Manafort. That Trump is still standing means we need to prepare for Act II, what happens post-Mueller.
But first the eulogy for what might have been. Manafort became the subject of an FBI investigation in 2014, centered on sleazy consulting work for Ukraine’s former ruling party. The surveillance was discontinued that same year and the FBI dropped the matter for lack of evidence. Manafort’s less then three month tenure as Trump campaign chairman provided the good-enough-for-government-work hook as the FBI went fishing for ties between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian operatives.In the end Mueller was only able to convict Manafort on eight counts (he failed on ten other counts) involving false income taxes, failing to report foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud, all revolving around Manafort’s lobbying work and almost all prior to his work for Trump. The goal of repurposing the old surveillance data was to pressure Manafort into somehow tying Trump into the ambiguous collusion narrative. But via a combination of little having happened and Manafort’s lying even about that, the Mueller ploy came up dry. Oh there was all sorts of noise — Manafort handed over campaign polling data (not a crime) to someone and some of the people Manafort knew knew some of the people who knew Putin (also not a crime.) It was all as sleazy as you want it to be, just not so useful when you have to go to court and actually prove stuff to someone other than Rachel Maddow. In sentencing Manafort, the judge noted specifically there was nothing “to do with colluding with the Russian government.”
To drive home the non-point, the judge sentenced Manafort to only 47 months, with credit for nine months already served, which means maybe two years and change after time off and parole. This was well below even the minimum recommendations for his crimes, and a far cry from the “rest of his life” the media had been braying for. The Daily Beast took it personally, saying the light sentence “felt like a slap in the face for many watching the Russia probe.” Rick Wilson went on at length over his joy in seeing Manafort’s physical deterioration while in custody, concluding “karma is a magnificent b*tch.” Summing up ‘Merica 2019, a common theme across Twitter is hoping Manafort, now age 69, dies in prison.
Though you would be forgiven for thinking of this as blood sport, Manafort’s crimes were just white collar tax stuff that at worst forms the basis of one of those lurid backpage “how the mighty have fallen” stories. There is still another round of sentencing to go on Wednesday for Manafort with a supposedly vindictive judge (this round was the easy judge, but Google “concurrent sentences” before popping the champagne) and CNN tells us the superheroes of the Southern District of New York will someday prosecute Manafort separately (Google “double jeopardy” and put the bubbly back on the shelf) so he can’t be pardoned by Trump.
Of course any pardon will come either at the very end of Trump’s only term, or inside his second term, and will not matter much more than Scooter Libby did in the grand scheme of politics. Further down the road, no newly elected Democratic president is going to start their administration off seeking revenge on the previous guys; it’ll all be about healing and coming together. Like Obama, who excused torture, never mind tax crimes: time to move forward, not look backward. Trump could also just leave Manafort to rot; he isn’t very important.
UPDATE: Manafort was sentenced for his final convictions March 13, 2019. He received 73 months, with 30 concurrent with his previous sentence. That sentence was 47 months with 9 off for time served. The total by my count is: 81 months, almost seven years. With good behavior, out in about five+ maybe?
So, so much for all that.
Bottom Line: history books ten years from now will read “Paul Manafort’s lavish lifestyle, funded by corruption, came to an end in prison. He had nothing to do with Russiagate. He was just standing too close to Trump when he got caught.” So think of Manafort (and maybe Papadopoulos, Flynn, and Gates) as the weak curtain closer to Act I. Up next is Michael Cohen, the hoped for peppy tune that brings the audience back inside the theatre for Act II.
It is increasingly clear Mueller has no bombshell (hear much good about the Steele dossier lately? Just that Steele was being paid simultaenously by the FBI, the DNC, and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was owed money by Paul Manafort and wanted to out Manafort to the feds), even as his long-overdue freshman term paper is now dragging into junior year. #Russiagate, in reality always more a hashtag than a caper, has devolved into a placeholder, a way to prep the public for the new plan, two years of Benghazi-like hearings looking for a crime.Scratch that — the Benghazi hearings will look orderly and dull in comparison. This is going to be two years of bread and circuses, with Elijah Cummings playing the calm but angry Morgan Freeman role (one kept waiting to hear him say “Now easy, young blood…” to one of his freshman representatives at the Cohen hearing) while AOC and her posse own, scold, hot take, slay, tear down, slam, and crush, for the cameras. Insurance fraud! Real estate devaluation! A Trump golf course she has to drive past everyday! Something about taxes! It’s a lot of capitalism and AOC knows from college that’s bad, right? At least until a week later, when it all comes up empty in the harsh light of sobriety. A signed check with no tie to any crime but a convict’s word is the smoking gun of impeachment? The gold standard on these things is a semen-crusted blue dress.
It’s like watching Wiley E. Coyote try something new each time but never catch the Roadrunner. Beep! Beep!
The everlasting gobsmacker of a problem remains. Ever watch Law & Order? Most episodes begin with a body on the ground. Watergate started with a break-in at Democratic National Headquarters by people quickly revealed to have direct ties to the Republicans. All things Trump began with the disbelief he won the election fairly. Everything — everything — since that has flowed from the search for a crime to reverse November 2016.
The media is chock-a-block with articles which while they take for granted the House will soon begin impeachment proceedings, offer no clear statements on exactly what the grounds for impeachment will be. Corruption is popular though the specifics are vague. Or maybe obstruction, a process crime like Mueller’s well-worn perjury traps created out of the ashes of an investigation of nothing of substance. It really doesn’t matter. Impeachment is the goal, someone will just have to find a reason sooner or later because Trump must be guilty. The problem is this is all an investigation in search of a crime. That sounded better three years ago when it all began. Watching the pivot from Russiagate to generic corruption as the main driver just exposes how empty the process is. What was supposed to be the end, Mueller, is now being characterized as only “the end of the beginning.”
NBC is more straightforward in outlining the “reasons” for impeachment than most: “The lines of investigation run from Trump’s campaign and White House operations all the way to his tax records and business dealings, and some Democrats are convinced they will ultimately be able to use their findings to tell the story of a president who has committed offenses for which he should be removed from office.”
Representative Rashida “Impeach the Mother F*cker” Tlaib is the unofficial spokesperson for the “he’s guilty, now find me the crime” line. Tlaib will introduce a resolution calling on the House Judiciary Committee “to formally move on investigating grounds for impeachment.”
The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Green seems to have figured out the situation, writing “Unlike the Nixon impeachment inquiry, the current impeachment drive did not commence against the backdrop of identifiable events that took place after Nixon was elected, or which resonated beyond the partisan divide. Here, there was no Watergate break-in or Saturday Night Massacre. Instead, impeachment feels like a cumulative punishment for ‘modern presidential,’ Trump’s ceaseless effort to define deviancy, and decency, down.”
A developing nasty truth about many of the accusations accumulating around the new Democratic House like snow drifts is the loop between what the Dems are doing and the media. The goal is to ever-widen the circle of things to be investigated in hopes of finding something. It works like this. An article will appear, based of course on anonymous sources, saying for example Trump tried to block a merger for political gain. Mere days later, citing the article as new evidence, House Judiciary Committee Democrats announce they need to look into the merger. Next up, a Democratic senator demands the Attorney General launch his own investigation. Often an editorial or Op-Ed will then complete the circle praising Congress for trying to get to the bottom of things.The same thing happened after a New York Times article, based in part on those anonymous sources, triggered calls to investigate Jared Kushner’s security clearance.
The use of anonymous sources (and who knows, perhaps those “sources” are connected to the Democrats themselves) to cue the growing number of investigations up is very transparent. Concerns Trump and Fox work together are too narrow a focus on what is really going on, as mainstream outlets shift from mere partisan reporting to serving as political operatives. Donna Brazile leaking a few questions in advance to Hillary Clinton will seem quaint in retrospect.
That seems to be the game plan for the next two years. What remains are two big questions: will it work, and will it end.Assuming something is found worth opening impeachment hearings over, the Republican majority in the Senate is still unlikely to convict. Trump will thus run for reelection in 2020. Will public opinion, empathy, following impeachment proceedings help him as it ultimately did Bill Clinton? How many voters will see through this politicization of the Constitutional process and turn away from the Dems? How many Democrats who want real things to happen on healthcare and immigration will see this all as just a waste of time?
Then the last question: will this all end in 2020? Because if the endless investigation tactic seems to work this time around, you can bet when the next Democrat takes the White House, they will wake up the day after their inauguration to find a special prosecutor and Congressional hearings waiting. Ten years of taxes? How about we start with twenty and see where that goes? Now, Madam President, about this handwritten note in your junior high school yearbook…
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
New York Reverting to 19th Century Housing Standards, for the Poors!
Certain basement apartments in East New York (for you out-of-towners, that’s code for “da’ po’ parts o’ town”) will be able to become legal under a city pilot program intended to provide affordable form of housing.A new law to authorize the pilot Basement Apartment Conversion Pilot Program (BACPP) was signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday. The legislation creates a three-year initiative overseen by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development during which low- to middle-income homeowners in East New York and Cypress Hills can apply for low or no-interest loans to convert their basements and cellars into legal dwellings.
Budding Fred Trumps, take note: homeowners outside of those crappy neighborhoods may also seek legalization on their own, albeit without city funding. The areas where the city plans to pay for the experiment with human beings living in basements previously considered uninhabitable are largely black and hispanic. East New York’s rate of violent crimes per capita is greater than the city as a whole, as is the incarceration rate. So the place has that going for it to attract tourism if this basement things doesn’t work out.
The new law amends things like minimum ceiling heights, the requirement to have windows in all bedrooms, and some fire safety rules such as multiple ways to get out of the building. It is a real pain in the neck to have only one front window to escape through when the fire is in that room, you know.
Converting basements into sweatshop look-a-likes is not cheap. The city will allocate $12 million to cover program staffing costs, implement, and manage the program, along with loan amounts for the construction of 40 homes. The maximum loan per homeowner is $120,000. So, math: about $7 million in administrative costs to fund less than $5 million in loans. And the loans will be low or no-interest, or “possibly forgivable” to help create new slum lords. Seems socialism-y enough for me!
According to the city, it is all supposed to look like this, with bright colored graphics substituting for actual daylight:
But the best part of all this is that the laws NYC is seeking to change to allow for these basement apartments were enacted in large part around the turn of the century to prevent the abuses of tenement housing shown, for example, in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives — lack of light and air, no windows in bedrooms, etc.
One of the reforms of the last time we barked about having a Progressive Era, the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, was also one of the first laws to ban the construction of the dark, poorly ventilated apartments occupied then primarily by immigrants we did not care about. The law required new buildings to have among other things exterior windows in every room and ceilings of a minimal height. Indoor toilets were also mandated, and for now at least New York does not seem to be pulling back that part of the law. Do standby for the measles epidemic, last seen in these parts in the early 20th century, as anti-vaxx cosplayers seek to keep up with these new city standards.
To claim to create affordable housing, New York is literally reverting to some of the 19th century standards it was shamed into fixing once upon a time. Those charting the course of capitalism, make a note of it!
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Is Michael Cohen Impeachment’s Smoking Gun?
While 8000 miles away in Vietnam the president of the United States practices nuclear diplomacy, Americans at home watched former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen stand up on his hind legs to beg for a reduced jail sentence.Cohen, testifying on February 27 before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform (he testified behind closed doors on Tuesday to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he will go back behind closed doors Thursday with the House Intelligence Committee), told Americans who think they already know what they think exactly what they wanted to hear: Trump is a vulgar conman, a racist, and a cheat. None of that is impeachable or criminal. Also, water is wet.
The media is burying the lede: Michael Cohen did not provide any evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, nor did he provide any evidence of collusion, active coordination or conspiracy with Wikileaks. Cohen’s accusation of a Trump crime while in office is at best an evidence-free rendering of an unclear violation of a campaign finance law usually settled with a fine. Any action going forward using Cohen’s testimony requires one to simply believe the words of Michael Cohen. That’s a big ask.
Building a criminal case, or impeachment, around the uncorroborated testimony of a disbarred, convicted felon violating attorney-client privilege to beg for a shorter sentence seems weak. Absent corroborating evidence it is hard to see Cohen’s testimony leading to impeachment or criminal charges. It all sounds very dramatic and will be played as such by the media, but in the end is another faux smoking gun. There’s just not much meat on these bones.
On Russian collusion, Cohen stated “Questions have been raised about whether I know of direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. I do not. I want to be clear. But, I have my suspicions.” Cohen went on to claim he saw Don, Jr. tell his father some meeting had been set. “I concluded that Don, Jr. was referring to that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting about dirt on Hillary with the Russian representative when he walked behind his dad’s desk that day.” Cohen presented no evidence the meeting Don, Jr. referred to was with the Russians, or maybe was with the guy redoing Trump’s kitchen. A defense lawyer would be laughing as she labeled Cohen’s “conclusion” speculation and uncorroborated supposition.
The best the Democratic questioners drag out of Cohen over the course of over seven hours was “Mr. Trump’s desire to win would have him work with anyone,” when asked directly if Trump worked with Russia. Cohen did later deny the existence of the pee tape and anything else that could be used as blackmail. Not much to work with. Russiagate comes down to some Trump people noodling around in Moscow about a hotel that was never built, talking about meetings with Putin that never took place? Your big takeaway is Trump was asking about that inside his own organization until June instead of giving up following the progress earlier? That’s what you want to take to the American people as a case for impeachment, with Michael Cohen in an orange jumpsuit on a prison pass as your key witness?
On business in Russia, Cohen claims Trump was “lying to the American people” during his campaign about negotiations to build a hotel in Moscow. Leaving aside there is nothing illegal about negotiating to build a hotel, and that neither Cohen nor anyone else has shown any evidence of all the Putin connections the media keeps insisting must exist. A review of Trump’s statements show what Cohen claims are “lies to the American people” about whether or not Trump had “business” in Russia would be seen by a defense lawyer as careful parsing of words; Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley concludes after his own parsing at worst Trump mislead by omission and even that requires one to dig into tweets where Trump used the present tense and not the past tense to describe things.
On Stormy Daniels, Cohen showed a check for $35,000 from Trump to him, which was supposedly part of the total $130k paid to her to keep quiet about Trump and Stormy’s affair. The check does not show what the payment was for. The check does not have Stormy’s name on it. Cohen said it was part of the reimbursement for “illegal hush money I paid on his behalf.” A defense lawyer would chuckle at the idea that was “evidence.” It is a receipt for a crime only because Cohen now says it is. Under direct questioning, Cohen claimed there was no corroborating evidence beyond the 11 checks. He said he sent invoices to Trump for “legal retainer fees,” so don’t bother with the invoices as evidence because Cohen now says he lied on them claiming it was a retainer fee. Those 11 checks will total over $400k, because supposedly Trump rolled Cohen’s fee and bonus into the amount, so we just have to take his word for it that some of that money was for Stormy. Cohen said some of the checks were signed by Don, Jr. and the Trump Organization’s CFO. Apparently the checks are going to be used to implicate personally a person who did not sign the checks.
Paying money as part of a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) is not illegal. If Trump had been just a businessperson who had an affair, there would be nothing to discuss. People legally pay other people to be quiet all the time. Legal services such as Cohen otherwise provided are a standing campaign cost (lawyers regularly obtaining discreet resolutions of issues that threaten the interests of their clients.) The alleged illegality comes from the supposition by Cohen that he can speak to Trump’s intent, that the NDA was not, say, to spare Trump’s marriage from new embarrassment, but in the text of the law “for the principal purpose of influencing an election” amid everyone already knowing Trump was a serial philanderer. Campaign finance laws require proof a person was willfully violating the law. Cohen’s testimony does not prove Trump knew the payments he was making were illegal. Prosecutors would have to prove that willingness somehow if they wanted to charge the president.
Even then, that would make Trump at worst a conspirator to a contested interpretation of the Federal Election Campaign Act. At worst it is a de minimis legal violation the serious business of impeachment isn’t concerned with. It is hard to imagine impeachment hearings bogging down looking into intricacies of federal election law that otherwise confound second year law students.
On Trump ordering Cohen to lie to Congress, Cohen said “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates. In conversations… he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie.” Cohen later referred to some sort of Trump “code” that was used to order him to lie.
On Wikileaks, Cohen stated “In July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump’s office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” Someone will need NSA intercepts to prove this true because Stone and Wikileaks deny it, and Cohen says there were no others present to corroborate.
The question left aside is so what. In the larger picture, it represents limited passive knowledge on Trump’s part the emails will leak, as Cohen said Stone had no details on the upcoming content. It does not say the Russians did anything, it does not say Trump worked with Wikileaks. Stone, of course, is habitually full of crap. He had previously lied about having dinner with Assange. Even if the call was made, it remains a real likelihood Stone was overselling his access to Wikileaks. Julian Assange is a hard guy to get on the phone and would have no incentive to tip off a partisan hack like Stone and risk soiling his claims to non-partisanship. Even the New York Times has questioned how trustworthy Stone is.
Cohen said the phone call took place July 18 or 19. Trump could have read on Twitter July 7 that Wikileaks had pending releases. Earlier, the Guardian on June 12, 2016, where Assange announced he’d be releasing more Clinton emails. The newspaper stated the emails will “provide further ammunition for Donald Trump, her Republican presidential rival, who has used the issue to attack her.” The Stone call, if it took place, was based on public knowledge. Pretty much anyone with a pulse in Washington anticipated more Wikileaks releases that summer of 2016. Cohen’s bombshell had been available online for almost three years.
The emerging media bleat Trump lied in writing to Mueller about contact with Stone and thus, if Cohen is believed, committed perjury, is based solely on unconfirmed anonymous “sources.” No one outside the White House and Mueller’s office knows what Trump wrote in answer to the special prosecutor’s written interrogatories.
So this is it? A saga that began in the summer of 2016, one that commanded a Special Prosecutor to investigate if the Russian government worked with the current president of the United States to help him get elected, that claimed that president was a Russian intelligence asset under the control of Putin, is going to hinge on the minutiae of campaign finance law? That is going to be lawyered into something leading to impeachment?
As for the hearing itself, Democrats spent the day putting inflammatory words into Cohen’s mouth that he gratefully voiced to make good quotes. They focused on questions of Trump’s finances which will no doubt provide the hook for exposing Trump’s taxes. Republicans spent the time calling Cohen dishonest. Neither side distinguished themselves but gratefully no one on the dais made any specific Godfather movie references. The new POC Democrats in the House called most everyone else racists and made little virtuous speechlets.
Cohen, for his part, referred to himself more than once as the son of a Holocaust survivor and sought victimhood throughout the hearing because he will miss his family while in jail. Cohen hurt his own credibility on multiple occasions claiming not to understand simple questions just as time ran out, allowing him to dodge responding. Chairman Cummings abetted this via his on-and-off again aggressive enforcement of time limits. Cohen refused to say he’d dedicate the millions he will most certainly make off book deals and commentary roles to charity, further reducing his credibility. He dangled he had hundreds of tapes of something, but produced none. Heaven help us when #BelieveCohen starts trending.
It was going to be Comey’s testimony that took Trump down, then Papadopoulos was going to flip, or maybe Manafort or Flynn. There were tapes of something, a Russian spy with red hair who would roll over. Books by Comey and Clapper blowing the roof off things, the walls closing in again and again and again. And soon it will be Mueller time! Or may Southern District of New York time, because the media seems to be prepping us Mueller may not have much to say.
It is all exhausting. We’ll soon enough see if voters feel like a dog with a mean owner always holding out a Scooby treat he’ll never let go of. Sooner or later that dog might say, I’m either gonna bite that SOB, or just get bored and stop giving him the satisfaction of salivating around him.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Poor Folks
A guy on Facebook I don’t know wrote a version of what has become a kind of set-piece article in today’s America. Here’s a portion:Losing The War of Attrition or How To Turn Any Normal Person Into A Broken, Angry Radical
You are one of the millions who are employed at minimum wage. Or you are one of the millions who are euphemistically called underemployed, or you are one of the millions with no job and no prospects. You are retired- how did that happen?- or disabled- why did that happen?- and trying to survive on Social Security.
You reach a point when you realize that getting ahead is no longer possible. After that you reach a point when you realize that holding on to what you have is no longer possible. Then you reach a point when you realize that replacing what has been lost or depleted is no longer possible.
I wrote a book about this five years ago called The Ghosts of Tom Joad. No one read it. Publishers in the process of turning me down mocked me for writing about “poor people” and seemed surprised there were poor people in America who weren’t black and living in ghettos. Well, hell, then Trump happened. Because people watching a way of life — a middle class existence where the rich have more but we had some — fall away are easy targets for demagogues. Always have been. Because before we dismissed things as whataboutism we used to study them as lessons from history. Other people’s’ mistakes. History shows very clearly this economic game we’re playing ends with everyone but a small handful at the top losing badly.
I concluded five years ago the game was already decided. Our society was already then like those photos of railroad tracks, where in the distance it seems like the two rails come together in a single point. That point is essentially feudalism, where a tiny minority owns almost everything and everyone else lives off whatever scraps they let us have. Like in the Middle Ages, where everyone farmed for the king as serfs. It’s worse than slavery, because slaves at least know they’re slaves and have the possibility, however small, of freedom. Maybe for their kids if not for themselves.
We are not at the singularity, but we are inexorably headed toward it. Five additional years of data has only made that clearer; five years ago we spoke of the 1%. That number no longer matters. The new figure is .1%, an even smaller group who owns even more.And no, none of this is new Because Trump. Since 1980, the incomes of the very rich (the .1%) have grown faster than the economy, for about a 400% cumulative increase in wealth. The upper middle class (the 9.9%) has kept pace with the economy, while the other 90% of us, the middle class and the poor have fallen behind.
By the way, it is these numbers which sent Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign to both use $250,000 as the upper limit of the middle class. They sounded misguided, but it was sort of true. They just were still lumping what we’re calling here the “Upper Middle Class” and the “Middle Class” together. Just words. At present in the U.S. we have three-and-a-half classes: The .1%%, the 9.9%, everyone else hanging on, plus some people way at the bottom with basically nothing.
But bad news for the 9.9% Since the they the most (the most the .1% does not yet have) they have the most to lose. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35% of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12%, exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1% rose. And do understand the people at the top are constructing walls and throwing nails off the back of the truck to make sure no one can catch up with them. The goal of .1% is to eliminate the competition, the 9.9% below them. They’ll only effectively have it all when the ratio is down to two classes, the .1% and the 99.9%
We are kept in place via shiny objects (500 channels, more movies and Apple watches and drugs!) and curated divisions. The ever-increasingly sharp lines between say blacks and whites are a perfect tool. Keep the groups fighting left and right and they’ll never notice the real discrimination is up and down. Some groups just found down earlier and harder, but as long as a poor white man in south Kentucky thinks he has nothing in common with a poor black man in the South Bronx they will never work together, never even see the massive economic forces consuming both equally. Forces are even now hard at work to tell us the Republican party is for whites, POC head Democrat, and any third party is a Russian shill in place to hurt the candidate you favor.
Whether your housing is subsidized via a mortgage and that tax deduction or Section 8, you’re still on the spectrum of depending on the people really in charge to allow you a place to live. I do not see a way out of this, only maybe steps that can slow it down or cause it to speed up.
Very short version summary: People like you and I fell through the cracks; we weren’t supposed to end up here but the .1% hadn’t worked out the details so they got as much as they do now and we basically ended up with bigger crumbs than we should have, especially me lucking into a “career” with no real skills.Our own kids may do OK with what we leave for them, but only if your son is a medical doctor will he have a decent shot at our lifestyle and only because of the “cartelization” of the profession by the AMA. The rest of our kids are unlikely to have any shot at what we ended up with.
Sorry, I’m not a more cheerful guy but these conclusions are based on a fair amount of honest study.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The FBI’s Coup Attempt Failed
The sad state of things is former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is barking around late night comedy shows, in spots usually reserved for B-list actors to pimp their latest movies, pimping the idea the president is a live Russian intelligence asset.We also hear from McCabe the FBI sought to overturn the 2016 election after it failed to get its preferred candidate elected.
If any of this surprises you — essentially an attempted coup by the FBI that failed when the Cabinet would not support it by a faux invocation of the 25th Amendment — you haven’t been reading my stuff. Here’s a piece from over a year ago explaining.
BONUS:
And for fun, here’s a year old summary of the Mueller Russiagate case that could run today with some minor updates. Little of substance has changed, and yes, we’re still waiting.If you’re interested in what’s next, it will be the Steele Dossier falling apart. Here’s why.
The full force of the U.S. intelligence community has been looking for evidence of Russian government (not just “some Russians”) interference in the election for close to two and a half years (five Trump campaign officials were under investigation as of September 2016, including Flynn.) It is reasonable to conclude they do not have definitive intelligence, no tape of a Team Trump official cutting a deal with a Russian spy. The same goes for the Steele dossier and its salacious accusations. If a tape existed or if there was proof the dossier was true, we’d watching impeachment hearings.
What’s left is the battle cry of Trump’s opponents since Election Day: “Just you wait.” They exhibit a scary, gleeful certainty that Trump worked with the Russians, because how else could he have won?
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
But Why Do You Hate Me?
To all the people who said hateful things to me, accusing me of being a racist and supporting white supremacy simply because I raised early questions about the Jussie Smollett case, apologies are welcome below. If it makes you feel better, you can still say “well, we still don’t know everything.”
Same for those who said similar terrible things to me when I questioned the Covington Narrative, and asked why #BelieveAllWomen seemed to apply to Kavanaugh’s accuser but much less so to the case in Virginia of the Lt. Governor.
Russiagate/Collusion, of which I also remain very skeptical, is still dragging on, but a little introspection wouldn’t hurt over that either. And yes, I know, just wait. For those interested, I wrote two years ago about the Deep State coup people are now finally discussing openly in reference to McCabe’s remarks. It does occasionally amuse me that people ten years ago now said similar nasty things about my thoughts on Iraq being a failure.
We must all retrain ourselves to being more skeptical and questioning of the media, pundits, and celebrities who force an agenda on us disguised as “journalism.” I actually once wrote a primer on how to evaluate “sources” that may be of value.
And to the editor who accused me of “giving in to redneck conspiracy theories” over Smollett and disinviting my future submissions, be advised while you can’t see which single finger I am typing this with, you can take a good guess.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
After Jeff Bezos, Everyone in America is Now a Victim
“I didn’t think we’d see this for a few more years, but this Bezos thing put us over the top,” said Department of Homeland Security Director of Victims Ronald Devine, accompanied by his support dog and her personal support kitten.
“It’s 100% as of today. Every American is now classified — officially — as a victim.”
Devine explained the final holdout were super-wealthy, white, straight, older men, led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos was once seen by most observers as victim-proof, given his fierce Caucasianess. Yet revelations this week he was not actually a philandering old dude caught sending pathetic nude pics to his younger trophy mistress while still married to the woman who worked beside him for decades while they built Amazon together, shocked a nation.
“Bezos is a victim,” stated every blue-check, which includes all previously designated victim-Millennials. “His phone, we heard from Seth, was hacked by the Russians on orders from Trump because Bezos’ Washington Prime Post writes journalism about Trump, so Trump ordered the Russians to trick Bezos to take photos of mini-Jeff.”
“And that did it,” said DHS Director of Victims Devine. “We had previously categorized only about 50% of the entire population as victims until we looped in all women except Melania, who social media feels sort of deserves it. Then it was the creation of ‘People of Color’ being victims, a super victim smoothie that ties together the whole Pantone scale from a Chinese billionaire to a Dominican guy delivering food.
“Of course black folks were brought in after Black Panther told their origin story, same as Star Wars once did for white people. All immigrants and their grandchildren who write college entrance essays were entitled to victim status for years. Same for Native Americans, though the category now includes all older men who wear overly large turquoise jewelry and bolos.
“We’d already counted all veterans and their grandchildren who write college entrance essays as victims. It once was just those Vietnam guys rocking handlebar mustaches down at the VFW who all needed to blame their drinking problem, their cheating problem, and their buying cars at 21% interest problem on something, but now anyone who did two years as a supply clerk at Fort Hood is in. You don’t need to even show any paperwork anymore; just get a Support the Troops sticker on your car, or, south of the Fairfax County line in Virginia, fly that POW flag in your front yard.
“Most of the rest of Americans — I think it got us into the 90% percentile — made it to be victims when we started adding letters to being gay. In the old days we just had the guys from the drama club at Brett Kavanaugh’s old high school. The category jumped when LGBT became so many letters. LGBTQIA added queer, intersex, and asexual. We also have U for unsure, C for curious, another T for transvestite, TS or 2 for two-spirit persons, P for polyamorous, and O for other. The initialism LGBTTQQIAAP (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual) covered most of California and parts of Austin.
“Another step forward toward 100% victimization was a decision to merge ‘survivors’ and ‘community’ with ‘victims.’ There’s a ton of crossover you know. People who had a suspicious mole removed from their back now qualify as cancer survivors, and everyone that knows them forms a cancer survivor community supporting their struggle, see. And then once you could purchase that kind of thing by typing your credit card number into a GoFundMe, it was like the Big Bang of shared victimhood.
“So really all that was left were super-wealthy, white, straight, older men. We at this office had been keeping an eye on them for some time, and thought they’d made the jump into victim status when Trump claimed avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was ‘his Vietnam.’ But for some reason that didn’t catch. Funny, given how nearly every super-wealthy, white, straight male of his generation would have been under that umbrella alongside those college deferments. Same as that Esquire article about American boys everyone flipped out on. Nonetheless, it is, once again I may add, Jeff Bezos who leads us into the future. Him being the victim, his very privacy lost, brings every single person in America into victim status. We did it, people. There still is that American Dream. This rejects the Trumpian view of the world.
“So effective immediately, some changes. We’ve ordered millions of ‘Do Not Pet’ reflective vests for Americans to wear themselves to avoid unwanted touching at work. Otherwise, no more clothing with words on it. Every pet and most house plants are now officially designated as support animals. No more need to buy those fake ID cards for Rover off Amazon.
“Things are gonna get crazy at the airport, because after the crew boards everyone with a branded credit card and local municipal employees in uniform, 100% of the remaining passengers are going to qualify for preboarding and extra time. We may need to create new, expansive forms of social media. I know one already being tested is called SJWMobster. I can imagine mandatory VLOGs. It’s difficult to see Joe Pesci’s career advancing, but there will be huge opportunities in sensitivity training. And we gotta add about 8000 words to the First Amendment to define hate speech so we can ban it. We can expect ‘raising awareness’ to become the number one major at America’s colleges, and setting up a GoFundMe our fastest growing job title.
“What’s ahead? I think the new frontier in America is going to be celebrities, who have already been victims for a long time owing to the pressures they face earning millions of dollars and having to do drugs, using some of the new victim coaches out there to grow themselves into more varied categories of victimhood. There will be a lot of competition to book those who can tick the boxes in three or more categories.
“We’ll be busy sorting out who we should be boycotting, given the competing victim statuses creating new categories of multiverse victims for nearly every piece of music, literature or film ever made. Here at the Department of Homeland Security we have already created a new sub-ministry of truth that is even now working through everything ever published to unoffend it double-quick. We may just close all the libraries and let Amazon decide what’s safe to read now that all victims finally have a voice.
“With 100% of Americans enjoying victim totalitarianism, somebody is being hurt, retraumatized, triggered or disrespected right now as I speak, maybe just because I am speaking. How will we as a nation deal with that? I mean, it’s not like we can just laugh at all this, right?”
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Blackface: Confronting One’s Integrity in the Past
We live in an age when one’s past is dragged up by those with ill intent to confront one’s integrity in the present.
If you worked in Asia in the 1980s or earlier, you likely remember a popular toothpaste called, sadly, Darkie. It featured a caricature of a black-faced minstrel performer on the label, with shining white, white teeth.I have an old Polaroid photo of a very young American diplomat from that era, now a senior official, dressed as that logo, complete with blackface and a top hat, from a long-ago Halloween party. Others present were dressed as local characters, logos, kind of a theme. One person was done up as the Frito Bandito, a caricatured portrayal of Mexicans. The black-faced diplomat was not a racist then and is not now, actually has done some important things for the State Department at some personal risk in terms of getting it to treat its people better. Most today would describe him as “woke.”
Yet I am sure the NYT, or if not them, TMZ, would rush to publish the photo and the diplomat would be pressed to resign. His career would be impacted, his decent work stopped, and none of that would have a whit of any effect on racism in America. Unspoken is the idea that the same guy who wore blackface then is the same guy who is doing good things today. You just know something more about one evening long ago that now seems to matter so much when it doesn’t matter at all.
I have no intention of revealing the photo from three decades ago. But we live in miserable times for this kind of thing when judging someone based on 30 years of their life seems to make less sense than picking something from 30 years ago and ignoring everything else since.
Our society’s current solution is to selectively allow offenders to apologize, often accompanied by a sizable donation to some appropriate charity. Kevin Hart was offered the chance with hosting the Oscars as his prize, Louis C.K., not so much. Al Franken’s time came too soon; today he’d likely be let off by the mob with a heartfelt mea culpa; one can see the tears behind those smug glasses.But overall the idea of apologizing as a work-around is a bit of a strawman, a cheap trick to somehow drag the discrete events of the past into the present day — well, he did XYZ in 1984, but he continued not to apologize for the last 35 years! And it offers the mob another chance to judge; see, it’s about something happening today (the apology) and not an event from when TV was in black and white! Yet in one case it was presented as enough to derail a Supreme Court nomination and in another it is dismissed as a political smear.
Anybody can say they’re sorry, especially under the gun of the social media-regular media mob that passes judgement on these things. What might make more sense is to look for are amends, what someone has done with their life since some bad thing. Are you a better person? Are you still espousing racism? What have you done with the years? Oh, but that’s complicated. Easier to snarl at a old photo and tweet.
Inside the world of security clearances, where practicality often still overrules mob shoutdowns, standards have evolved. When I joined the State Department during the Reagan era, you could not get a clearance if you admitted to smoking a joint, and you certainly could not be cleared if you admitted to being gay. Same for holding significant debt, which supposedly made you vulnerable to Russian spy payoffs. Heavy drinking? Well, that was almost part of the job description and was generally overlooked. It got to the ridiculous point where only good liars, people from strict religious backgrounds, and folks who could hold their liquor could pass.If today was debt was a show stopper the vast majority of young applicants, with their massive student loans, would be denied clearances. Limited illegal drug use in the past is not a problem in most cases, and we all know of the 180 degree change on LGBT status. There are still showstoppers in the clearance process (having relatives in “bad” countries is a huge issue as more and more first generation Americans, some with critical language skills, seek clearances,) but the emphasis is now on holism, a long view of a person’s life that looks for trends and patterns instead of hyper-focusing on singularities.
Few claim Northam in blackface is a good thing. The real question is at what point do we judge, a single point in the past or the sum of a man’s life. I don’t know much about his work in the last 35 years, but that seems a more reliable indicator of how he’ll serve as governor (the actual issue) than a photo from whenever. Northam resigning does not erase racism of the past, and it does nothing practical about racism today. He just joins the crowd of those sacrificed at the altar of identity politics, a feel-good to the many who only seem to have realized these issues exist since Trump was elected.
See, it is not like this issue of how the past affects the present is new; we’ve just resolved it more practicaly in other iterations. How many states are seeking to allow felons to vote again? Parole, expungement, time served — people who have committed actual crimes, even murder, get to a point where they can move on.Our tolerance for illegal drugs has followed a similar path. Decades ago, Bill Clinton was confronted with accusations he smoked marijuana. To save himself, he came up with the line that while he may have once held a joint to his lips, he never actually inhaled (Clinton would employ similar word play later in his career over whether a blow job constitued sex.) Fast-forward to candidate Barack Obama, who early on casually admitted to smoking weed, and even experimenting with other drugs. The public response? Meh. People grow, people change, that was then.
The alternative is to allow the mob greater control. With Facebook turning 15 years old today, politicians on the rise will find more and more of their pre-celebrity lives documented. Will we band together online to hunt down every person who ever did anything wrong and drive them out of home and job in some Great Cleansing? What happens when definitions of “wrong” morph? Is such a mob vetting likely to bring better people into government, or send them running?
Unspoken is the idea the same guy who wore blackface then is the same guy who was elected by the people of Virginia now and, until about a week ago, apparently well-thought of by them. We all just know something more about his past that powerful forces are seeking to drag forward into the present and claim represents a different man. We live in the age when one’s past is dragged up to confront one’s integrity in the present.
We don’t want to talk about Brett Kavanaugh, but there are elements that awkwardly pair with the Northarm story. What really happened decades ago? Are we learning about those events now accurately and unemotionally, or are they being spoon-fed through a ready tablodized media for partisan political ends?How were the Kavanaugh accusations, uncorroborated and in some instances refuted by other witnesses, more in line with #BelieveWomen than those now directed by a woman at the Virginia Lieutenant Governor but labeled as a political smear by his supporters? Yet in one case it was presented as enough to derail a Supreme Court nomination and in another it is dismissed as a political smear, spiked by a partisan Washington Post who basically said to the victim “Honey, time to take one for the team, we’re not running this an causing a Democrat to lose this election. Now, did Judge Kavanaugh ever lay a hand on you?”
And not a single 2020 Democrat has commented on Fairfax, though pretty much all have condemned Northam. Meanwhile, in the hearings to replace Kavanaugh in his old job, Democrats hyperfocus not on the nominee’s years on the bench, but on her now-politically incorrect articles written by the nominee in the 1990s, containing what they label as anti-feminist advice such as “a man who rapes a drunk girl should be prosecuted. At the same time, a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.” We’ll leave judging the actual usefulness of such advice to those with daughters reading this.
Now imagine the potential for what we awkwardly call blackmail should an unscrupulous lobbyist confront a politician with some old photos, asking for a political favor. Need we demand candidates hand over their yearbooks along with their old tax forms as a bulwark against social media mob justice?
This is about the future, not Ralph Northam. How did the very serious business of #MeToo end up a political tool? How did we get to a place where old yearbook photos may overturn an election? Why are we accepting this as the way we’re conducting our democracy?
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Seriously WaPo?
Seriously WaPo, you spent millions on a Super Bowl ad using Tom Hanks to tell us, “Um, guys, really, journalism is good.”
And your best strategy for that is paint yourselves as victims, brave patriots who put their lives in danger to report the news?
Oh! My dudes, seriously, a tiny, tiny number of journalists are ever hurt or killed due to their jobs, though a huge number daily seek “Victim Status” on social media bragging about their death threats. The fact they think their job is some heroic or dangerous profession shows how deluded the media has become and I guess, full circle, why WaPo needs to spend millions to convince the public to take what passes as journalism there seriously.I much preferred the Super Bowl commercial that seemed to suggest someday little girls will play pro football, or the tribute showing Dr. King’s relatives endorsed the coin toss.
And by the way, WaPo, that “democracy dies in the dark” catch-phrase is way, way over dramatic, especially coming from a paper that bases most of its political coverage on anonymous sources and documents leaked to harm someone’s political enemies using you as the tool.
Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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