Hullabaloo

Thursday, March 02, 2017

 

Did Jeff Sessions tell a little, white lie?

by Tom Sullivan

That is the question raised by a Washington Post report this morning:

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.

MSNBC reports the second contact occurred at a July Heritage Foundation event where Sessions "spoke informally with a small group of ambassadors, including Kislyak." The Post's report adds that the Heritage event was "on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention."

It's not as if Sessions wasn't asked.



The Post continues:

In January, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Sessions for answers to written questions. “Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote.

Sessions responded with one word: “No.”

Buzzfeed has a statement from a Sessions spokesperson:

A spokeswoman for Sessions told BuzzFeed News that he met with the Russian ambassador in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee — not as a representative of the Trump campaign. Sessions did not mislead members of Congress, she said.

“There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer,” spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said. “Last year, the Senator had over 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, including the British, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Indian, Chinese, Canadian, Australian, German and Russian ambassadors. He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign—not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee.”

The Trump White House muddied the water instead of calming them:

Trump admin official on Sessions/Russian envoy: "superficial comments about election-related news, not substance of their discussion"

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) March 2, 2017

Sessions this morning gave a non-committal promise to recuse himself "whenever it's appropriate," NBC reports. But another member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, also a member of the Armed Services Committee, responds:

"I've been on the Armed Services Com for 10 years. No call or meeting w/Russian ambassador. Ever," she tweeted Thursday.

Which raises another question: Who arranged the meeting between Sessions and Kislyak, and what was discussed?

The Post story comes alongside a New York Times report that Obama White House officials were concerned that the Russia's involvement in the election might be swept under the rug by the incoming Trump administration. They took measures to preserve information regarding contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign across agencies "to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators." None of the efforts were directed by Obama, according to former senior Obmama officials:

At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.

There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress. In one instance, the State Department sent a cache of documents marked “secret” to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland days before the Jan. 20 inauguration. The documents, detailing Russian efforts to intervene in elections worldwide, were sent in response to a request from Mr. Cardin, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and were shared with Republicans on the panel.

Any new investigations would now go through Sessions as the sitting U.S. attorney general. But in the wake of the Post report, that is now in question. If any criminal activity turns up, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told a gathering last night, a special prosecutor is needed and Sessions must step aside:

“If there is something there, and it goes up the chain of investigation, it is clear to me, that Jeff Sessions, who is my dear friend, cannot make this decision about Trump,” Graham said at a CNN town hall Wednesday night.

"If there were contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, they may be legitimate; they may be OK. I want to know what happened between the Trump campaign, the Clinton campaign and the Russians," he said.

A reminder from John Aravosis:

Jeff Sessions in 1999 on the importance of prosecuting Bill Clinton for lying under oath. https://t.co/Rh374GShfK

— John Aravosis (@aravosis) March 2, 2017

Undercover Blue 3/02/2017 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

 

Hey press corps, I've got a great deal on some Trump steaks. You in? 

by digby

Honestly, why on earth would anyone take what the Trump White House says at face value?

CNN reported Wednesday on a senior administration official admitting that the White House intentionally misled reporters ahead of President Donald Trump‘s congressional address in order to get generate positive press coverage as part of a “misdirection play.” 

Multiple reports Tuesday indicated that Trump would embrace a more moderate tone on immigration and would announce that he was willing to negotiate granting millions of illegal immigrants legal status. Most of those reports, cited to a “senior administration official,” came immediately after anchors lunched with Trump. Some of those outlets then just attributed the claim to the president himself. 

But when it was time for Trump to actually give the speech, he said nothing of the sort. CNN’s Sara Murray complained the next day about “the bait and switch that the president pulled when it came to immigration yesterday. He had this meeting with the anchors, he talked about a path to legal status.” 

“Basically they fed [them] things that they thought these anchors would like, that they thought would give them positive press coverage for the next few hours. A senior administration official admitted that it was a misdirection play,” she reported. 

Host John King wondered why reporters should even trust the White House going forward. “It does make you wonder; so we’re not supposed to believe what the senior-most official at the lunch says — who then they allowed it to be the president’s name says — we’re not supposed to believe what they say?” he asked. “Maybe we shouldn’t believe what they say.”

Ya think?

The anchors and pundits yesterday afternoon were so thrilled at having been given that little nugget when they had their very special visitation with the King that they couldn't stop talking about it. It was obvious bullshit, considering that Trump's top adviser on immigration, Jeff Sessions, is the man who almost single-handedly trainwrecked Comprehensive immigration reform and went out of his way to thank Steve Bannon and Steven Miller at Breitbart for helping him do it.

But they so wanted to believe that Trump was "pivoting" that they bought the lie and then let their good feelings about Trump turn them into fawning sycophants over the speech.

Heckuva job guys.

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digby 3/01/2017 05:00:00 PM

 
Trail of Fears

By Dennis Hartley



Last night, the Great White Father in Washington decreed before a joint session of Congress that there is a new sheriff in town:

(from The Independent UK)

Donald Trump will form a new agency to publish a regular list of all crimes committed by immigrants. 

During a speech markedly softer in tone than his inauguration address, in which he dialed back his trademark brash rhetoric, he revealed that he would set up a special agency for “immigrant crime”. 

The agency is expected to publish a weekly list of all crimes committed by what it terms “aliens”. 

That does not seem to refer only to undocumented migrants – suggesting that anyone who has moved to the US could find their name on the public list. 

Audible groans greeted the President’s announcement, during a speech that was mostly met with applause from lawmakers. 

“I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims,” he said in the speech. 

“The office is called VOICE — Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.” 

He went on to list a number of people who he claimed had been killed by immigrants that he would have banned from the country.

“A weekly list of all crimes” Hmm. Sounds awfully familiar:




The headline above roughly translates to: “Jewish Murder Plan Against Gentile Humanity Exposed”. Der Sturmer was the weekly Nazi tabloid founded in 1923. It was the brainchild of Julius Streicher, who was tried, convicted and executed for crimes against humanity in Nuremberg after the war. The paper regularly issued tallies on alleged crimes committed by Jews against Gentile German citizens; with names, dates, and descriptions that were limited only by Streicher’s fevered imagination. Fake news of the worst kind.

My heart went out to the grieving families of murder victims that the POTUS had stationed in the gallery expressly for this portion of his speech. However, as Digby Tweeted back to me after I observed that the manner in which Trump went on to exploit their pain went “beyond bad taste”, it was more aptly described as “grotesque”.

But it also got me to thinking about the way Trump put the emphasis on the word “Americans” in reference to the victims, as well as the specificity of his new agency’s moniker: “Victims Of Immigrant Crime Engagement”. Historically, there is only one group of Americans who can lay genuine claim to this victimhood. So let us take a moment to remember one of the American victims of “immigrant crime engagement”…

The body of Chief Big Foot at Wounded Knee, December 29, 1890

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digby 3/01/2017 03:30:00 PM

 
Looking for a chance to annoy a misogynist wingnut today?

by digby

I've got one for you. There's this horrible "pastor" in Tennessee who likes to make videos ranting about where people are allowed to go to the bathroom. Today he's upset about something else and it's ... wonderful:

"So today in the mail I got a very shocking and very interesting card. It came from Planned Parenthood, which is a very strange organization to be sending me anything at all because everyone knows my very bold and biblical stand against them," Locke said last Tuesday.

"But here's what's interesting. Here's what the card said. 'Dear Greg Locke. Planned Parenthood Federation of America is pleased to let you know that a generous and thoughtful donation has been made in your honor by' and then apparently the hater's name was Christa Ginsberg in Houston, Texas. And it doesn't say how much it was and then sincerely, you know, the Richards lady that runs Planned Parenthood," he said.

Jen Hayden at Daily Kos writes:

In the video below, he howls about the fact this thank you card was sent to him and wants to make it crystal clear that he doesn’t in any way support women’s health care at Planned Parenthood. He warned that such donations in his name are a waste of time and he’ll deposit any thank you cards in the trash. So, whatever you do, don’t waste your time donating to the Planned Parenthood clinic closest to Greg Locke’s church—Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee—and don’t waste your time making sure a thank you card gets mailed to him at: 

Greg Locke
c/o Global Vision Bible Church
2060 Old Lebanon Dirt Rd
Mt Juliet, TN 37122

Haha.




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digby 3/01/2017 02:00:00 PM

 
The normalization has begun

by digby

With the normalization of Trump suddenly sweeping the nation in the wake of one boring speech to congress, I thought it might be a good idea to post this piece again as a reminder:

Autocracy: Rules for Survival

by Masha Gessen


“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.

Hours later, President Barack Obama was even more conciliatory:


We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world….We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.

The president added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.

Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”

However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.

More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. (It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s statement, that “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.”) Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.

The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa. Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.

But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.

He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.

To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.

Of course, the United States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.

The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign—when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.

Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.

It's happening. People are already starting to see him as just another Republican no worse than the usual. The press is thrilled for the opportunity to get back in his good graces. Like the proverbial frogs, we're being boiled to death and we don't even know it.z

That's simply not true. They're all bad. He is much, much worse in ways that should already be clear. If we do not resist him with everything we have, they he will be validated in 2018. And then all bets are off.


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digby 3/01/2017 12:30:00 PM

 
Making buck passing official

by digby

I'm so old I remember when a right wing Republican administration got their Justice Department to legalize torture so that those who ordered it and the men and women in the field who carried it out would have a legal defense if anyone objected. It actually worked.

Trump isn't bothering with any of that. He's busy tweeting and holding photo-ops. He's just going to throw the whole thing to the military and say "have at it":

The White House is considering delegating more authority to the Pentagon to greenlight anti-terrorist operations like the SEAL Team 6 raid in Yemen that cost the life of a Navy SEAL, to step up the war on the so-called Islamic State, multiple U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast.

President Donald Trump has signaled that he wants his defense secretary, retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, to have a freer hand to launch time-sensitive missions quickly, ending what U.S. officials say could be a long approval process under President Barack Obama that critics claimed stalled some missions by hours or days.

In declared war zones, U.S. commanders have the authority to make such calls, but outside such war zones, in ungoverned or unstable places like Somalia, Libya, or Yemen, it can take permissions all the way up to the Oval Office to launch a drone strike or a special-operations team.

Trump’s subsequent defense of the Yemen raid, and discussion of accelerating other counterterrorist operations, shows his White House will be less risk averse to the possibility of U.S.—or civilian—casualties, unlike the Obama White House, which military officials say was extremely cautious to the point of frustrating some military commanders and counterterrorist operators.

Yet that added authority might give Mattis and senior military officers pause, after Trump blamed military leaders Tuesday for the loss of Navy SEAL Senior Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens during the fraught Jan. 28th raid against al Qaeda in Yemen, instead of accepting responsibility for the raid’s outcome as commander in chief.

“This was a mission that was started before I got here,” Trump said Tuesday during a Fox News interview. “They explained what they wanted to do—the generals—who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”

Mattis and company must know he's going to throw them over the side if anything goes wrong. I guess they figure they're immune too and they probably are. Who's going to cross them?

Former Obama administration officials tell The Daily Beast they’d already streamlined the approvals process for counterterrorism raids, following the failed 2014 mission to rescue U.S. hostages James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Kayla Mueller, who were being held by ISIS in Syria. The hostages were moved shortly before U.S. special operators arrived on the scene. 

“Obama gave a lot of leash to commanders in the field—but not on everything,” said one former senior Obama administration official. “It’s all about controlling escalation. Do I want to give someone else the authority to get me deeper into a war?”

The official explained that in some cases, Obama deemed it necessary to push authority down to his commanders, as when he gave the Navy SEALs the green light to shoot their way out of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, though firing on Pakistani troops might have triggered armed conflict with Islamabad. 

Obama used to give Mattis pre-delegation authority to act when he was head of Central Command on some issues, but not others, the official said. “Will you delegate authority if an Iranian boat gets close, I can take it out? Most presidents will think carefully about that,” he said. “There’s usually a healthy back-and-forth to come up with the right balance.” The official spoke anonymously to discuss the sensitive discussions on approving raids. 

Trump officials believe loosening the permissions process can help turn up the heat against ISIS—and counterterrorist-focused agencies like the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) are lining up new targets in anticipation of more numerous and more rapid approvals.

Why do I keep thinking about this?

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digby 3/01/2017 11:00:00 AM

 
 "A performance artist pretending to be a great manager"

by digby

I wrote about Trump the businessman for Salon this morning:

Tuesday night’s big speech by President Donald Trump to the joint session of Congress was yet another in the series of disorienting and surreal spectacles over the last year and a half that make you blink your eyes and pinch yourself to ensure you aren’t dreaming. You shake your head and mutter under your breath, “Yes, Donald Trump really is our president.”

Since Trump has so much trouble telling the truth and makes conflicting comments to different people every day, it’s a waste of energy discussing the policies he laid out in the speech. His actions are the only way to determine his real agenda, so one has to evaluate these events as performances.

As Bill Maher said on MSNBC, the president was “Teleprompter Trump” on Tuesday night. That means he was tolerably disciplined and semi-articulate, reading a speech written by others. This particular performance style always compels media outlets to declare his tone “moderate” and “measured.” Some said Trump has finally “pivoted” to a more presidential demeanor. They were enthusiastic enough about this speech that Trump may even stop tweeting insults about them for a few days. All in all, it was a good night for the president.

Trump is basically an entertainer and a pitchman, so these events play to his talents, such as they are. A formal speech isn’t his favorite venue to sell his wares, of course. He loves his rallies where he can rant spontaneously on whatever topic takes his fancy and his cult followers cheer wildly. Their worship is like air to him. His second preference as president is the photo op. I don’t think any president in history has ever held more of them and imparted less substance while doing so. George W. Bush’s adviser Karl Rove always said that “politics is TV with the sound turned off,” and it appears that Trump took him literally.

But no matter how well Trump manages to keep up the sales spiel, the fact is that he is the president and it’s a bigger job than pitching steaks and cheap perfume. Since he allegedly ran a billion-dollar empire, he was supposed to be a high-powered executive with supernatural management talents. As Al Jazeera and many other news organizations reported throughout the campaign, for many of his followers that was the biggest attraction. For instance, this quote in USA Today is entirely typical of the Trump voter:

"He knows how to run a business, he knows how economies should work and he knows how to hire the right people to get the job done instead of thinking he knows best on everything. He speaks his mind, he doesn’t bow to political correctness and he’s honest.”

Well, he does speak his mind.

Trump played a successful entrepreneur on his reality show for many years and that’s been a big part of his image. But it’s also true that Republicans have extolled the virtues of the businessman as leader for many years, often making the point that the government should be run like a business because it would be more efficient. But that’s faith-based market worship, not reality. Government is not a business and while some of the lessons one might learn in business could be applicable to running the government, the duties of governing, especially at the highest level, are much more complex than those of running even the largest industries. The problems, the mission and the constituencies are so different that the skills required for the job have much more to do with general temperament and intelligence than executive experience.

This doesn’t mean business experience is of no value. It does mean that that a business executive can’t run the country the same way he or she ran a business. It’s a different organizational structure altogether.

Donald Trump is actually running the country like his business. He appears to believe that he’s the CEO of America and everyone in the government answers to him. This is why his administration doesn’t think twice about enlisting the FBI and members of the congressional intelligence committees to do damage control or about insulting the independent judiciary and the press when they fail to do his bidding. (Did Trump even know the president can’t fire federal judges?) Trump appears to think that being president means he’s everyone’s boss.

But that doesn’t explain the White House chaos of these first weeks, with all the leaks and missteps and infighting. Even though the government isn’t a business and the president’s job is very different than a corporate executive’s, if Trump were actually a skilled executive, as he so often claims, he should at least be able to manage the White House staff.

An article in Politico by Michael Kruse sheds light on that issue: Donald Trump isn’t just making the mistake of trying to run the government like a business; Donald Trump is also a terrible businessman. According to Bruce Nobles, who was president of the defunct Trump Shuttle airline in the 1980s, Trump is a “performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”

Nobles had been involved with some big organizations and remarked to a reporter at the time that he was surprised at what “a family-type operation” the Trump airline had, “instead of a business kind of orientation where there is a structure and there is a chain of command and there is delegation of authority and responsibility.”

Trump had greatly overpaid for the airline with borrowed cash, and Nobles observed that Trump was much more concerned with the superficial image of the business than the actual nuts and bolts of running it. Trump’s airline failed as did all his casinos, which he ran based on highly eccentric notions of business management.

Kruse quotes Trump biographer Tim O’Brien, who said, “I don’t think there’s anything of scale that he’s had his hands on that he hasn’t made a hash of.” Biographer Gwenda Blair noted, “Ramping up is something he’s maybe not so good at.”

Trump famously crashed and burned in the ’90s and found his feet again only when he went into the branding business where he could take advantage of his one indisputable talent: self-promotion. He is very, very good at that and it got him all the way to the White House. But these first weeks have illustrated in living color that he’s brought to the presidency the notoriously poor management skills that led to one disastrous business failure after another.

Can Donald Trump actually change? Who knows. But it seems unlikely. As biographer O’Brien told Politico, “This isn’t just about a modest course correction. This is about getting an entire personality transplant.” If only that were possible.

digby 3/01/2017 09:00:00 AM

 

A piece of the action

by Tom Sullivan

If Donald Trump's speech last night to a joint session of Congress had moments that were "Reaganesque," as Politico's John Bresnahan described it, it was because we've seen this picture before. After the requisite immigrant bashing and more immigrant bashing after that, Trump's promises recalled Reagan's boast that he would expand the military and build a 600-ship navy while slashing taxes and balancing the budget at the same time. We know how that worked out.

There was the usual bragging about things with which he had little to do: business decisions by Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Sprint, etc. There was the display of victims of crime by immigrants, low by measure, but meant to impress us otherwise. There were promises to expand school choice (charters and vouchers) and health care choices as well. Except for reproductive choice, of course.

Trump stuck to the teleprompter and refrained from attacking his adversaries. If anything, many of his proposals cut against Republican orthodoxy. Republicans found themselves having to give tepid applause to proposals they really, really do not like.

My administration wants to work with members of both parties to make child care accessible and affordable, to help ensure new parents that they have paid family leave, to invest in women's health, and to promote clean air and clear water, and to rebuild our military and our infrastructure.

The claims on women's health and clean air and water run counter to actions he has already taken. At Vox, Emily Crockett notes that "family leave" is an expansion of the maternity leave Trump already Trump already proposed. Plans for investing in women's health, she writes, "will be news to women’s health providers." Politico's analysts gave that idea a twenty percent chance of happening.

In the most jaw-dropping, shameless moment of the night, Trump pointed to the widow of William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL who died Yemen at the end of January. Michelle Goldberg describes the moment:

As Carryn Owens stood next to Ivanka Trump, tears streaming down her face, the assembled crowd heartily applauded her monumental sacrifice. She appeared overcome. Then Trump ad-libbed, “And Ryan is looking down, right now, you know that, and he’s very happy, because I think he just broke a record.” In other words, Owens’ death had a happy ending because a lot of people clapped at Trump’s big speech.

But along with the xenophobia and self aggrandizement, there were promises to restore jobs. "Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and railways, gleaming across our very beautiful land," Trump promised.

To launch our national rebuilding, I will be asking the Congress to approve legislation that produces a $1 trillion investment in the infrastructure of the United States, financed through both public and private capital, creating millions of new jobs.

That is, the kind of federal program he name-checked Eisenhower for will be privatized under a Trump administration. That doesn't have the same effect as direct federal spending and will cost taxpayers in fees what it may save them in taxes. And all this while giving the military a blank check and delivering "a big, big cut" in taxes. Reaganesque indeed. Politico's analysts ranked the infrastructure plan's chances at ten percent chance. But it was meant to impress, and that's what many will remember.

Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel) tweeted, "That was a good speech. Democrats will underestimate it at their peril." She's right.

Trump hit a lot of the right notes to reinforce for those who elected him. Trump again called the Obamacare "failing," "unsustainable," and "collapsing," and vowed not only to repeal it, but to replace it. Easier said than done. But even now, Democrats are mobilizing to spread the news that Trump means to eliminate the protections under Obamacare. The problem is their permanent defensive crouch leaves Democrats trying to undermine Trump rather than compete for his audience and sell themselves. Trump may be a reality show president, but reality shows are popular. There will be much talk of whether last night's speech was the so-called "pivot" the mercurial autocrat needed to make to succeed as president. But to compete, Democrats need to offer a better product, not just badmouth his. Democrats have got to stop trying to convince voters what's wrong with Trump and pivot to persuading voters of what's right with them. They will need more than their usual lackluster base turnout to gain back ground in 2018, whether or not Trump voters have buyer's remorse.

Trump may be selling snake oil, but he knows how to sell it, and he did last night. One thing I remember from the Reagan and Bush II years: tax rebate checks. How many Americans remember little else? Democrats have to give voters something to fondly remember them by, or at least sell them on the idea that by voting for Democrats there is something in it for them. True or not, Trump is already reinforcing the notion that if they stick with him, they'll see a piece of the action.


Undercover Blue 3/01/2017 06:00:00 AM

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

 
Pivot in his pants

by digby

If we're supposed to believe that Trump's had an epiphany on immigration and is "open" to a path to citizenship as long as "both sides" compromise, I'd try to get Sessions, Bannon and Miller on the record about what changed their views on this issue:

One night in September 2014, when he was chief executive of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon hosted cocktails and dinner at the Washington townhouse where he lived, a mansion near the Supreme Court that he liked to call the Breitbart Embassy. Beneath elaborate chandeliers and flanked by gold drapes and stately oil paintings, Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, sat next to the guest of honor: Nigel Farage, the insurgent British politician, who first met Sessions two years earlier when Bannon introduced them. Farage was building support for his right-wing party by complaining in the British press about “uncontrolled mass immigration.” Sessions, like other attendees, was celebrating the recent collapse in Congress of bipartisan immigration reform, which would have provided a path to citizenship for some undocumented people. At the dinner, Sessions told a writer for Vice, Reid Cherlin, that Bannon’s site was instrumental in defeating the measure. Sessions read Breitbart almost every day, he explained, because it was “putting out cutting-edge information.”

Bannon’s role in blocking the reform had gone beyond sympathetic coverage on his site. Over the previous year, he, Sessions and one of Sessions’s top aides, Stephen Miller, spent “an enormous amount of time” meeting in person, “developing plans and messaging and strategy,” as Miller later explained to Rosie Gray in The Atlantic. Breitbart writers also reportedly met with Sessions’s staff for a weekly happy hour at the Union Pub. For most Republicans in Washington, immigration was an issue they wished would go away, a persistent source of conflict between the party’s elites, who saw it as a straightforward economic good, and its middle-class voting base, who mistrusted the effects of immigration on employment. But for Bannon, Sessions and Miller, immigration was a galvanizing issue, lying at the center of their apparent vision for reshaping the United States by tethering it to its European and Christian origins. (None of them would comment for this article.) That September evening, as they celebrated the collapse of the reform effort — and the rise of Farage, whose own anti-immigration party in Britain represented the new brand of nativism — it felt like the beginning of something new. “I was privileged enough to be at it,” Miller said about the gathering last June, while a guest on Breitbart’s SiriusXM radio show. “It’s going to sound like a motivational speech, but it’s true. To all the voters out there: The only limits to what we can achieve is what we believe we can achieve.”

The answer to what they could achieve, of course, is now obvious: everything. Bannon and Miller are ensconced in the West Wing, as arguably the two most influential policy advisers to Donald J. Trump. And Jeff Sessions is now the attorney general of the United States. The genesis of their working relationship is crucial to understanding the far-reaching domestic goals of the Trump presidency and how the law may be used to attain them over the next four years. Bannon and Sessions have effectively presented the country’s changing demographics — the rising number of minority and foreign-born residents — as America’s chief internal threat. Sessions has long been an outlier in his party on this subject; in 2013, when his Republican colleagues were talking primarily about curbing illegal immigration, he offered a proposal to curb legal immigration. (It failed in committee, 17 to one.)

Talking to Bannon on air in September 2015, Sessions, who has received awards from virulently anti-immigrant groups, described the present day as a dangerous period of “radical change” for America, comparing it to the decades of the early 20th century, when waves of immigrants flooded the country. He said that the 1924 immigration quota system, which barred most Asians and tightly capped the entry of Italians, Jews, Africans and Middle Easterners, “was good for America.” Bannon is also uncomfortable with the changing face of the country. “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think — ” he said on the radio with Trump in November 2015, vastly exaggerating the actual numbers. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

I hate to be cynical but I just have to wonder if people like Bannon and Sessions might just have something sneaky in mind. These are hard core anti-immigration nativist white nationalists.

Keep this in mind as you listen to his happy horseshit:

Behind President Trump’s efforts to step up deportations and block travel from seven mostly Muslim countries lies a goal that reaches far beyond any immediate terrorism threat: a desire to reshape American demographics for the long term and keep out people who Trump and senior aides believe will not assimilate.

In pursuit of that goal, Trump in his first weeks in office has launched the most dramatic effort in decades to reduce the country’s foreign-born population and set in motion what could become a generational shift in the ethnic makeup of the U.S.

Trump and top aides have become increasingly public about their underlying pursuit, pointing to Europe as an example of what they believe is a dangerous path that Western nations have taken. Trump believes European governments have foolishly allowed Muslims with extreme views to settle in their countries, sowing seeds for unrest and recruitment by terrorist groups.
[...]
At the same time that the European share of migration has dropped, the overall foreign-born share of the U.S. population has increased, quadrupling in the five decades since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act took effect. In 1960, the U.S. had 9.7 million foreign-born residents. In 2014, it had 42.2 million.

That change has alarmed right-wing nationalists like Miller and Bannon, who see Trump’s administration as an opportunity to change those migration trends for decades to come.

The two men see the country’s long-term security and wage growth entwined with reducing the number of foreign-born people allowed to visit, immigrate and work in the U.S.

Nations, including the U.S., are undermined by too high a level of diversity, Bannon has argued.

“The center core of what we believe, that we're a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a — and a reason for being,” Bannon said Thursday at the conservative gathering.

“Rule of law is going to exist when you talk about our sovereignty and you talk about immigration,” Bannon said.

The deportation orders and the travel ban were both designed to “protect the hardworking people” of the U.S. from income suppression, crime and terrorism, Miller said on Fox News last week.

“Uncontrolled immigration over many years has undermined wages, hurting prospects for people from all backgrounds and all walks of life and has made us less safe,” Miller said. “Proper controls will raise wages, improve employment, help migrant workers enter the middle class who are already living here and keep us safe from the threat of terror.”

Yeah. These guys are going to push through Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Trump said this a number of times during the campaign. He was often supposed to have "softened" his position on immigration and "pivoted". It's meaningless.

What isn't meaningless are his Executive orders allowing ICE and the CBO to "take off the shackles." That's real. It's actually happening.


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digby 2/28/2017 06:00:00 PM

 
He Ain't Goin' Nowhere 

by tristero

Don't kid yourself. He's goin' nowhere. They love their autocrats (and they hate democracy):

...Mr. Trump has more support among Republicans at this point in office than any president other than George W. Bush. 

“While there were deep divisions in the Republican Party during the campaign, it is clear that the G.O.P. rank and file are well unified behind Trump,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll.

So no, impeachment isn't on the table. And "engaging" Democrats isn't on the table. And "preventing the most egregiously wrong-headed things Trump/Bannon are planning" isn't on the table. And protecting ourselves from disaster isn't on the table.

And when it all goes poof - as it surely will, from sheer incompetence (but they might also push it along via an American Reichstag Fire ) - do you honestly think either Trump or Republicans have the slightest incentive to be introspective? As in "Wow, this is our fault, we are really fucking up?"

Please. They have the perfect herd of scapegoats: an African-American president (Obama), a woman Secretary of State (Clinton), a press that won't tow the (Republican) party line, and liberals.

Are you starting to get it yet? I certainly hope so because it really is that serious.
tristero 2/28/2017 04:30:00 PM

 

Thanks Vlad. 

by digby

Oh no! Is Trump becoming disillusioned with the Russian President?

Russia Vetoes U.N. Measure on Syria Backed by Trump 

* The Russian move was the first public clash at the Security Council between the Kremlin and the Trump administration.

 Maybe they don't see eye to eye after all. This could be the big break. What was the issue?

* The resolution would have punished the Syrian government for using chemical weapons.

Never mind.

Trump won't be upset about this. He's fine with Assad using chemical weapons on civilians. He's a strong decisive leader who's bring law and order back to his country. Trump would do the same if that's what it took.

It's just political correctness that makes the United States look weak by insisting that other countries shouldn't use chemical weapon. And if they want to use them on their own citizens who are we to say they shouldn't? It's not our country. And anyway, we might want to do it too.

Vlad did the dirty work for him this time. I'm sure, if he ever hears about it, Trump will be properly grateful that his buddy is helping preserve the prerogatives of national leaders doing what it takes to make their countries great again.

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digby 2/28/2017 03:00:00 PM

 
It's all fake I tell you, fake!

by digby

This is just nuts:

Asked about the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks and threats across the nation, President Trump on Tuesday told a group of state attorneys general that "sometimes it's the reverse," Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said of Trump’s comments in his and other officials' meeting with the president.

"He just said, 'Sometimes it's the reverse, to make people — or to make others — look bad,' and he used the word 'reverse' I would say two to three times in his comments," Shapiro said. "He did correctly say at the top that it was reprehensible."

Asked for further information about the purpose of the president's comments, Shapiro only said, "I really don't know what he means, or why he said that,” adding that Trump said he would be speaking about the issue in his remarks on Tuesday night.

Saying that he hoped to see clarification from the president in those remarks, Shapiro added, "It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.”

White House spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, said, "That is an absurd and obscene statement."

The Anti-Defamation League also questioned Trump’s reported remarks.

"We are astonished by what the President reportedly said. It is incumbent upon the White House to immediately clarify these remarks. In light of the ongoing attacks on the Jewish community, it is also incumbent upon the President to lay out in his speech tonight his plans for what the federal government will do to address this rash of anti-Semitic incidents,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of ADL, said in a statement.

It's pretty obvious what he's saying. Here's his close adviser Anthony "the Mooch" Scaramucci this morning:

He said earlier today that Obama is behind all the protests too.

Delusional? Nah. He's really just a sneaky little liar trying to shirk responsibility for what he's done. As usual.

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digby 2/28/2017 01:30:00 PM

 
He knows more than the generals

by digby

And when something goes wrong, it's their fault:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday dodged responsibility for a botched mission he ordered in Yemen last month, placing the onus on the military and Barack Obama’s administration instead.

Bill Owens, the father of Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL who died in the operation, demanded an investigation into his son’s death over the weekend. Owens further revealed he couldn’t bear to meet Trump at the airport as Ryan’s casket was carried off the military plane last month.

Asked about the matter during an interview with Fox News’ “Fox ‘n’ Friends,” Trump repeatedly said “they” were responsible for the outcome of the mission, in reference to the military.

“This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do,” he said. “They came to me, they explained what they wanted to do ― the generals ― who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.

He also said that they got tons of intelligence, which has been refuted. In fact, the pentagon is leaking like a sieve on this and Trump blaming the generals will likely encourage more of it.

Let's set aside the fact that he's refusing to take responsibility for a mission he authorized over dinner like he was ordering the molten lavacake. He has never taken responsibility for anything in his life and I doubt he ever will. The buck stops elsewhere.

But what's this drivel about "his generals"? He didn't create them. He didn't promote them. They came all generalled up when he took office.

This is the mindset that creeps me out the most about Trump. He sounds like Saddam Hussein.

By  the way, you'll like this little aside in a Reuters piece about Trump request for massive increases in military spending:

An official familiar with the proposal said Trump's request for the Pentagon included more money for shipbuilding, military aircraft and establishing "a more robust presence in key international waterways and choke points" such as the Strait of Hormuz and South China Sea. 

That could put Washington at odds with Iran and China. The United States already has the world's most powerful fighting force and it spends far more than any other country on defense.

He's a refreshing populist, isolationist who doesn't use a private email server so it's all good, amirite?

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digby 2/28/2017 12:00:00 PM

 
Trump and Comey, together again

by digby

There are dozens of important political stories percolating at the moment, from President Donald Trump blithely saying,”nobody knew health care could be so complicated” to an administration proposal to slash necessary government programs to the bone to pay for a massive increase in military spending. There are also discussions about putting large numbers of troops on the ground in the Middle East and ongoing horror stories about the large-scale deportation of immigrants and harassment at the borders and other points of entry.

But there are two stories that keep bubbling up to the surface no matter what else is going on: the investigations of Trump’s possible connections to Russia and his holy war against the press. Indeed, according to Chuck Todd of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the two are related. On Sunday’s show Todd reported an apparent pattern: Every time a news organization publishes another story about the Russian investigation, Trump has an additional tantrum about the media. It’s like clockwork.

This pattern doesn’t prove anything other than the fact that the Trump administration is touchy about the story. We can’t conclude it is consciously trying to punish the press for reporting the Russian-related stories or that the Trump team is attempting to distract attention from them. Nevertheless, how the administration has been dealing with the Russian investigations in other ways certainly raises questions.

On Sunday we found out that the White House was so obsessed with leaks that Sean Spicer gathered White House lawyers and forced his staff to turn over their personal and work phones for searching. On Monday it was revealed that Trump had personally signed off on the order. Calling such behavior “Nixonian” is a cliché, but there’s just no way around it. This is paranoid behavior. It’s also revealing, since Trump likes to say the media has no sources and is just making stories up — and yet he’s obsessed with leaks. Something doesn’t add up.

But that’s just a White House story. As revealing as it is, it’s not as important as the revelation that in the wake of stories that Trump campaign personnel had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election,” press secretary Sean Spicer personally connected journalists with Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., chair of the Intelligence Committee, who both are involved in current investigations of the matter. Spicer even stayed on the line while reporters spoke to those officials. Burr and Pompeo apparently told reporters the stories were “not accurate,” without offering details. (Assuming that they were telling the truth, all that means is that something in the stories was inaccurate, not that they were entirely false.)

This news came as a follow-up to an earlier report that the White House had reached out to Republican members of the intelligence committees in the House and Senate in an attempt to knock down the Russian-connection stories. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, also a member of Trump’s executive transition committee, denied that the White House had pressured him, but nonetheless went on record to assure the country there was nothing to the allegations. How could he possibly know that? The investigation hasn’t really even begun.

The point here is that it is improper for the White House to use the CIA director and the heads of congressional committees as its PR damage control department. It’s particularly improper for such collusion to happen in a case in which the latter are personally involved in the investigations in question. But let’s face facts. Scandals like these are almost always partisan affairs. Even if Spicer and the White House had not displayed outrageous disregard for normal protocol, a special prosecutor or a bipartisan commission likely would have been needed at some point to take up the investigation. That’s even more obvious now.

As troubling as all this White House outreach to congressional Republicans is, it’s nothing compared to inappropriate interactions between White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and Andrew McCabe, the deputy FBI director. Their contact apparently related to a New York Times story concerning connections between the Trump campaign and Russian officials before the election.

Priebus went on the Sunday talk shows and said he had been told by intelligence officials that there was nothing to the story and further that he had been authorized to say so publicly. That’s an odd thing to say and CNN reported that Priebus, like Spicer, had tried to get the FBI to “publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump’s associates and Russians known to US intelligence.”

That’s not just inappropriate or unethical; it could be obstruction of justice. At the very least it violates longstanding Department of Justice rules in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that prohibit such contacts between the bureau and the subjects of an FBI investigation. (One of the articles of impeachment introduced against President Richard Nixon was for “interfering or endeavoring to interfere” with an FBI investigation.)

This is undoubtedly why the White House amended Priebus’ comments days later, saying that the FBI’s McCabe had actually approached Priebus to tell him the Times story was “bullshit.” It was then that Priebus asked the FBI to “knock down” the story publicly, which the FBI told the White House it could not do. But CNN has reported that, according to the White House, both McCabe and the FBI’s director, James Comey, “gave Priebus the go-ahead to discredit the story publicly, something the FBI has not confirmed.”

It’s certainly possible that the White House is misrepresenting the FBI’s involvement. The Trump administration’s credibility gap is the size of the Grand Canyon and growing. But if the Priebus account is correct, we are once again looking at an FBI that is behaving in a partisan and unprofessional manner on behalf of Donald Trump. In this case, its conduct may even be illegal. After Comey’s overt interference in the election and refusal to sign on to the original reports of Russian interference, it’s mind-boggling that everyone in the bureau, especially Comey himself, would not go to epic lengths to avoid even the slightest whiff of impropriety.

This might all add up to nothing in the end. But at this point these unethical and possibly illegal contacts between the White House and various agencies, congressional officials and the FBI have made an independent investigation an absolute necessity.

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digby 2/28/2017 10:30:00 AM

 

Blond tufted silverback theory

by digby

This piece by Susan Glasser in Politico about Trump's alpha-male foreign policy is interesting since she interviews a group of female FP experts to analyse it. I think a lot of us already knew that this was the basic premise of everything Trump's doing. I wrote about it extensively in Salon during the election. Josh Marshall even coined a phrase for it called "dominance politics." But an article about Trump's looney tunes adviser Sebastian Gorka in which he happily blurted out "the alpha-males are back" has made it explicit. 

What Glasser adds to the literature on this isn't even the female perspective, although that's interesting in itself. It's that experts are unable to grasp how to think about Trump and the United States without a normal policy framework. For instance, she remarks on former Obama administration's Michelle Flournoy's inability to make the leap:

I was struck throughout the wide-ranging conversation by how difficult it still is to analyze Trump’s foreign policy by any of the standard Washington measures; Flournoy, in particular, kept struggling to offer rational, academic even, arguments about why an Alpha Male foreign policy wouldn’t work, citing studies about the benefits of diversity and the like. In explaining the Alpha Maleness of the new administration, Sherman looked to the politics of anger Trump has stirred up and, interestingly, connected the president’s disdain for the regular order of the interagency process that generally helps shape national security policy for an administration to his desire to play the strongman. That interagency process, developed over time by administrations of both parties, she argues, is “the difference between a democrat and an autocrat.”

I think that's the leap that must be made although it sounds as though Flournoy may still be grappling with how to do that.

You have to look at Trump the way you look at other autocrats. If anyone should have an idea about how to do that it should be the foreign policy experts. They're the ones who have actually had to think about this in the course of their work. But I think there is resistance to fully accepting that this is happening in America and I suppose that's understandable. But it is happening and people had better figure out how to think about it and counter it. Soon.

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digby 2/28/2017 09:00:00 AM

 
Baby steps...

by Gaius Publius

Photographing Baltimore cops at play (story here)

Slowly but surely, the courts are dealing with the militarized police state. ArsTechnica:

Divided federal appeals court rules you have the right to film the police

Filming cops, 2-1 court rules, ensures that they "are not abusing their power."

A divided federal appeals court is ruling for the First Amendment, saying the public has a right to film the police. But the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, in upholding the bulk of a lower court's decision against an activist who was conducting what he called a "First Amendment audit" outside a Texas police station, noted that this right is not absolute and is not applicable everywhere.

The facts of the dispute are simple. Phillip Turner was 25 in September 2015 when he decided to go outside the Fort Worth police department to test officers' knowledge of the right to film the police. While filming, he was arrested for failing to identify himself to the police. Officers handcuffed and briefly held Turner before releasing him without charges. Turner sued, alleging violations of his Fourth Amendment right against unlawful arrest and detention and his First Amendment right of speech.

The 2-1 decision Thursday by Judge Jacques Wiener is among a slew of rulings on the topic, and it provides fresh legal backing for the so-called YouTube society where people are constantly using their mobile phones to film themselves and the police. The American Civil Liberties Union says, "there is a widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places and harassing, detaining and arresting those who fail to comply."

Just in time for certain-to-appear spring and summer conflicts in Beauregard Sessions' America.

Be carefully, though, as you wield those dangerous digital lenses. There's a lot of yes-but in the article, including this one:

The Supreme Court still has not ruled on the issue.

Hmm.

GP



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Labels: Gaius Publius

Gaius Publius 2/28/2017 07:30:00 AM

 

"Managing" to make a mess

by Tom Sullivan

Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. Not up to the job?

Well, after all it is complicated. Like health care that way:

WASHINGTON — President Trump, meeting with the nation’s governors, conceded Monday that he had not been aware of the complexities of health care policy-making: “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

Well for one, Bernie Sanders knew. Via Raw Story:

“Well some of us who were sitting on the health education committee, who went to meeting after meeting after meeting, who heard from dozens of people, who stayed up night after night trying to figure out this thing, year—we got a clue,” Sanders told Anderson Cooper on Monday’s AC 360.

“When you provide health care in a nation of 300 million people, yeah, it is very, very complicated,” he continued. “And maybe now, maybe the president and some of the Republicans understand you can’t go beyond the rhetoric, ‘We’re going or repeal the Affordable Care Act, We’re going to repeal Obamacare and everything will be wonderful,’ a little bit more complicated than that.”

In further remarks, Trump told the governors, Obamacare is a "failed disaster." So a little ambivalence there from the chief executive.

TRUMP: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” https://t.co/LFr422VHbq

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 27, 2017

Politico's Michael Kruse spoke with several former Trump employees. Bruce Nobles ran Trump Shuttle airline and spoke of the problem Trump had with scaling up to the big-time:

“It surprised me how much of a family-type operation it was, instead of a business kind of orientation where there is a structure and there is a chain of command and there is delegation of authority and responsibility,” Nobles told a reporter from Newsday in the fall of 1989. “As the organization gets bigger, and it seems to be getting bigger all the time, he’ll have to do a better job of actually managing the place as opposed to making deals.”

That hasn't happened, Nobles told Politico.

“I don’t think there’s anything of scale that he’s had his hands on that he hasn’t made a hash of,” says biographer Tim O’Brien. “He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”

Now Trump has his hands on the biggest organization in the country, and he's "managing" the Oval Office the way he manages everything else: by impulse. One long sentence spells out Trump's way:

In recent interviews, they recounted a shrewd, slipshod, charming, vengeful, thin-skinned, belligerent, hard-charging manager who was an impulsive hirer and a reluctant firer and surrounded himself with a small cadre of ardent loyalists; who solicited their advice but almost always ultimately went with his gut and did what he wanted; who kept his door open and expected others to do the same not because of a desire for transparency but due to his own insecurities and distrusting disposition; who fostered a frenetic, internally competitive, around-the-clock, stressful, wearying work environment in which he was a demanding, disorienting mixture of hands-on and hands-off—a hesitant delegator and an intermittent micromanager who favored fast-twitch wins over long-term follow-through, promotion over process and intuition over deliberation.

His loyalists think behind his disorienting style he's playing shrewd, eleventy-dimensional chess.

TRUMP: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” https://t.co/LFr422VHbq

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 27, 2017

Right.


Undercover Blue 2/28/2017 06:00:00 AM