Hullabaloo

Thursday, May 02, 2019

 

Above the law

by Tom Sullivan

American democracy? Welcome to Fifth Avenue. (The mouth is almost right.)

Stunning among other stunning statements Attorney General William Barr made Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee was his blithe declaration that the president is above the law.

Responding to questioning by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Barr claimed repeatedly Donald Trump had been "falsely accused" of coordinating with Russia. Deploying the "no underlying crime" red herring, Barr asserted that the president as head of government and the Department of Justice was entitled to close down an investigation into himself if he felt it was off the rails:

Barr said this situation was unique because the president has the “constitutional authority to supervise proceedings,” and if he feels a proceeding was “not well founded” or “groundless,” he could legally shut it down.

“The president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course,” Barr said. “That’s important because most of the obstruction claims that are being made here . . . do involve the exercise of the president’s constitutional authority, and we now know that he was being falsely accused.”

Wild from Barr: If the president feels a proceeding is unfounded, "the president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused." pic.twitter.com/SMpiIXia92

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 1, 2019

The supposed chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America declared President Donald J. Trump his own grandpa prosecutor, judge, and jury. Bill Barr declared Trump king.

As Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) tweeted repeatedly during the proceeding, Barr never specified what details in the Mueller report he repeatedly mischaracterized were false. Democrats never pressed him to name them.

What the Mueller Impeachment Referral found — after failing to get Trump to sit for an interview — was there was not enough evidence to bring formal conspiracy charges provable in court. Details such as what became of the Trump campaign internal polling data Paul Manafort gave to a suspected Russian intelligence asset and what Roger Stone's campaign role was in coordinating with Wikileaks on releasing stolen emails remain muddy. As is whether Trump's conduct in dangling pardons before his associates obstructed Mueller's finding out. But there was plenty enough misconduct, Mueller suggested, to launch an impeachment investigation.

The report states, "[W]e were not persuaded by the argument that the President has blanket constitutional immunity to engage in acts that would corruptly obstruct justice through the exercise of otherwise-valid Article TI powers. 1091" (Pg. 178, Pt. II) Footnote 1091 refers to impeachment as a remedy.

The always-caustic Rick Wilson predicted Barr's move before he made it, warning Tuesday evening that with his knowledge of Washington's "folkways and expected behaviors" he has twice lulled Democrats into thinking he is a rational, pre-Trump Republican. They clearly haven’t caught on that he is not. Perhaps Wednesday disabused them. Wilson cautions, "Impeachment for [Trump] is reality TV catnip ... Once it fails, he’s free to rape and pillage the remains of Washington." Wilson declares, "The GOP is Trump now, and Trump is the GOP."

Former F.B.I. director James Comey explained in the New York Times Wednesday how that occurred:

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

Giving silent assent as Trump lies about what “everyone thinks” and offering up the fawning praise he demands, Comey writes, slowly "pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent" until they are lost. Comey may be sanctimonious, but it doesn't mean he is wrong.

Republicans, the party of wealth and the "petite bourgeoisie" have found their mad king in Donald Trump. I have long written that the royalist strain among us, present since before the Revolution, has never slept far below the surface. That sleeping desire for absolutism has awakened.

Comey is not alone in seeing how it has overtaken us bite by bite:

He slipped several times, but the biggest slip seemed to be planned. Barr argued that Trump (or any president) could shut down an investigation into his own crimes, by simply declaring himself “falsely accused.”

Barr is a monarchist. Trump is the GOP’s king.

Hole card seen.

— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

Fascism, Stalinism, monarchy, despotism - all names for what fills the void when democracy is dismantled. It’s what self-dubbed “libertarians” meant to do all along.

— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

Getting government-by-the-people out of the way, piece by small piece, until the vacuum opens and government-by-ONE-person rushes in to fill it.

It’s been the GOP right-wing’s project for decades. And it was inevitable that foreign enemies of democracy co-opted it as their own.

— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

This is a perilous moment. Best to make yourselves heard and felt.


Undercover Blue 5/02/2019 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, May 01, 2019

 
If the shoe was on the other foot, would Republicans be so blase?

by digby



Barr pretty much gave a green light to any foreign country that wants sabotage American elections. He's protecting Trump but the way the Republicans are acting, it's quite obvious that they believe this is a big advantage for them generally.

And they are actually right to say that. Democrats would turn on their own if they did this. Republicans will not. Clearly. This is a Republican-only strategy.

However, it's still fun to see what they say when someone asks them what they would do if a Democrat were in the same position:

On @AJUpFront, I asked Trump campaign adviser Marc Porter if he was ok with the Democratic 2020 presidential candidate calling on China to hack Trump’s emails, or for the candidate’s kids to meet in secret with representatives of the Iranian government:pic.twitter.com/g9zpDjg0Zb

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 1, 2019

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digby 5/01/2019 05:30:00 PM

 
Bill Barr's snitty testimony

by digby



Emptywheel has a nice succinct round-up of what we learned from Bill Barr today:

Bill Barr just finished testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It was remarkable.

Among the opinions the Attorney General espoused are that:

You only need to call the FBI when being offered campaign assistance by a foreign intelligence service, not a foreigner

It’s okay to lie about the many dangles hostile foreign countries make to a political campaign, including if you accepted those dangles

Because Trump was being falsely accused (it’s not clear of what, because the report doesn’t address the most aggressive accusation, and many other accusations against Trump and his campaign are born out by the Mueller Report), it’s okay that he sought to undermine it through illegal means

It’s okay for the President to order the White House Counsel to lie, even about an ongoing investigation

It’s okay to fire the FBI Director for refusing to confirm or deny an ongoing investigation, which is DOJ policy not to do

It’s okay for the Attorney General to call lawfully predicated DOJ investigative techniques “spying” because Fox News does

Public statements — including threatening someone’s family — cannot be subornation of perjury

You can exhaust investigative options in a case having only obtained contemptuous responses covering just a third of the investigation from the key subject of it

The Attorney General also got himself in significant trouble with his answers to a question from Charlie Crist about whether he knew why Mueller’s team was concerned about press reports. His first answer was that he didn’t know about the team’s concerns because he only spoke with Mueller. But he later described, in the phone call he had with Mueller, that Mueller discussed his team’s concerns. Worse still, when called on the fact that the letter — as opposed to Barr’s potentially suspect representation of the call — didn’t mention the press response, he suggested Mueller’s letter was “snitty” and so probably written by a staffer, meaning he assumed that the letter itself was actually from a staffer.

But that’s not the most amazing thing.

The most amazing thing is that, when Corey Booker asked Barr if he thought it was right to share polling data with Russians — noting that had Trump done so with a Super PAC, rather than a hostile foreign country, it would be illegal — Barr appeared to have no clue that Paul Manafort had done so. He even asked whom Manafort shared the data with, apparently not knowing he shared it with a guy that Rick Gates said he believes is a Russian spy.

That’s remarkable, because he basically agreed with Ben Sasse that Deripaska — with whom Manafort was sharing this campaign data — was a “bottom-feeding scum-sucker.”

So the Attorney General absolved the President of obstruction without having the faintest clue what actions the investigation of which Trump successfully obstructed by floating a pardon to Manafort.

This is what stunned me:

In one of his more forceful defenses of Trump, Barr said Wednesday that the president had been “falsely accused” of coordinating with Russia and that it helped inform the decision to say that Trump could not be charged with obstructing justice.

Barr was responding to questions from Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) about why the absence of an underlying crime — in this case, that Trump conspired with Russia — mattered in the obstruction case. Leahy pointed out that obstruction could prevent investigators from identifying an underlying crime.

Barr said this situation was unique because the president has the “constitutional authority to supervise proceedings,” and if he feels a proceeding was “not well founded” or “groundless,” he could legally shut it down.

“The president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course,” Barr said. “That’s important because most of the obstruction claims that are being made here . . . do involve the exercise of the president’s constitutional authority, and we now know that he was being falsely accused.”

In other words, the president is above the law. There is no one else in this country who can proclaim that he is being falsely accused and then shut down an investigation. Only a president. Or, more precisely, a king.

And, by the way, he was not falsely accused. He was clearly happy to benefit from a Russian government sabotage of his opponent and it remains unknown whether or not he was under Russian influence when he did it. He sure as hell has acted like he was during the campaign and after.

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digby 5/01/2019 03:30:00 PM

 
Everyone should tweet this quote at Trump

by digby


His top toadie, Bill Barr, made this headline today:

"No, I didn't exonerate. I said that we did not believe that there was sufficient evidence to establish an obstruction offense which is the job of the justice department."

So much for "TOTAL EXONERATION!"

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digby 5/01/2019 02:30:00 PM

 
Barr should be removed for this alone

by digby

Not only does Barr hesitate, but watch closely what Barr ends up narrowly saying: Barr says only that presidential campaigns offered dirt from a "foreign intelligence service" should report to the FBI. He seemed to wait and dodge to avoid saying "foreign government." NUTS. https://t.co/TpWxxGonXV

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) May 1, 2019

I guess it speaks to my continued naivete but I find this absolutely shocking. Barr had been asked in an earlier round about whether or not a there was anything illegal about foreign nations infiltrating and the American political system and he hedged. Coons followed up with this question and Barr's answer was chilling. He knows foreign government can hear him and he knows they are going to hire cutouts and intermediaries again --- and he wants them to do it. I wish I knew why these people are so sure that foreign adversaries are going to help Republicans, which they obviously do, but I'm almost afraid to dine out.

And for those who think Barr is some kind of goodwill ambassador for legitimate international understanding when he says there's nothing wrong with political actors being paid by foreign interests to infiltrate political campaigns, he also hinted that he was interested in looking into foreign influence in "the government."

 If he goes the way of the partisan "purge" of the top brass of the FBI that had been alarmed by Trump's relationship with Russia,  that really is McCarthyism, only this time it will be purging those who are concerned about Russia rather than those who are sympathetic to it.

This guy is something else.

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digby 5/01/2019 01:30:00 PM

 
Trump may end up yearning for the good old days of the Mueller Witch Hunt

by digby



My Salon column this morning:

The big news today is the Washington Post's Tuesday night's bombshell report revealing that Robert Mueller was not a happy prosecutor when Attorney General Bill Barr wrote that four-page PR document. He wrote his own letter to Barr and then spoke with him on the phone in the days after, complaining that Barr's summary  “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Special Counsel's work.

According to DOJ veterans, this was a very big deal:

Exactly. It’s a declaration of war, as I just tried to explain on @donlemon because everybody realizes it’s a loaded bomb that could go off anytime. That’s why I said for the laconic and obedient Mueller, it’s almost like lighting yourself on fire in front of the DOJ. https://t.co/PPw8L592PT

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) May 1, 2019

This uproar will likely last for a few news cycles, which probably has the president quite relieved. He's happy to have the Congress battle the DOJ instead of focusing on the problem that's really keeping him up at night. That would be the congressional inquiries into his personal and business finances. I think he'd rather be impeached for betraying the country than have his books opened up to the public.

He's got his hands full. The Ways and Means Committee is chasing his tax returns. The Financial Services and Intelligence Committees have subpoenaed his banking records. The US Attorneys Office in the Southern District of New York is looking into inauguration fund irregularities and that campaign finance case with Trump named as "individual one" is still out there. State of New York regulators and the Attorney General have opened investigations into possible bank and insurance fraud by the Trump Organization. And two separate cases involving Trump's alleged violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution are currently wending their way through the courts, one of which passed a big hurdle on Tuesday.

There are also 14 unknown investigations that were referred by Mueller to other jurisdictions. Trump's loyal consiglieri William Barr will likely have filled him in on those but unless they are dropping them, he has to be worried. Any federal investigation involving him will likely look into his finances. And as we all know, that is his "red line" which for some reason he believes he has a right to draw.

He seems to be very confused about the separation of powers, complaining that the Democratic House majority isn't "impartial"  and is just trying to win 2020, which means he needn't cooperate with their requests. This is also known as "politics" a profession he probably should have thought twice about entering if he didn't want anyone looking at his finances, particularly since he refuses to divest himself of his companies and spends most weekends as president promoting them.

The New York Times deep dive into the Trump family's systematic tax fraud over the course of many decades should certainly be enough to justify the release of Trump's tax returns. If laws need to be changed to prevent such activity, the congress has every right to see them as do the American people.
And as the ongoing investigations by Pro-Publica and WNYC have shown in their "Trump Inc" podcast series, the ground is incredibly fertile for investigations into the business. The Trump Organization has been a cesspool of fraudulent activity for decades.  (The piece about the branded development projects in which Donald and Ivanka Trump lied to buyers and falsified documents to banks alone is mind-boggling all on its own.)

Trump's been stonewalling all the congressional requests, refusing to hand over documents and instructing the various agencies not to cooperate. The administration has said they will fight subpoenas and contempt citations in court and the Justice Department is apparently willing to fight for his right to do whatever he wants. Finally, this week, he took the extraordinary step of suing the banks that have been subpoenaed by the Financial Services and Intelligence committees looking into possible compromise and conflicts of interest with Trump and foreign governments and domestic businesses.

From what most of the legal observers say, the lawsuit is almost comically absurd:

OF NOTE: Trump's lawsuit against Deutsche Bank attributes to House Democrats a bunch of things they didn't say.

And one is actually the headline  of a story about the NY state attorney general (not a quote) https://t.co/86WaKIqEYz: pic.twitter.com/5VWtj3BC67

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) April 30, 2019

The suit claims the Congress is harassing his children, Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka, neglecting to note that all three are executives in the Trump Organization and Ivanka is a senior adviser to the president. His lawyers, as usual, are anything but professional.

Trump likes to sue, we know that.  He learned to do it at the knee of his mentor, Roy Cohn who, according to journalist Marie Brenner, derived his power "largely from his ability to scare potential adversaries with hollow threats and spurious lawsuits."  Brenner writes that they bonded over an early case of Trump bigotry:

As Donald Trump would later tell the story, he ran into Cohn for the first time at Le Club, a members-only nightspot in Manhattan’s East 50s, where models and fashionistas and Eurotrash went to be seen. “The government has just filed suit against our company,” Trump explained, “saying that we discriminated against blacks . . . . What do you think I should do?” 

“Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated,” Cohn shot back. The Trumps would soon retain Cohn to represent them.

Cohn went on to teach Trump everything he knew.

Whether or not the president will prevail in this suit is unknown. But it's possible that he'll at least be able to delay the release of financial records until after the election. Trump had better hope so anyway because House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced the hire of a heavy hitter, Patrick Fallon, former chief of the FBI’s Financial Crimes Section, according to two sources familiar with the move. What that indicates is that the Intelligence Committee is going to be looking at Trump's foreign business deals.

Mueller's investigation hewed closely to a mandate pertaining to criminal conduct the 2016 election and Russian interference and his report does mention the Trump Tower Moscow project as a potential point of leverage. But there is so much more that goes back years and points to a strong suspicion of money-laundering. Trump has brushed off the charge in the past saying simply that he might have sold some condos to Russian buyers. He did. And those sales are very suspicious. By all accounts, if anyone can untangle the details of those transactions, its Fallon.

For the first two years of his presidency, Trump was under scrutiny by a tight-lipped prosecutor with a narrow mandate. Now he's dealing with at least a half dozen congressional probes happening in the middle of his re-election campaign, run by people who like the cameras just as much as he does. He may soon find himself wishing for the good old days of the Mueller Witch Hunt.

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digby 5/01/2019 12:00:00 PM

 
Bill Barr, unitary executive extremist

by digby




Grover Norquist always said that Republicans only need a president who can hold a pen, meaning that it didn't matter whether he or she was a "real conservative" as long as they could get elected and sign rightwing legislation, specifically tax cuts, issue orders to dismantle the "administrative state," and pack the courts with extremist judges. Right-wing ideologues have long pressed for an authoritarian strongman definition of the presidency which they call the "unitary executive." Their dream has been delivered by the incompetent boob Donald Trump.

The GOP Congress delivered on the tax cuts and functionaries in the Executive Branch are working feverishly to destroy the regulations that keep us healthy and safe. Bill Barr has taken on the job of perversely ensuring that this erratic, bizarre presidency solidifies unaccountable presidential power.

The long-term goals of the conservative movement are being realized. No wonder they all back Trump unquestioningly.

Here's a piece of a long Politico profile of Bill Barr that will send chills down your spine:

Now that Barr has provided him with political cover from Mueller’s report, Trump is lavishing him with praise. Days after Barr released a four-page summary of the report’s conclusions that Mueller himself found problematic, Trump told his friend and Fox News host Sean Hannity that Barr was a “great gentleman” and a “great man.” In a tweet on Monday, Trump gloated that while Barr is “highly respected,” Democrats now pretend not to remember their onetime hero Bob Mueller.

Other Republicans are just as exuberant about Barr, who they believe embodies the ruthless competence of previous Republican administrations that has often been sorely lacking in the current one. After his combative news conference moments before the release of the Mueller report, one GOP operative wished aloud that Trump would drop Vice President Mike Pence from the ticket in 2020 and add Barr instead. Other prominent Republicans speak of him in almost adulatory terms. “Barr is the closest thing we have to [former Vice President Dick] Cheney,” said Chuck Cooper, a conservative litigator and Barr ally who, like the attorney general, has led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. “He’s a man. He has a very strong sense of purpose and confidence.”

To Democrats, Barr is merely shilling for Trump, putting politics ahead of the law — “waging a media campaign on behalf of President Trump,” as House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler put it. To them, he is an expression of the corruption of the Republican party under Trump, one among many conservatives who might have had second thoughts about the president but now follow in lockstep. That’s a theme they will press in two Congressional hearings this week, beginning with a Wednesday session before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But people who know Barr and have tracked his career for years say the story is more complicated. Trump and Barr barely have a personal relationship, according to White House aides. Barr may have donated $2,700 to Trump in the 2016 general election, but only after he threw $55,000 to Jeb Bush in the primaries. They say that it’s not Donald Trump whom Barr is fighting for, but a vision of the presidency.

Advocates for the "unitary executive"
Barr’s first interaction with the Trump White House came in the spring of 2017 when he met with Pence to talk about representing him in the Mueller probe. Barr waved off the offer, instead recommending a handful of friends to do the job. About a year later, when the president’s children were unhappy with Trump’s legal representation, Barr got another phone call — and turned down another offer, this one to join the president’s personal legal team.


In late 2018, when the White House was on the hunt for a new attorney general, Barr might as well have been on speed dial. He is a longtime friend of White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who worked for him at the Department of Justice in the 1990s and who pressed him to take the job. Again, Barr begged off, urging the White House to consider his friend J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge — or former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl — or his Kirkland & Ellis partner Mark Filip.

Ultimately, his friends managed to talk him into it. “We had discussions over a period of time, and I encouraged him to take it,” said George Terwilliger, a conservative attorney and longtime friend of Barr’s.

Barr’s social and professional circle was critical in drawing him into Trump’s orbit. Barr pals, including Terwilliger, Cooper, Luttig and former Virginia Attorney General Richard Cullen are part of a group of elite conservative litigators who were once wunderkinds in the the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. They grew up together and have fought countless political battles alongside one another.

The Trump era has been no different. Cullen represents Pence in the Russia probe. Cooper represents former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And Luttig was the runner-up for the attorney general post when Trump tapped Barr in December, according to multiple sources.

They are united by a firm belief in a theory of robust presidential power dusted off by Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese. Known among legal scholars as the theory of the “unitary executive,” they argue that the Constitution grants presidents broad control of the executive branch, including — to take a salient Trump-era example — the power to fire an FBI director for any reason at all.

Barr made his first imprint in this battle as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the George H.W. Bush administration, when he authored a controversial memo giving the FBI the right to seize fugitives abroad without the consent of the foreign government in question. As deputy attorney general, he told George H.W. Bush he had the power to send U.S. military forces into Iraq without congressional authorization

Conservative heroes from Robert Bork to the late Justice Antonin Scalia have been advocates of this theory. Bork carried out President Richard M. Nixon’s directive, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, to fire independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox because he determined the president had the right to do so. Scalia, in a 1988 dissenting opinion, argued that the president had the power to fire any executive branch official, including an independent counsel.

“A lot of The Federalist Society heroes are people who participated in or were advocates for the unitary executive,” said University of California law professor John Yoo, himself a proponent of the theory, which became a flash point in the George W. Bush administration after Yoo penned memos advising Bush that the Constitution grants the president virtually unlimited authority to use force abroad and justifies the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

Enter Bill Barr. Before he agreed to take the attorney general job, he drew on the unitary executive theory in the 18-page memo he sent to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last June — a document his critics say amounted to a veiled application for his current job. In that memo, Barr argued that obstruction of justice is limited to things like witness tampering and destroying evidence and that the president has “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding.” The implication: Trump was acting on firm constitutional ground when he fired FBI director James Comey, regardless of his motivation, and that doing so was not an effort to obstruct justice. Neither were Trump’s subsequent, but thwarted, moves to fire Mueller himself.

Described by his friends as supremely confident in his views, Barr said at his confirmation hearing that he had circulated the memo widely “so that other lawyers would have the benefit of my views.”

"Supremely confident" doesn't even begin to describe it. There is a touch of megalomania in Barr, a mirror of what a president like Trump would look like if he weren't a simple demagogue. If they get away with this, there may be no going back.

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digby 5/01/2019 10:30:00 AM

 
The Mueller letter

by digby

House Judiciary has just received a copy of the letter Special Counsel Mueller sent to AG Barr pic.twitter.com/VTeSmiHOuL

— Alex Moe (@AlexNBCNews) May 1, 2019

As Josh Marshall says, it's worse than we thought. Here's his breakdown of the timeline:

Mueller lays out a timeline of contacts between his office and Barr around March 24, when the attorney general wrote a letter to Congress that purported to outline top-line conclusions about the special counsel’s report.

The contacts show that the special counsel was in close contact with Barr as he released the letter and in the days after.

Below is a timeline of the contacts revealed in Mueller’s letter:

March 5: The Special Counsel meets with Barr and informs him that “the introductions and executive summaries of our two-volume report accurately summarize this Office’s work and conclusions.”

March 24, early afternoon: The Special Counsel reiterates the purpose of the Mueller report’s executive summaries and introductions.

March 24, late afternoon: Barr sends his now-notorious letter to Congress, which was made public immediately, purporting to outline the Mueller report’s top-line conclusions.

March 25, morning: The Special Counsel’s office informs the Justice Department that his letter to Congress “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” It’s not clear who communicated with whom in this instance, or in what form.

March 27: Mueller sends a letter to Barr complaining about the March 24 letter and urging him to release the executive summaries.

Mueller was pretty frantic about the PR spin Barr was offering up. He understood that his findings were being mischaracterized and that this could end up shackling congressional efforts to hold Trump accountable. He may also have been a little frantic about the fact that the spin was likely making the nation more vulnerable to further election sabotage. Indeed, he may have seen the specter of the DOJ shackling the ongoing counter-intelligence investigation in order to prop up Trump.

Barr said this morning that he had no problem with Mueller testifying. But Democrats say the DOJ has not responded to their request to set up a date.

Barr is a piece of work. He is arrogant and blatant in his defiant defense of the president's unethical behavior. And he seems to be going out of his way to throw his weight around, coming close to saying Mueller is his underling who didn't do his job and so the boss had to step in and do it for him.

He is operating as the president's lawyer. Openly using the word "we" in defending him:

Barr says, while speaking about McGahn's possible testimony: "We haven't waived executive privilege" pic.twitter.com/8Fx0az0kx0

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) May 1, 2019

The Democrats are going to have to step up their game and do it quickly.

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digby 5/01/2019 09:10:00 AM

 

Defiled hard

by Tom Sullivan

Why did Barr do it?

Last night's news that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote to Attorney General William Barr to complain about Barr's four-page, non-summary summary of the special counsel's findings in the Trump-Russia investigation unleashed a flood of commentary. Left unanswered is why Barr has risked himself for Donald Trump.

Natasha Bertrand tweets, "Something I'm hearing from lots of former DOJ/FBI folks tonight is just how rare & significant it is for a DOJ official, especially an institutionalist like Mueller, to 'go to paper' like this. 'We are conditioned not to' do that, Chuck Rosenberg told me."

In the letter obtained by the Washington Post, Mueller complained that Barr's characterization of the findings “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel team's work, leaving the public with a distorted view of what the Mueller report contains. Barr's April 18 press conference describing the findings in "Trumpian language" prior to releasing the redacted report solidified the perception that Barr was Trump's new Roy Cohn.

Unnamed sources told the Post Mueller did not take issue with public discussions of the Russian investigation section of the report. Meaning Mueller is unhappy with seeing the obstruction of justice investigation into the president's campaign spun as exoneration.

Mueller followed up his letter with a fifteen-minute phone call to Barr:

Justice Department officials said Tuesday that they were taken aback by the tone of Mueller’s letter and that it came as a surprise to them that he had such concerns. Until they received the letter, they believed Mueller was in agreement with them on the process of reviewing the report and redacting certain types of information, a process that took several weeks. Barr has testified to Congress previously that Mueller declined the opportunity to review his four-page memo to lawmakers that distilled the essence of the special counsel’s findings.

Barr appears to have misled Congress as well as the American people on that. The leaked letter has spurred calls for Barr's resignation or impeachment, especially if he refuses to appear before the House Judiciary Committee. One theory on the timing of the leaked letter by "we didn't know" anonymous sources is that Barr allies in the department hope to dampen the impact of his scheduled testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning at 10 a.m. EDT. Barr used strategic delay and disinformation to manage perceptions for the president's benefit before. The leaked letter will dominate the news for days and keep Democrats focused on Barr rather than on the president. (His prepared statement is here. He doubles down on his decision to declare Trump innocent.)

But why Barr would accept this job and defile his reputation and that of his department to protect Donald Trump is as much a mystery as what the sitting president is hiding in his taxes. Barr does not have to face Trump voters in the next election as Republicans on Capitol Hill do. Why did Barr do it?

Trumpism has characteristics of a cult. The power Trump wields over followers is something to behold, and not just among his red-hat, rally faithful. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the former military lawyer, has become a full-fledged, fawning acolyte. Republicans such as Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida are far lesser intellects who live to touch the hem of their master's garment. They will go down with the ship if Trump asks.

But Barr volunteered for this job. While uniquely qualified to run interference for a president, the former attorney general came out of "retirement" to take the attorney general's job Trump offered. His behavior suggests he too is a true believer. In what is unclear.

Now he risks himself to protect the most corrupt president in American history.

First, let's do a head count of Trump associates already caught in the Mueller probe. Here is a list via Vox of those already convicted:

1. Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, on one count of lying to the FBI
2. Rick Gates, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager and Manafort protégé, on one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to FBI agents
3. George Papadopoulos, a low-level Trump foreign policy adviser, for making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the campaign
4. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a possible Trump Organization real estate project in Moscow that was under consideration during the 2016 presidential campaign.
5. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, who pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the US and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone remains the subject of investigation.

Barr's motivations remain a mystery. The fate of many of Trump hangers-on is not. Knowing the list of the indicted keeps growing, last night's news brought to mind John McClane of the Die Hard franchise telling Trump, "I mean, you've GOT to be running out of bad guys by now, right? ... I mean, how does that work? Got some kind of service or something? Some kind of 800 number? 1-800-HENCHMEN?"


Undercover Blue 5/01/2019 06:00:00 AM

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

 
Robert Mueller isn't happy

by digby





Well, well, well it looks like Mueller wasn't happy with his old pal Bill Barr's little damage control strategy:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

At the time the letter was sent on March 27, Barr had announced that Mueller had not found a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Barr also said Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement , Mueller wrote a previously unknown private letter to the Justice Department, which revealed a degree of dissatisfaction with the public discussion of Mueller’s work that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and made some initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.

The context, nature and substance of the report ....

I'm pretty sure that covers pretty much all of it.

Justice Department officials said Tuesday they were taken aback by the tone of Mueller’s letter, and it came as a surprise to them that he had such concerns. Until they received the letter, they believed Mueller was in agreement with them on the process of reviewing the report and redacting certain types of information, a process that took several weeks. Barr has testified to Congress previously that Mueller declined the opportunity to review his four-page letter to lawmakers that distilled the essence of the special counsel’s findings.

In his letter, Mueller wrote that the redaction process “need not delay release of the enclosed materials. Release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation.”

Barr is scheduled to appear Wednesday morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee — a much-anticipated public confrontation between the nation’s top law enforcement official and Democratic lawmakers, where he is likely to be questioned at length about his interactions with Mueller.

A day after the letter was sent, Barr and Mueller spoke by phone for about 15 minutes, according to law enforcement officials.

In that call, Mueller said he was concerned that news coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work, according to Justice Department officials.

When Barr pressed him whether he thought Barr’s letter was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not, but felt that the media coverage of the letter was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.

In their call, Barr also took issue with Mueller calling his letter a “summary,” saying he had never meant his letter to summarize the voluminous report, but instead provide an account of the top conclusions, officials said.

Justice Department officials said in some ways, the phone conversation was more cordial than the letter that preceded it, but they did express some differences of opinion about how to proceed.

Barr said he did not want to put out pieces of the report, but rather issue it all at once with redactions, and didn’t want to change course now, according to officials.

Throughout the conversation, Mueller’s main worry was that the public was not getting an accurate understanding of the obstruction investigation, officials said.

No kidding. I guess we know now why Mueller wasn't there the day Barr held his notorious press conference.


This is big. Mueller was the one person in the whole country who could have truly validated Trump and Barr's interpretation of the report's conclusions.

He didn't.

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digby 4/30/2019 05:00:00 PM

 
It's nice to see Warren's ideas getting some traction

by digby



I know the latest polling of the Democratic field shows Biden getting a sizeable bump since he announced, which doesn't surprise me. He's like an old shoe, familiar and comfortable. A lot of people probably think he presents a return to normal life. ( FWIW, I don't think life will ever go back to that old "normal." But it can go forward to something better....)

But it's a long campaign and I honestly have no idea where it's going to end up. I don't think anyone can realistically guess at this point.But I was happy to see that Warren is finally getting a little love, and it's fair to guess that it's mostly for her policy proposals which are as progressive as it gets.



I don't know if it's enough to carry her all the way --- again, I wouldn't hazard a guess about the race at this point. But if she continues to poll well because of her policy ideas, I think it bodes well for the party going forward. They won't adopt them in whole cloth but they provide a road map for Democratic governance in this era and I hope whoever gets the nod will take her agenda and use it as the basis for his or her agenda.

Of course, it's always possible that the voters will decide they like her too. You never know. I know I do. (Always have ...)


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digby 4/30/2019 03:30:00 PM

 
Ady Barkan is a true hero

by digby

Health care rights activist Ady Barkan took what might be his last big trip to advocate for Medicare for All at a congressional hearing:

The degenerative neurological disease ALS has robbed Ady Barkan of his ability to walk and his ability to talk. But that didn't stop him from traveling across the country, from California to Washington, D.C., to make an impassioned plea for Congress to guarantee universal health care by passing Medicare For All.

As the disease has rendered his diaphragm and tongue too weak to speak, Barkan gave testimony at a Thursday hearing of the House Rules Committee using a synthetic computerized voice.

Barkan delivered heartbreaking opening remarks in which he talked about his diagnosis with the terminal disorder, and how battles with his private insurance company over the treatment he needed has cost him not only of thousands of dollars but also precious time with his family.

"Like so many others, Rachael and I have had to fight with our insurer, which has issued outrageous denials instead of covering the benefits we’ve paid for," Barkan said in his opening remarks, referring to his wife. "We have so little time left together, and yet our system forces us to waste it dealing with bills and bureaucracy. That is why I am here today, urging you to build a more rational, fair, efficient, and effective system. I am here today to urge you to enact Medicare For All."

Tuesday's hearing was on a Medicare For All bill introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), which would move the U.S. to a single-payer health care system where all Americans are able to get health insurance through the government, rather than being forced to rely on private insurance companies.

The bill is just one idea being floated by Democrats, who are working to ensure that the U.S. health care system works better for Americans.

Meanwhile, Republicans, led by Trump, are still leading the effort to make the system worse by weakening key protections created by the Affordable Care Act under former President Barack Obama's tenure.

Trump's Department of Justice has gone as far as joining a lawsuit that calls for the entire law to be repealed — which would cause an estimated 20 million Americans to lose their insurance coverage.

Republicans get very angry when it's suggested that their opposition to guaranteed, universal healthcare will kill people.

It will.

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digby 4/30/2019 02:00:00 PM

 
Fox News sees nothing wrong with this

by digby

This fascist garbage is very much being mainstreamed by the right wing media and the President of the United States:

Fox News is consistantly repeating the white supremacist talking point "immigrants will replace you" and it's not just Tucker and Laura. pic.twitter.com/DsXu2cEXZk

— John Kerr (@JohnnyHeatWave) April 30, 2019

Amanda Marcotte wrote about it on Salon:

Replacement theory is an elaborate conspiracy theory that is just as unhinged as it is hateful. Adherents believe that a cabal of secretive Jews are deliberately trying to undermine white hegemony by pushing anti-racism and feminism and other such social justice notions, sneeringly derided by white nationalists as "cultural Marxism." These Jewish conspirators, the theory continues, exploit feminism to trick white women into having fewer babies while pushing for "open borders," and all this is aimed toward the ultimate goal of "replacing" white people with Jews and people of color.

As civil rights organizer Eric Ward told Salon last year, white nationalists simply cannot accept that women and people of color are smart enough to agitate for equality and social justice all on their own, and therefore blame "a global conspiracy by Jews" for masterminding the whole thing.

Every piece of this conspiracy theory is now being championed, in one form or another, on Fox News and by other conservative luminaries, such as Canadian psychology professor-turned-reactionary darling Jordan Peterson.

The idea that immigrants from Asia and Latin America threaten to dislodge white people from their supposedly rightful roles and "replace" them has become a constant refrain on Fox News. Ingraham and Carlson repeatedly characterize immigration as an "invasion" and present the demographic shifts that come from immigration as inherently negative and a threat to "normal" (aka white) Americans.

As anyone even slightly familiar with American history knows, similar arguments were leveled against Italian, Irish and even German immigrants in the past. What's frustrating about this argument is that of course it's true that immigration causes cultural change. Spaghetti with marinara sauce used to be considered a novel and exotic dish in America, for instance. Garlic and sour cream were unknown commodities outside their relevant ethnic enclaves. What's blatantly wrong is the interpretation of these changes as a threat, when the broader truth is that cultural change is both inevitable and beneficiary, in ways both small (spaghetti is tasty!) and tremendous (technologies like TV and computers could not have been developed without the "globalism" that white nationalists decry).

While Fox News hosts avoid directly accusing Jews of running this supposed conspiracy, they certainly employ a lot of euphemistic terms that gesture in that direction. Carlson, for instance, talks a lot aboutthe "ruling class" and the "elites," terms that many liberal commentators and journalists may assume refer to the billionaire and ultra-millionaire class that uses its wealth to manipulate our political systems.

Carlson encourages this reading, particularly in interviews with progressive outlets like Salon, but there's good reason to be skeptical that's how his actual audience reads these terms. Carlson's rhetoric tends to evoke not the actual super-rich, but a "liberal elite" compromised more of middle-class professionals like college professors and public intellectuals than the truly wealthy. Carlson tries to confuse this issue by name-checking a handful of billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros (both Jewish, by the way) who are are culturally identified as relatively progressive, while ignoring the larger class of billionaires like the Kochs, the Waltons, the Adelsons, the DeVoses and other ultra-rich Americans (including Fox News' ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch) who tend to be more supportive of Republicans and right-wing causes.

Carlson and Ingraham lean heavily on these vague euphemisms to insinuate that liberal-minded, middle-class urban professionals are somehow more "elite" than right-wing billionaires. Full-blown white nationalists like the shooter simply take this to the next level, by explicitly blaming Jews. But the basic conspiracy theory is the same: A shadowy group of "elites" is out to destroy white Christian America, and they're using progressive ideology, feminism and immigration to accomplish that goal.


While most conservatives tend to dislike feminism because they see it as an assault on traditional gender roles, white nationalists claim to see feminism as an aspect of the Jewish plot to undermine America. They argue that feminist movements for reproductive rights and equal pay are about distracting white women from their main duty in life, which is of course to perpetuate the white race.

Sure enough, this idea is starting to pop up on Carlson's show. He's begun to paint abortion rights as a conspiracy perpetrated by those vague "elites" in order to divert women into paid employment and away from their supposedly natural inclination to stay home and raise a bevy of children. Carlson has also tied day care into this supposed plot, arguing that it's just being "used to justify more immigration," again tying together the idea that America must stay white and that keeping women out of the workplace is an important element in accomplishing that.

When you have a president who brags about assaulting women and praises Nazi sympathizers as very fine people who are just trying to preserve their heritage, it's not surprising to see this sort of thing escalating into violence.

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digby 4/30/2019 12:30:00 PM

 
Trumpies never leave a penny on the sidewalk.

by digby



They have to pocket every last one, no matter what:

The day before special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted his report to the Justice Department last month, Washington was abuzz with what revelations it might contain about contacts between the 2016 Trump campaign and foreign officials. But President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, was an ocean away, delivering a paid speech to a room full of Romanian politicians and policy elites.

Legal analysts said that Parscale’s visit breaks no laws so long as he does not do any lobbying in the United States on behalf of foreign clients without registering. But ethics experts said any money changing hands between foreign citizens and campaign officials created an obstacle course of potential risks. And some ethics lawyers worried that Parscale’s engagement — which received little attention outside Romania at the time — is a sign that the 2016 Trump campaign’s freewheeling approach to foreign contacts may be carrying over to its 2020 successor.

“The appearances are terrible,” said Richard Painter, a chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush. “You would certainly think that a campaign manager would not take money from foreign nationals in this political environment.”

Trump has not banned his campaign officials from taking money from foreign sources, and the campaign declined to comment about any changes it has made this cycle to encourage caution in dealing with foreign entities.

In a statement, Parscale said the “handful of international speeches” he has delivered gave him a chance to see the world with his wife and recuperate from campaign responsibilities.

“We did not grow up with the opportunity to travel internationally, and speaking opportunities have allowed me to share my talent with other professionals in a university setting while having a brief break from the rigorous campaign schedule that I maintain,” Parscale said. “This speaking engagement was fully vetted and approved through the necessary channels in advance.”

He added: “This is yet another effort by the biased fake news media to systematically target another person in President Trump’s orbit.”

Parscale did not respond to a question about how much he had been paid in Romania — a trip sponsored by McCann/Thiess Conferences, an event-planning partnership co-founded by Romanian businessman Adrian Thiess and the Bucharest outpost of the McCann international marketing firm. Parscale also would not say how he decides which foreign engagements to accept. Parscale is listed with the Worldwide Speakers Group, an Alexandria-based agency. Its website notes his speaking fee as $15,000 to $25,000 and promotes his insider’s perspective as Trump’s 2016 digital media director.

Since 2016, Parscale has also spoken at conferences in Portugal, Monaco and Croatia.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany emphasized that Parscale was traveling “as a private citizen” and “followed the Trump campaign’s approval process governing invitations for outside speaking engagements.”

Here you have an administration under siege for its private relationships with foreign governments and they just keep on doing it, no matter what. According to the article, nobody can think of an example of someone doing this during a campaign because of the obvious appearance of influence peddling. But then, if Parscale waits until afterwards, Trump might lose and he wouldn't make as much money, amirite? It's amazing how much money you can make off the presidency if you have absolutely no shame.

And I'm sure the "Trump campaign approval process" is extremely arduous. The only question is how much of a cut they have to give the president.

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digby 4/30/2019 11:00:00 AM

 
The WH is pushing the Democrats closer to impeachment whether they like it or not

by digby




My Salon column this morning:

People in the media and politics bemoan the cynicism of our age, saying that people vote for a liar like Donald Trump because they believe all politicians lie and he's just more colorful about it. This era is producing men and women of such grandiose mendacity that it will be a miracle if the next generation believes that anyone in politics is even capable of acting in the national interest. It's possible that Robert Mueller may be the last of his kind in the GOP and I'm not all that sure about him either. We'll have to see how this plays out to know whether Mueller pulled too many punches but for the moment he's all we have left of a "just the facts ma'am" Republican straight arrow.

You certainly cannot say the same for his friend William Barr, the new attorney general. He has proved to be the most rank partisan in that role since John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's attorney general, who spent 19 months in jail for his part in the Watergate scandal. Even though I had my suspicions that Barr had spent too much time in the right-wing fever swamps, based upon the notorious unsolicited memo he sent to the White House and his comments to the news media, like most people I was hoping that he would be one of those old-school "institutionalist" types who would look at the evidence in the Mueller report and be as appalled by this norm-busting, law-breaking, power-abusing president as the entire world has been since it was released.

It turns out that we were not cynical enough. Not by a long shot. Rather than acting as an independent upholder of the law, serving the people, Barr is proving to be the most servile of all Trump's henchmen. He's not even as independent as the multiple yes-men in the administration who failed to follow Trump's orders but stayed on anyway. Barr seems to see himself as the president's trusted legal consigliere, helping him to avoid getting caught for his crimes. The president truly has found his new Roy Cohn, Trump's notorious mentor and personal lawyer who was eventually disbarred for egregious unethical conduct.

From the four-page "Barr letter" and its fatuous conclusion that Trump did not obstruct justice to the pre-release press conference in which Barr attempted to spin the report in the president's favor, the attorney general has been doing damage control. Over the last week, as Trump has said he will fight every request and every subpoena, Barr is now running interference between the Justice Department and the Congress. He is refusing to appear before the House Judiciary Committee unless chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., shelves his plan to have part of the session run by committee counsel and hold a part of the hearing in closed session. Apparently Barr does not like the idea that the legal staff could follow up closely with a line of inquiry. He prefers the disjointed five-minute questioning format that never gets anywhere, which is a sad statement coming from the attorney general of the United States.

If Barr can't face a committee lawyer, perhaps he's not really fit to be the top law enforcement officer in the federal government. The Judiciary Committee lawyers interviewed many of the other participants in the Russia investigation, including former FBI director James Comey, in closed session. The only difference with Barr is that this will be a public hearing, which one might expect the self-described most transparent government in history to be happy to accommodate.

Barr has been around long enough to remember all the times that congressional committees had counsel question witnesses, including cabinet members. It most famously happened during the Watergate hearings when lawyers like Sam Dash and Richard Ben-Veniste became national figures, holding the president's men's feet to the fire. Chief counsel to the Senate's Iran-Contra committee, Arthur Liman, led the questioning in that inquiry. And considering that just a few months ago, the Republicans hired an outside attorney to question Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, it's entirely absurd that Barr is balking.

Nadler refused to change his plans, explaining patiently that witnesses aren't allowed to dictate procedure to congressional committees, nor is the attorney general allowed to dictate to the legislative branch. (The Trump administration remains very confused about the separation of powers in general.) Nadler says he'll issue a subpoena if Barr refuses to show up. There is some talk about holding the hearings with an empty chair which would be very silly and unproductive.

Robert Costa of the Washington Post reported on MSNBC on Monday that Republican sources tell him the Democrats are being "political" and have no right to hold hearings that are impeachment inquiries in all but name. I think we know how to solve that problem, don't we?

Barr's outrageous behavior and the White House attempts to stonewall all forms of oversight are pushing the Democrats toward impeachment, whether they want it or not. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., a member of the House Democratic policy leadership team who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, “If we can’t fact-gather, we’re going to have to use the other tools at our disposal and make sure our oversight responsibilities are respected.”

Lieu added, "If it turns out we can’t investigate because the White House is not complying with anything that Congress requests, then I think the caucus would support an article of impeachment on obstructing Congress in order to maximize our court position.” As Sargent points out, Democrats have already said that fact-gathering and accountability is their mission for the moment, "but if Trump won’t allow that, they can threaten an impeachment inquiry in response, and note quite correctly that Trump is forcing them into it."

The third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon was for defying congressional subpoenas and oversight. Trump may be leaving Congress no choice but to do that again, if only to defend its own constitutional prerogatives. For a president with an approval rating that's been hovering around 40% for his entire tenure, that's a risky strategy.

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digby 4/30/2019 09:30:00 AM

 

"The biggest thing in transparency since transparency began"

by Tom Sullivan

He really, really does not want authorities peeking behind his gold curtains:

President Donald Trump and his family are suing Deutsche Bank and Capital One to block subpoenas issued by House Democrats seeking Trump’s financial records.

In the federal lawsuit filed Monday in New York, Trump’s lawyers argued that the subpoenas serve “no legitimate or lawful purpose.”

Trump hopes to quash efforts to examine bank records relating to the Trump Organization. Deutsche Bank has lent Trump more than $312 million since 2012. The loans helped Trump purchase properties and refinance old loans at a time no one else would lend him money. With Trump's history of bankruptcies and stiffing contractors, he is a notoriously bad risk. And yet Deutsche Bank continued to lend him money.

Why does Obama believe he shouldn't comply with record releases that his predecessors did of their own volition? Hiding something?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2012

Democrats are looking “into allegations of potential foreign influence on the US political process,” said Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

The sitting president's attorneys call that harassment, and the subpoenas “unlawful and illegitimate,” a "sweeping, lawless, invasion of privacy,” reports the Washington Post:

“This isn’t a close legal question,” said David Alan Sklansky, a professor at Stanford Law School. “I’m quite confident there has never been a situation where a congressional subpoena has been quashed without a finding that it violates a constitutional right.”

The claim that there is no legitimate need for the subpoena, or that it is politically motivated, is a “frivolous argument, even if it’s true,” he said. “That is not a basis for quashing a subpoena.”

In filing the suit on behalf of Trump's sons Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump, his daughter Ivanka Trump, and the Trump Organization, the president's attorneys, revealed details about what information Congress wants:

According to the suit, the request to Deutsche Bank — the president’s largest creditor — includes account records and other information related to “parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, branches, divisions, partnerships, properties, groups, special purpose entities, joint ventures, predecessors, successors or any other entity in which they have or had a controlling interest.”

For perspective, recall that The 10,000 Falsehoods Man claims he and his White House are committed to transparency.

“What I want is I want total transparency…. You have to have transparency,” Trump said in May last year in opening up a sensitive intelligence briefing on a confidential human source.

“All I want to do is be transparent,” Trump said in September 2018 when releasing classified documents related to the Russia inquiry.

Before leaving on Air Force One on Friday, Trump declared, “[I]n the history of our country, there has never been a President that’s been more transparent than me or the Trump administration.”

And finally, from Aaron Rupar:

Trump flagrantly lies to reporters while explaining why he doesn't plan to comply with subpoenas from Congress: "I have been the most transparent president and administration in the history of our country by far."

His tax returns couldn't be immediately reached for comment. pic.twitter.com/THfvluVawR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2019

He is big. It's the investigations that got small.


Undercover Blue 4/30/2019 06:00:00 AM

Monday, April 29, 2019

 
Infrastructure kabuki

by digby




I understand why Democrats will take this meeting. They feel they need to be seen as being willing to govern even if it means working with Trump. But if they give him this win, no matter what it is, they can kiss 2020 good-bye. We only have 18 months to go and infrastructure can wait until after the election. I'm sure they must know this, right?

And, by the way, everything this article quotes from the White House is pure bullshit designed to divide the Democrats and pressure them into committing political suicide.

But they know that too, right?

At last month's St. Patrick's Day lunch in the Capitol, President Trump told Richard Neal, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House's tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, that he wants to spend close to $2 trillion on infrastructure, according to two sources to whom Neal recounted his conversation.

Trump's 2020 Budget calls for just $200 billion in additional infrastructure spending. A spokesperson for Neal did not comment on this reporting. A former senior White House official told me that on infrastructure, Trump's instincts are much closer to Elizabeth Warren's than they are to his tight-fisted acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

Trump meets on Tuesday with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to discuss infrastructure. These meetings usually amount to nothing besides a media circus. But Democrats still take these meetings — in fact, Pelosi requested this one — because they know that, left to his own devices, Trump would happily spend a ton of federal money on infrastructure. (It's his own party that won't let him.)

The dirty secret — which multiple senior White House officials have confirmed to me — is that Trump hates the infrastructure plan his own White House released last year. In private, he has referred to it dismissively as "Gary's plan," a shot at his former top economic adviser Gary Cohn.

The heart of "Gary's plan" was to build infrastructure through "public-private partnerships" — leveraging a modest amount of government spending to stimulate private investment in projects around the country.

Democratic leaders have no interest in public-private partnerships. Neither does Trump. Even though he himself has benefited richly from public-private partnerships (as with the Trump International Hotel in D.C.), he has told aides he thinks they don't work and that they need to spend real federal money instead.

Behind the scenes: Trump came into office imagining a presidency in which new projects — "built by the Trump administration" — would be erected all over the country, sources close to him tell me.

"There was a genuine naïveté about the prospect of Democrats and Republicans coming together to do something on a grand scale with infrastructure," a former White House official told me. "It was one of those things where Trump said it was gonna be easy. He really thought so."

In an early 2017 infrastructure meeting at the White House with his friend, New York real estate billionaire Richard LeFrak, Trump laid out his grand Trumpian vision. "They say Eisenhower was the greatest infrastructure president. They named the highway system after him," Trump said, per a source who was in the room. "But we're going to do double, triple, quadruple, what Eisenhower did."

What's next? Nobody will come into the Tuesday meeting with an infrastructure plan, according to White House, administration and Democratic leadership sources who’ve discussed the meeting plans with me. And there are no plans to present even a top-line figure or a list of ways to offset new spending.

"The whole thing comes under the heading of an ongoing discussion," a senior administration official with direct knowledge of the plans for Tuesday's meeting told me. "Nobody wants to lay down specific markers. Nobody wants to rule in; nobody wants to rule out."

The White House team working on the issue — led by Larry Kudlow — seems much less excited than Democrats are about new, large-scale federal spending on infrastructure. Instead, they are focused on cutting permitting regulations, making it easier to spur energy development, and signing a longer-term transportation funding bill.

It's all bullshit. But I'm afraid I will never be able to totally trust Democrats not to tie their own hands in pursuit of a grand bargain.


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digby 4/29/2019 05:00:00 PM

 
"This is the way you treat your friends?"

by digby



Maria Bartiromo asked Trump about this:

Maria Bartiromo asked Napolitano about this when he joined her on Fox Business, but he shrugged it off and asked “This is the way you treat your friends? How do you treat your enemies?”

Napolitano said the tweets pertained to a series of conversations he had with Trump when the latter was president-elect and trying to figure out who should take Antonin Scalia‘s place on the Supreme Court. Napolitano said that when he described how Neil Gorsuch had the judicial qualities Trump was looking for, the president-elect supposedly turned to him and said: “sounds like you’re describing yourself.”

“I said ‘no, no, I’m not describing myself,'” Napolitano recalled. “‘I’m describing Neil Gorsuch because you have this list of people from which you want to choose, and Judge Gorsuch is the person that I think most of your advisers are going to point to.'”

In terms of the “pardon” situation, Napolitano said Trump once asked for his opinion about the conviction of a “mutual friend” of theirs. Napolitano said he thought that the conviction was just, to which, Trump offered “a very strong term” to express his disagreement.

“He said ‘You know this person as well as I do. Call this person up and tell this person he’s going to be on the list of pardons that I will seriously consider.’ That was the extent of that conversation.”

Napolitano concluded by saying Trump’s comments were a “brilliant” way to divert attention from his Mueller commentary.

I don't know who this "mutual friend" is but if it's Cohen or Manafort it's more evidence of a crime.

Oh, and Trump has no friends. None. He has sycophants.

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digby 4/29/2019 03:30:00 PM

 

Another fine member of Jared's posse

by digby

This Natasha Bertrand story about one of Jared's buddies from the Mueller Report is just more evidence of what a lowlife he is. He's an egomaniac with no intelligence and no ethics. No wonder Ivanka married him. He's just like daddy:

Jared Kushner needed help. 

It was March 2016 and Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald Trump, was steamrolling to the Republican presidential nomination. But the businessman-candidate was taking heat for his campaign’s lack of foreign policy expertise, something Kushner was trying to remedy.

That’s when he found a Russian willing to assist. 

On March 14, 2016, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Kushner attended a lunch in Manhattan in honor of Henry Kissinger. Also in attendance was a tall, bearded Russian émigré with a booming voice. His name was Dmitri Simes, and for nearly 20 years he had been president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy think tank. 

Simes had been a Washington fixture since he left the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, obtained U.S. citizenship, and served as an informal foreign policy adviser to President Richard Nixon. A longtime advocate of warmer U.S.-Russia relations, he was also dogged by criticism that he was notably sympathetic to Moscow’s views. 

Kushner and Simes met at the lunch and began communicating, including in a meeting at Kushner’s office later that month. Although the Trump campaign never identified Simes as an adviser, he provided counsel to the Trump team, particularly with regard to Russia. In June 2016, Mueller found, he sent a memo to then-Senator Jeff Sessions, who headed up Trump’s foreign policy team, offering several policy recommendations, including “a new beginning with Moscow,” and in August he would send Kushner himself a “Russia policy memo.”

In April of that year, CNI hosted Trump’s first genuine foreign policy address, attended by Russia’s U.S. ambassador, in which the candidate offered a similar message. Mueller also discovered that Simes also offered Kushner disparaging information about former President Bill Clinton. 

The Simes-Kushner relationship was outlined in detail by Mueller’s report, which mentions Simes over 100 times. While the report concluded that Simes did not act as a campaign intermediary with Moscow, and did not allege that he works at the behest of the Kremlin, it did note that Simes and CNI have “many contacts with current and former Russian government officials.” 

To Simes’ allies the report was, as Trump might say, a total exoneration that should end the speculation over his Simes background and motivations: “I think what is in the report is very clear,” said Paul Saunders, a former CNI executive director and current board member. “They did not find evidence that he or the center were involved in passing any messages back and forth between the campaign and Russia. More than that, the report states that he advised the Trump campaign against hidden contacts with Russia.” 

Even so, former U.S. officials and people who know Simes say Mueller’s report is a fresh reminder that he is at best a mysterious—and at worst alarming—player in Washington’s foreign policy community. Depending on who you ask, he is either a shrewd foreign policy realist dedicated to defusing tensions between his birth-nation and the one where he chose to make a life — or a Kremlin advocate who cloaks his true agenda in Washington, D.C.

Of course, Kushner went in this direction. His wife undoubtedly told him that the Trump Org was planning some big projects in Moscow and greasing the skids with pro-Russia advisers would be a smart move.

The presidential campaign was conceived as a marketing plan, first and foremost. And Jared was in on it.

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digby 4/29/2019 02:00:00 PM

 
QOTD: Michael Cohen

by digby

You are going to find me guilty of campaign finance, with McDougal or Stormy, and give me three years—really? And how come I’m the only one? I didn’t work for the campaign. I worked for him. And how come I’m the one that’s going to prison? I’m not the one that slept with the porn star.

He's got a point. Trump is getting away with murder as he has his whole life. But then again, Cohen said he'd take a bullet for him ...

That quote is from the Jeffrey Toobin interview with Cohen in the New Yorker. I know he's a rotten person. He eagerly did Trump's dirty work for years.  But I do feel sorry for him. He's paying a huge price. And Trump is ... not.

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digby 4/29/2019 12:30:00 PM