Heather Cox Richardson

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February 11, 2020 (Tuesday)

As predicted, yesterday’s calm was short-lived. There were three major news items today but, put together, they added up to a surprisingly coherent narrative.

The first story was that one that has taken the media by storm: the Department of Justice, under Attorney General William Barr, today stepped into the sentencing of Trump advisor Roger Stone to reverse the recommendation the department had made yesterday.

In November, a jury convicted Stone of seven counts of obstructing and lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses concerning his role connecting the Trump campaign with Wikileaks in 2016. Career prosecutors in the Justice Department yesterday followed federal guidelines to recommend that the judge sentence him to between 7 and 9 years in prison. After they made this recommendation, Trump tweeted that the recommendations for the sentencing of his friend were “very unfair,” a “miscarriage of justice,” and a “ridiculous 9 year sentence recommendation.” Today, the department submitted a revision to its recommendation, telling the judge the previous recommendation was “excessive and unwarranted.”

It appears the Justice Department attorneys on this case learned about the revision by hearing it on the Fox News Channel. As soon as they heard, four of them—Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, and Michael Marando-- filed paperwork to be removed from the case, and one, Jonathan Kravis, resigned his position as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., going back to his home base as an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this event.

The Department of Justice is supposed to defend the rule of law in America. It is not supposed to be swayed by political pressure, and traditionally, communicates with the White House only very generally, and never about specific cases. It is emphatically not the role of the Justice Department to work with the president, but rather its job is to guarantee equality before the law for everyone in America. The Attorney General is the lawyer for the American people, theoretically, while the White House Counsel is the lawyer for the office of the president. In addition, the president can have his or her own personal lawyers. But the idea that the Attorney General is working for the president undermines the whole idea of the impartial justice on which our body of laws rests.

I can’t resist noting here that, while the Constitution established an office of the Attorney General, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill creating the Department of Justice in 1870 to try to preserve the rights of African Americans in the South after the Civil War. The department’s first assignment was to stop the Ku Klux Klan in the South, and it did, indicting more than 3000 people and winning more than 600 convictions as it tried to reestablish the rule of law in the former Confederacy. That history reflects that the role of the Department of Justice is really about upholding the rule of law, not about doing any particular president’s bidding.

Even while this is going on, pundits noted that the judge, Amy Berman Jackson, whom Stone attacked online, apparently to try to get her to withdraw from the case, and then apologized when she didn’t, was unlikely to be moved by the revision. Tonight, though, Trump tweeted “Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!” (Jackson did not put Manafort in solitary confinement.) Hillary Clinton retorted: “Do you realize intimidating judges is the behavior of failed-state fascists? Just asking!”

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tweeted that Trump had “engaged in political interference in the sentencing of Roger Stone. It is outrageous that DOJ has deeply damaged the rule of law by withdrawing its recommendation. Stepping down of prosecutors should be commended & actions of DOJ should be investigated.” Trump instantly responded “Who are the four prosecutors (Mueller people?) who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence to a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam and shouldn’t ever even have started? 13 Angry Democrats?”

(As an aside, can I just say I long, with every fiber of my being, for the days when profound political fights were not conducted by tweet?)

Pundits agree that this is a uniquely terrifying moment. But for all tonight’s outrage, it is not clear that Trump holds all the cards. As former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara noted, the judge could insist on hearing from the withdrawing prosecutors before she lets them quit. We will know more tomorrow.

The second major story—although it is not being treated as such—is that the Trump administration has withdrawn the nomination of Elaine McCusker for the position of Pentagon Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer. Her confirmation hearing was scheduled for Thursday. Recently released emails show that McCusker pushed back on Trump’s order to withhold money from Ukraine and warned officials that they were likely breaking the law. While the White House is suggesting they are withdrawing the nomination because McCusker is not sufficiently loyal to Trump, the timing makes it likely that they do not want her in a confirmation hearing before the Senate, where she can be asked about the Ukraine Scandal.

And the third major story is the New Hampshire primaries. Before I talk about them, let me note that I am approaching them as a historian looking for patterns, rather than as a modern-day partisan, and I cannot tell you how much I don’t want to be swarmed with supporters of one candidate or another screaming at me that I’m wrong. Yes. I could be wrong. And no, I am neither thrilled by what I see, nor endorsing any candidate. But I will note what I see nonetheless in the hope it will be of interest to some of you. Dismiss it at will.

What has grabbed headlines tonight is that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent, has won the New Hampshire Democratic primary. But if you dig a little deeper, the New Hampshire primary showed something very interesting. Progressive candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren won 35% of the vote in New Hampshire, while the moderates—Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Joe Biden-- won 53% of the vote. Now, for all the fact that we pay such deep attention to Iowa and New Hampshire, those states are emphatically not representative of either Democratic voters or of the United States at large. But it is not inappropriate to see groupings at this point, and to note that Democratic votes seem to be resting on candidates perceived to be moderate rather than those perceived to be more progressive. Super Tuesday, March 3 this year, when 14 states vote for presidential candidates, will tell us more about the preferred Democrat, not least because former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg has saved his firepower for that contest.

But my guess is that the headlines trumpeting Sanders at this point are missing the larger story that today revealed so clearly. Americans are just sick of Trump, sick of his attempts to undermine the rule of law, and eager simply for a return to a stable government that does not produce constant drama. That the White House is so eager to keep McCusker from testifying before the Senate that they are withdrawing her nomination suggests that the drama is not yet over, and will not be over, for a long time.

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February 12, 2020 (Wednesday), Lincoln’s Birthday

The major news story today is the same as yesterday’s: the unprecedented and dangerous politicization of the Department of Justice.

The man at the center of this crisis, Attorney General William Barr, is a proponent of what is called the unitary executive theory. This theory says that the president wields the sole power of the executive branch of government, and cannot be checked by either Congress or the courts. That theory has led him to argue that President George H. W. Bush did not need congressional approval to invade Iraq. Later, he backed Bush’s pardons of the Reagan officials charged in the Iran-contra affair.

That theory apparently has him firmly in Trump’s camp, despite the fact that the Department of Justice, which he oversees, is supposed to be nonpolitical.

So why the sudden crisis? On Monday, February 10, prosecutors in the Justice Department wrote to Judge Amy Berman Jackson to recommend jail time of 7 to 9 years for Trump’s friend and Republican self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone, whom a jury found guilty of seven counts of lying to Congress and witness tampering during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. This recommendation fell within standard department guidelines.

In their filing, they outlined the case: Before the 2016 election, Stone repeatedly reached out to Wikileaks “to obtain information… that would help the Trump campaign and harm the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.” Campaign officials “believed that Stone was providing them with nonpublic information about WikiLeaks’ plans. Indeed, [Steve] Bannon viewed Stone as the Trump campaign’s access point to WikiLeaks.” Stone lied to Congress five times, interfering with their Russia investigation, and threatened another witness to try to keep him from exposing Stone’s lies.

The prosecutors noted: “Investigations into election interference concern our national security, the integrity of our democratic processes, and the enforcement of our nation’s criminal laws. These are issues of paramount concern to every citizen of the United States. Obstructing such critical investigations thus strikes at the very heart of our American democracy.”

Immediately after the sentencing recommendation, though, Trump tweeted that it was “horrible and unfair” and a “miscarriage of justice.” Trump and Stone go way back, and Stone’s business partner Paul Manafort, at loose ends after the Ukraine oligarch whom he had helped to get into the presidency was ousted, joined Trump’s floundering campaign and turned it around.

The Department then reversed itself, saying its own prosecutors had failed to be “reasonable.”

In response, on Tuesday, all four of the federal prosecutors responsible for Roger Stone’s case withdrew: Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed and Mike Marando. Kravis and Zelinsky resigned from the D.C. US attorney’s office altogether. Zelinsky, who had worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, will return to the Baltimore U.S. attorney’s office, from which he had come. (I got these men mixed up yesterday).

This is a huge statement.

Also on Tuesday, the administration abruptly withdrew the nomination of the former U.S. attorney who oversaw the Stone prosecution, Jessie Liu, for a top position in the Treasury Department. Barr had replaced her with Tim Shea, a Trump loyalist, last month. It appears that Barr is hamstringing the Department of Justice to make sure that no one can touch the president.

For his part, Trump is deliberately demonstrating his power over the Justice Department. While some DOJ officials tried to maintain that the call for a lighter sentence for Stone had been in the works for a while, Trump this morning tweeted: “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!” (The charge that Mueller lied to Congress is astonishing, and Trump has provided no evidence to back it up.)

This crisis has brought back onto the radar screen Barr’s actions since he took office almost exactly a year ago.

In his confirmation hearing, Senators pressed Barr about his stance on the relationship between the Justice Department and the White House, and he insisted that he would not permit the department to be politicized. Asked explicitly about the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign, Barr pledged that he would not impede the investigation and that he would disclose as much as he could of the forthcoming Report. Senators confirmed him by a vote of 54-45 with few senators crossing party lines. He took office on February 14, 2019.

Almost immediately, Barr had to deal with the Mueller Report. On March 22, Barr notified Congress that Mueller’s investigation was complete, and on March 24, he wrote a letter summarizing what the Report said. In his summary, he emphasized the Report’s conclusion that “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Barr turned that careful statement into an exoneration of the president and his team when, in fact, the Report established first that the Russian government had illegally intervened in the election to benefit Trump, and second, that the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller’s team had concluded it could not prove a criminal case, in part because “several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation….”

On March 27, Mueller wrote to Barr saying that his letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Report. On April 18, Barr delivered the Report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and promised to make it available to the public. He held a press conference in which he said that Mueller cleared the president of “collusion” with the Russians. (“Collusion” is not a legal term, and Mueller said explicitly that they did not look at it.) Still, Barr emphasized again “the Special Counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations. In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign “collusion” with the Russian government’s hacking.”

Since then, it appears that Barr has worked to consolidate his own control over cases involving Trump or his associates. He appointed his own investigator, John Durham, to try to prove that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that hacked our 2016 election (our intelligence community has established definitively that it was Russia). Also, under him, Senior DOJ officials worked to change the sentencing recommendation for Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Lev Parnas (who is not a reliable reporter) claims Barr was in on the scheme to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Joe Biden. And we learned earlier this week that the DOJ has set up a system to receive information from Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani which he insists ties Hunter Biden into a corrupt scheme.

All of this seems a bit in the weeds, but it is a huge red flag for our democracy. If our Department of Justice is corrupted by loyalty to Donald Trump rather than maintaining its traditional loyalty to impartial justice, another pillar of our three branches of government is tottering.

Judge Jackson is scheduled to sentence Stone on February 20.

Also available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

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And we never saw the full report. We only ever got the heavily redacted version. Plus, no tax returns. Plus no witnesses in the impeachment trial. Talk about a sham government! This isn’t a democracy. This is a non-aucracy. Completely dysfunctional, tainted by loyalism to one man. I can’t wait until they are all rotting in jail. Relish the thought!

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That last line isn’t in bold in her original post (though maybe it should be), don’t know why bbs did that.

All of this seems a bit in the weeds, but it is a huge red flag for our democracy. If our Department of Justice is corrupted by loyalty to Donald Trump rather than maintaining its traditional loyalty to impartial justice, another pillar of our three branches of government is tottering.

Scary shit indeed. If Barr is ensuring that Trump can do whatever he wants, what’s to stop him from overturning an election result if he loses?

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Or jailing his opponents and their supporters during the election.

I suppose the thing that stops him is us. We walk out and refuse to comply, en masse. Then it would need to transform from casual mass resistance to organized mass resistance, or we’ll all just be sitting in jails ourselves.

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I hope that’s not the only option, given that most Americans have been so well trained now into a docile inability to imagine themselves taking to the streets. I just can’t see it happening, until things get really, really bad in material terms.

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In Markdown, If the next line of text is any number of dashes, it will become a heading


This will be a heading
--

This will be a heading

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Also, any line preceded by two hashtags will be a heading

## This is a heading

This is a heading

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Ah ha!

Meaningless extra letters cuz bbs has a silly character minimum

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Royalists have always done well in the US./s

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Yeah, clever, but the current ones are so far doing really “well.”

Still waiting for the Democratic “resistance” to start resisting effectively. Or at least more vociferously.

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Yup. Any minute now…

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February 13, 2020 (Thursday)

Since the Senate acquitted him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, Trump seems to feel untouchable, and he is trying to consolidate his power.

On his calendar today was that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was to meet with him at the White House, and Trump used the occasion to threaten the governor. Before the meeting, Trump tweeted that Cuomo “must understand that National Security far exceeds politics. New York must stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harassment, start cleaning itself up, and lowering taxes. Build relationships, but don’t bring Fredo!”

This is alarming.

Trump is referring here to two things: the fact that his administration has stopped New York’s ability to participate in the Global Entry and other programs available to international travelers on the one hand; and New York’s many lawsuits against Trump and his businesses, on the other. The New York state attorney general Letitia James has subpoenaed Trump’s financial records from Deutsche Bank, the only bank willing to lend to him after his many bankruptcies, an institution linked to money laundering. She has just won a $2 million settlement from his disbanded “charitable foundation” for misusing funds, and is also looking into Trump Organization business practices. Trump is clearly suggesting that he will retaliate against New Yorkers unless its officials back off.

This is precisely what the House impeachment managers warned of in their impeachment trial brief: “An acquittal would… provide license to President Trump and his successors to use taxpayer dollars for personal political ends … Presidents could also hold hostage federal funds earmarked for States — such as money for natural disasters, highways, and healthcare — unless and until State officials perform personal political favors,” and the House impeachment managers called it out. Jerrold Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee tweeted: “Dear @SenateGOP, This is what another quid pro quo by the President of the United States looks like.”

Also today, the fallout continued from Attorney General William Barr’s interference in the sentencing recommendations for Trump’s associate and self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone. The outcry against this politicization of the Department of Justice has increased pressure on the administration. Jessie Liu was the US attorney who oversaw Roger Stone’s prosecution. She left for the Treasury Department with the promise of a Senate-confirmed position after being replaced by one of Barr’s proteges, Timothy Shea. But the White House yanked her nomination for the position of under secretary for terrorism and financial crimes on Wednesday. Today we learned that she has resigned from the Treasury Department, effective last night.

In the wake of this crisis, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, let loose on the president in a speech at Drew University in New Jersey. He defended Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified about the content of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky: “We teach them, Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss,” he said, indicating that Trump’s phone call with Zelensky undercut U.S. policy and national security. In a comment reflecting that people are moving away from association with Trump, Kelly suggested that he had worked for the president only to protect the country.

Piling on, today the Senate, in a bipartisan vote, agreed to limit the president’s ability to go to war with Iran without congressional approval. Despite Trump’s tweet saying “We are doing very well with Iran and this is not the time to show weakness. If my hands were tied, Iran would have a field day. Sends a very bad signal. The Democrats are only doing this as an attempt to embarrass the Republican Party”— the vote was not even particularly close, 55-45.

Barr seems fully aware of how damaging this event has been to the credibility of both the Department of Justice and to himself. He did an interview today with ABC News, in which he appeared to lambast the president for his tweets about Stone’s sentencing. He said that Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case,” (an interesting hedge), but that his tweets made it “impossible for me to do my job.” He said “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”

It sounded noble, but Barr’s interview was clearly damage control.

Trump gave away the game when White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who has yet to hold a press conference, by the way, although she’s been on the job since July 1 of last year, said Trump has “full faith and confidence in Attorney General Barr to do his job and uphold the law” and he “wasn’t bothered by the comments at all and he has the right, just like any American citizen, to publicly offer his opinions.”

Watch what people do, not what they say. If Barr were really interested in rebuking the president, he could’ve done so forcefully, in private. So why a sudden interview when he has been carrying water for Trump since he took office, as I outlined last night? He and the White House are clearly concerned about how much pushback this Interference into the Stone sentencing recommendation has attracted.

Trump did not stop, though, and went after the forewoman of the jury that found Stone guilty, tweeting: “Now it looks like the fore person in the jury, in the Roger Stone case, had significant bias. Add that to everything else, and this is not looking good for the ‘Justice’ Department." The Fox News Channel began to claim that the forewoman was an anti-Trump Democratic activist. And tonight, on his show on the Fox News Channel, personality Tucker Carlson revealed the Twitter handle of that forewoman, along with the portrait on that Twitter bio, insisting that “this was not a neutral person, this is not a person capable of judging this trial fairly.” He claimed that “Roger Stone is facing life in prison because an Obama-appointed judge allowed this woman to run the jury.”

Right-wing media personalities are ramping up calls for Trump to pardon Stone. On the Fox News Channel, Newt Gingrich complained about the prosecution of Stone when there had been “no action” against Hillary Clinton and her staff or against the FBI agents associated with the Mueller investigation. Jesse Watters insisted that Stone’s conviction was the result of a “hoax investigation” and proves that America is a “banana republic.”

The attempt to convince viewers that America is divided and collapsing is the same message Russian propaganda is spreading. And, in Kansas City, Missouri, you can hear the Russian message directly from Russian state media. There, Radio Sputnik has begun broadcasting their message of American decline on a local right-wing radio channel whose owner liked both their message and their money. “They are paying for airtime and I make a percentage,” the man who brokered the deal said in an interview.

The Russians are still attacking America, and some of us appear to be welcoming them. It is vital to remember that Stone was apparently the link between the Trump campaign and the Russians feeding hacked emails to Wikileaks. Stone has plenty of information Trump does not want made public. Trump’s determination to protect Stone might be seen as… a quid pro quo.

Also available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

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February 14, 2020 (Friday)

Increasingly, it feels like a race to see who’s going to make it into the legal system first: the people trying to destroy the rule of law, or the people trying to defend it. Since his acquittal by the Senate on the impeachment charges leveled by the House, Trump seems determined to consolidate his power, using the tools of the government to reward his supporters and punish those who have crossed him.

After fervently denying it during the impeachment inquiry, Trump acknowledged to journalist Geraldo Rivera last night that he had, indeed, sent his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to look for damaging information on the Bidens. “Here’s my choice: I deal with the Comeys of the world, or I deal with Rudy,” Trump said. James Comey was the former director of the FBI, who oversaw the investigation into Russian attacks on the 2016 American election. Trump’s firing of Comey for that investigation led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. (Both Comey and Mueller are Republicans.) “Are you sorry you did that?” Rivera asked, referring to sending Giuliani on a dirt-digging investigation. “No, not at all,” Trump replied.

Then, today started with Trump responding to Attorney General William Barr’s interview of yesterday, in which Barr said that Trump had never asked him to intervene in a criminal case (wording that seems to suggest he has, indeed, asked him to intervene in cases that are not yet criminal cases). Trump responded: “This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!” (Under our constitution, he does not have the right to intervene in the legal system.)

The news from the rest of the day has confirmed that Trump, and evidently Barr, see the Department of Justice as a tool for Trump to reward friends and take revenge on enemies.

On the one hand, Trump and Barr are defending their friends. They have gone to bat for Roger Stone, an accomplice in the machinations that helped the Trump campaign in 2016; he was the link to Wikileaks, which dumped Democratic emails the Russians had hacked. Today we learned that Barr has put together a group of outside prosecutors to revisit the prosecution and conviction of Trump’s former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, as well as other political cases. This is highly unusual. The new prosecutors are interviewing DOJ prosecutors about their investigations, prosecutorial decisions, and why they made those decisions. Essentially, Barr, along with his newly appointed associate Timothy Shea, who replaced Jessie Liu—who resigned earlier this week—is second-guessing the work of career DOJ lawyers. Flynn pled guilty to lying to investigators about his contacts with Russian agents in 2016 in exchange for his cooperation with the Mueller investigation. (It was Comey’s refusal to let the Flynn case go that led Trump to fire Comey.)

Barr’s Department of Justice is also accepting information about the Bidens in Ukraine from Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Barr has set up his own investigation of Ukraine’s involvement in attacking the United States in the 2016 election (our intelligence agencies have established that it was Russia that attacked the election, and that accusations that the culprit was Ukraine are Russian propaganda).

We also learned today that the Department of Justice has told lawyers for former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has that he won’t face criminal charges for allegedly lying to investigators about talking to the media. McCabe ran afoul of Trump over the Russian investigation when he took over the FBI as Acting Director after Trump fired Comey. McCabe continued the Russia investigation, and arranged the interview in which Flynn pled guilty to lying about his Russian contacts. Trump fired McCabe 26 hours before his scheduled retirement, thus denying him a full pension.

While this announcement makes it sound like the Department of Justice is adhering to the rule of law, in fact, the announcement comes on the same day the Justice Department had to release the details of the McCabe investigation to the public under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Those materials revealed that DOJ prosecutors tried to get a grand jury to indict McCabe in September, but the jurors thought there was no cause. Still, the DOJ lawyers did not want to drop the case. The judge, Reggie Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, said: “I understand there are political implications and other implications involved in reference to whether you go forward. And I fully appreciate the complexity of the assessment, especially — unfortunately, to be candid — in light of the way… the White House [is acting], which I don’t think top executive officers should be doing…. [T]he public is listening to what’s going on, and I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted,” Walton said. “I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road….”

Rather than telling McCabe he was clear back in September when the grand jury declined to charge him, they left him hanging until today, when the materials exonerating him would become public.

On the other hand, though, while Barr’s DOJ is using the law as a weapon against Trump’s enemies, other government lawyers are trying to bring Trump’s people to justice. We learned today that federal prosecutors in New York have contacted witnesses and collected documents in an investigation of Giuliani and his activities along with those of his associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, including their actions in Ukraine, and including their attacks on US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Trump has called this a “witch hunt,” and had told New York to stop its lawsuits, implying that he will punish the state’s residents until it does. New York is also investigating Trump’s family finances and those of his businesses.

So here we are, with our Department of Justice at the center of a tug of war over whether it will become a political arm of the president or whether it will uphold the rule of law. If its politicization is allowed to continue, it will destroy the rule of law in America and turn us, as Judge Walton said, into a banana republic.

But my eye is actually on something else tonight. Have you noticed that every single person Trump goes to bat for is someone from his 2016 campaign who worked with Russians? And those he is determined to destroy are people who were uncovering those relationships?

Russia. Again. All roads really do seem to lead there.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. Like you all, I celebrated the memory of Teddy Roosevelt’s wife and mother, who both died on this day in 1884 within hours of each other, sparking Roosevelt’s escape to the Dakota Territory to recover, which, in turn, sparked his conviction that the nation must clean up its cities and his meteoric rise to the presidency. That’s what February 14 is all about, right? :slight_smile:

P.S. In the two hours since I wrote this draft and then sat down for dinner with my sweetie, the story has broken that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met in Munich on Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in a meeting the American side tried to keep hidden. We learned it from Russian journalists, one of whom said that U.S. officials had asked for no press conference, joint statements, or photographers at the meeting.

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Signing over the deed papers For Alaska? When do we have to turn over the keys?

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It’s incredible. Russia. How did they manage to get into the USA so far? It boggles.

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Best real estate deal ever, made by the master negotiator, and for a surprisingly small cut for himself. What’s not to like?

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February 15, 2020 (Saturday)

There is more news today about Attorney General William Barr, and about the Soleimani killing, and about Trump’s grab for more power, but after the past ten days of Trump reveling in his acquittal by the Senate, it is starting to feel to me as if we are in a closing spiral in which it is hard to remember that there was ever a day when we didn’t live news article to news article, dreading what would happen next.

So tonight I want to write a little about the history of the Democratic and Republican parties to remind myself, and everyone who reads here, that the moment we’re in is unique in American politics. This is a safe post to skip if you’re here for today’s political news—I’ll be back in that saddle tomorrow.

Americans are currently bitterly divided over party affiliation, with each side seemingly identifying the other as its opposite, but this sort of polarization is unusual. It reflects that the current Republican Party leadership is far outside our democratic norms.

Historically, the Democratic and Republican parties are not two sides of the same coin. They formed in very different eras and for very different reasons. It is rare for them to stand as exact opposites in political contests; it’s more like they’re operating alongside each other to accomplish the shared goal of American democracy, but speaking different languages and bumping into each other a lot.

The Democrats formed to support Andrew Jackson for the presidency in 1828, organizing out of fear that the federal government had been captured by wealthy businessmen and bankers. They were determined to take it back for regular men. This was a rosy picture of what they were up to, of course: their arguments about democracy excluded African American men (and all women) and for all his talk of championing the common man, Jackson himself was a wealthy slave holder who enslaved as many as 300 African Americans. But the idea that they were reasserting the rights of regular men against wealthy bankers and businessmen shaped their ideology. Democrats believed the world was divided between the haves and the have-nots, and that the role of the government was to guarantee that the rich guys didn’t take everything.

The Republicans rose much later, in the 1850s. In that era, the Democrats had been taken over by the very wealthiest southern leaders, men who each enslaved more than 50 people on their profitable plantations. The policies started under Jackson had brought valuable cotton land under cultivation in the 1840s, and by the 1850s, these men had become fabulously wealthy. As they bought up prime land and took over politics, they stayed in power by convincing poor white men that any move to limit their power was simply an attempt to free enslaved African Americans and, once free, those men would take white jobs and marry white women.

In 1854, with the help of a compliant president, these wealthy Democrats forced through Congress a law—the Kansas-Nebraska Act—which would enable them to establish plantations with enslaved labor all across the West, where slavery had been banned since 1820. New slave states would overawe northern free states in Congress, and slavery would become national. Poorer white men on small farms would not be able to compete with the plantation system, and oligarchy would replace democracy.

So Americans horrified at the loss of democracy organized to take the government back from the wealthy southern planters. By 1856, they had begun to call themselves “Republicans,” and gained supporters, although as yet their platform was simply that they would stand against the “Slave Power.” While their candidate, John C. Fremont, lost the 1856 presidential election, more Americans voted for him and for the other candidate promising to push back the southern elite, former president Millard Fillmore, than voted for the winner, Democrat James Buchanan.

In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who had thrown in his lot with the Republicans, articulated a new ideology for the party. Drawing from the era’s rising political economists, he denied the Democratic idea that the world was divided between the haves and the have nots, and said instead that all Americans shared a harmony of interests. The government’s role was not to broker between two opposing forces, but rather to expand equality of opportunity and access to resources for poor men just starting out. As those men worked, they would produce capital—Republicans actually called capital “pre-exerted labor”—which they would use to buy goods, keeping the economy growing. When they made enough money, they would hire others just starting out, who would, in turn, begin to make money themselves. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,” Lincoln said. “This… is free labor – the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all – gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”

Because all Americans shared a harmony of interest, the government’s role was simply to encourage economic development, because what was good for one sector of the economy was good for all.

So Democrats saw society as a contest while Republicans saw it as a web. Both of these traditional ideologies have been susceptible to misuse, for sure, but both have also been vital to America at different times. The Democratic vision of the nation as one of haves and have-nots has been crucial when wealth accumulates at the top of society, as it did during the 1920s, for example, leaving Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to lead Democratic Congresses in the 1930s to recalibrate our laws to make them fair. The Republican vision has been vital for reiterating that the nation is not, ultimately, divided, and that the government must expand opportunity, as it did under President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. As I say, it is rare for these two theories to be in pure opposition; more often they rub along, sometimes in tandem, sometimes uncomfortably. But they do rub along.

Today’s Republican Party falls outside of our normal political realm. In the past, with the exception of the 1850s, members of both parties have worked to defend our Constitution, operating within the boundaries of our laws (or pretending to, at least).

Today’s Republican leaders have abandoned the rule of law and the Constitution and are instead turning our democracy into an oligarchy. (Note that I am not including all Republicans here; I receive a lot of email from people who still consider themselves Republicans but loathe Trump and his supporters and want their party back.)

The road to this place started in the 1950s, as a small group of Republicans who hated FDR’s New Deal insisted that any government intervention in the economy to make sure the haves did not dominate the have-nots was “socialism.” As voters kept siding with government activism, these leaders became convinced we did not know what was good for us and began to suppress the vote and gerrymander our congressional districts so they could stay in power. They turned to racism and sexism to rally white male voters who liked programs that expanded opportunity until they became associated with people of color and women.

And now, our government is headed by a president who is dismantling the New Deal state, as Republican leaders want, even though it remains popular: Americans like roads and clean water and Social Security. Trump also claims he is above the law, which is in keeping with the idea that voters’ wishes are less important than staying in power.

This. Is. Not. Normal. It reflects neither our history nor our democratic values.

It is important to remember that it does not have to be this way-- it was not this way in the past-- and that we do not have to resign ourselves to it. For people looking at the storm of crazy coming out of Washington these days and thinking the end of our democracy is a done deal, remember that if Trump and this GOP believed they have won, they would no longer feel the need to fight.

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A weird right wing pocket of the internet I recently saw people talking about how the country has been, “Going the wrong direction for 110 years now, and is just now turning the right way”.

Historically, what happened in 1910? I can’t quite suss that statement.

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