The rise of progressivism, which was part of Woodrow Wilson’s political platform (albeit a racist progressivism)? Sounds like it’s influenced by Glenn Beck who has largely pointed to the election of Wilson as a key problem in US history… largely cause he’s an idiot, but some people find him wise… it’s probably all the strings he uses to connect his batshit theories that convince them.
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My money is on “too dumb to do simple math properly” and they actually mean to refer to something from the 19th C.
February 16, 2020 (Sunday)
One of the stories I did not cover yesterday was that on Friday, the White House sent to Congress a memo explaining the rationale behind the killing of Iran military leader Qassem Soleimani last month. When it happened, if you recall, Trump and White House officials insisted the killing was imperative, and that the president did not have time to inform Congress, as required by law, because the threat from Soleimani was imminent.
The memo says nothing of the kind. It asserts that the assassination was “in response to an escalating series of attacks in preceding months” by Iran and the Iraqi militias it backed.
In early January, the administration had sent Congress a formal notification of the strike, as required by law, but the entire document was classified and lawmakers who saw it said it had no information about an imminent attack. Congresspeople described subsequent briefings as insulting and demeaning.
The new memo justifies the attack by relying on Article II of the United States Constitution and the 2002 Authorization of Military Force against Iraq. Proponents of the theory of the unitary executive, the theory I wrote about the other day that puts all of the authority for the executive branch of government into the president, make Article II do a LOT of work. It is the article that establishes the office of the president and gives that president certain powers, but they see it as giving him power to do anything he wants. As Trump said: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” This is a wildly radical interpretation of the scope of that article.
The other justification for the Soleimani strike in the White House document was the 2002 Authorization of Military Force against Iraq. That AUMF said “the President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to… defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.” Although Soleimani was Iranian, the White House reads this AUMF as reaching beyond Iraq itself to “militias, terrorist groups, or other armed groups in Iraq.” Soleimani was believed to be supporting Iranian-backed Iraqi militias.
Congress disagrees that the 2002 AUMF gives Trump such broad powers. “To suggest that 18 years later this authorization could justify killing an Iranian official stretches the law far beyond anything Congress ever intended,” New York Democratic Representative Eliot Engel said. In a bipartisan vote, for the third time, the Senate has just passed a resolution blocking the president from taking military action against Iran without congressional approval. The House is expected to pass it, but the president is expected to veto it, and neither house has the votes necessary to override his veto.
Today more than 1100 former Justice Department lawyers, Republicans and Democrats both, called for Attorney General William Barr to resign after he intervened in the sentencing memo in the case of Roger Stone, apparently at the urging of the president. More stories have surfaced since, suggesting that Barr tried to intervene in the indictment of state-owned Turkish bank Halkbank, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressed Trump to avoid charges and Turkish lobbyists spent millions with the Trump administration to try to stave off indictment. Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, went forward with a criminal prosecution despite the pressure. Today, career employees wrote to call for Barr’s resignation because they objected to his politicizing the Department of Justice. They also called for current department employees to act as whistleblowers for similar wrongdoing moving forward.
We also learned over the past few days that the moderate Senators exonerating the president in his impeachment trial have recently received grants for their states. On February 12, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) publicly thanked the U.S. Department of Transportation and our secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, who is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) wife, for allocating $20 million to the Port of Alaska to help it modernize. On February 13, Senator Susan Collins announced that Maine had been awarded more than $9.5 million to preserve and modernize affordable housing units for low income people and folks with disabilities.
So where are we, in just these three stories? We have a president and his top officials who insisted, on the record, repeatedly, that they had taken extraordinary military action against an imminent threat. The immediacy of that threat was how they justified neglecting to inform Congress, as required by law. Now, they have quietly admitted there was no such imminent threat, but insist the president has the right to do whatever he wants.
We have more than a thousand legal officials demanding the Attorney General resign for politicizing the Justice Department and jeopardizing the rule of law.
And we have two key Senate votes against convicting the president in his impeachment trial thanking the administration for large grants to their states.
If you heard about these stories anywhere else, what would you think was happening to the government of that country?
Available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
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I wonder if Collins is irked that she sold her soul for less than half of Murkowski’s?
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I hope so, and I hope it really, really stings.
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February 17, 2020 (Monday)
Attorney General William Barr, or rather, opposition to his continued leadership of the Department of Justice, has dominated the news today. Barr’s apparent attempts to mold the actions of the Justice Department around the political needs of the president have prompted the nation’s legal community to sound a blaring alarm that we are losing the bedrock principle of equality before the law.
Barr has carried water for Trump since he took office in February 2019 and almost immediately helped to bury the conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian attacks on the 2016 election. But the event that has thrust Barr’s actions into the news now concerns Trump’s friend and former advisor, self-described 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.
On Monday, February 10, career prosecutors in the Justice Department recommended a sentence of from 7 to 9 years, a sentence in keeping with Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Immediately after the sentencing recommendation Trump tweeted that it was “horrible and unfair” and a “miscarriage of justice.” The next day, political appointees at the Department of Justice did an about-face and filed a new recommendation with the court suggesting a lighter sentence.
Immediately, all four of the federal prosecutors on the Stone case withdrew, and two of them resigned from the Washington U.S. Attorney’s office altogether. Days later, the former U.S. Attorney who had overseen the Stone case, and who had shifted to the Treasury Department to allow one of Barr’s hand-picked cronies to take her spot, also resigned. When challenged, those who had revised the recommendations tried to claim that their revision had been in the works long before Trump tweeted. But the next day Trump 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.”
The day after Trump’s triumphant tweet, on February 13, the New York City bar association wrote to the Inspector General of the Justice Department, as well as to the chairs and the ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees “to express our deep concerns about the impartial administration of justice in connection with the prosecution of Roger Stone in federal court in Washington, D.C.”
It called for “immediate investigations by Congress and by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General.” It noted that “Recent actions by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, a component of the United States Department of Justice, raise serious questions about whether the Department of Justice is making prosecutorial decisions based not on neutral principles but in order to protect President Trump’s supporters and friends. In our criminal justice system, a single standard must apply to all who are accused or convicted of violating the law — unequal treatment based on political influence is to be deplored in all cases but is especially dangerous if it emanates from the presidency.”
It went on to say that if presidential influence over the prosecution of criminal cases were tolerated, “it will undermine the rule of law on which our nation was founded and on which we rely as a foundation of our democracy.”
Recognizing that he had a firestorm on his hands, Barr did an interview with ABC News in which he claimed that Trump had never asked him to intervene in a criminal case. But the next morning, on February 14, 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!”
This was too much for former Department of Justice employees. On February 16, news broke that a bipartisan group of more than 2,000 of them had signed a letter saying that “each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice.” “[P]olitical interference in the conduct of a criminal prosecution is anathema to the Department’s core mission and to its sacred obligation to ensure equal justice under the law,” they wrote. “And yet, President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle.”
And then they said it: “Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.”
They demanded Barr resign, but, acknowledging that he was unlikely to, called upon the career officials in the Justice Department to “to take appropriate action to uphold their oaths of office and defend nonpartisan, apolitical justice.” They asked all DOJ employees to report abuses to the Inspector General, to refuse to carry out orders that undermined the principle of equal justice before the law, to withdraw from cases where that principle was undermined, and, if necessary, to resign and to make public statements about why they were resigning. “The rule of law and the survival of our Republic demand nothing less.”
Then today, in The Atlantic, Donald Ayer, the former Deputy Attorney General under President George H. W. Bush, wrote that Barr was unfit for office because of his “long-held belief in the need for a virtually autocratic executive.” Barr is replacing our fundamental principle that everyone is equal before the law with his own theory that the president is all-powerful, and cannot be checked. This theory made the United States “a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached.”
Also today, the Federal Judges’ Association called an emergency meeting to respond to the intervention of Attorney General Barr into the sentencing of Roger Stone. The Federal Judges Association is a bipartisan group of more than 1000 federal judges, whose mission is “to protect the independence of the judiciary and to explain its significance to a free society.”
As a voluntary organization, the Federal Judges’ Association has no legal authority to remove Barr, but it has important moral authority. Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe tweeted: “This is rolling thunder. One stuffed goose named Barr is cooked. 2000 DOJ alumni he can ignore. 1000 federal judges? That’s an altogether different kettle of fish.” He elaborated: “Moral suasion shouldn’t be discounted — at least not yet. It won’t move Trump or Barr directly but could build pressure for more resignations down the line and thereby indirectly affect the electorate in November…. And in any event discrediting those who deserve to be discredited is good in itself.”
Meanwhile, Roger Stone is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday, and Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is overseeing the case, has called a special hearing for tomorrow. What, exactly, the hearing is about is not yet clear, but Jackson does have the authority to order the relevant players to appear and testify to the reasons behind their actions.
It seems that the fight over the independence of the Department of Justice is rapidly becoming a showdown over whether or not we will manage to preserve American democracy.
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Why doesn’t Trump just let Stone get convicted normally, and then just pardon him?
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The best explanation I’ve seen is that Trump doesn’t want to pardon people who used to work for him, or got in trouble because of their work for him, because that would create an implication that he owed them something. In Trumpworld, loyalty and support only flows in one direction, and Trump never owes anything to anyone. His pardons have been political stunts, stuff like Arpaio and D’Souza and those two bastards the US Army charged with murder.
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Also acceptance of a pardon is a declaration of guilt. You are now able to be subpoenaed and have to talk as you have admitted doing what you were pardoned for. Hairpiece doesn’t want that.
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February 18, 2020 (Tuesday)
Today, Trump pardoned 7 people and commuted the sentences of four others, and I am fascinated that the high-profile individuals all appear at first glance to be those who have committed financial crimes that would have been investigated by the FBI.
Trump commuted the sentence of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, who was impeached and removed from office for corruption before being convicted on 13 counts of soliciting bribes and trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat and sentenced to 14 years in prison. He pardoned Michael Milken, convicted in 1989 of securities fraud and sentenced to a $600 million fine and 22 months in prison. He pardoned David Safavian, a former lobbyist who worked in George W. Bush’s budget office and who spent close to a year in prison in 2009-2010 for obstructing justice and lying for criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He pardoned Bernard Kerik, the corrupt New York former police commissioner, who in 2009 confessed to tax fraud and lying to officials. He also pardoned Edward DeBartolo, Jr., the former owner of the 49ers football team, who was extorted by a former Louisiana governor for a gambling license and paid the money rather than reporting the felony. He was fined $1 million in 1998 and suspended for a year by the NFL.
There are a number of obvious reasons for Trump to pardon or commute the sentences of the people he picked. Jared Kushner and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were pushing for a pardon of Milken. Milken is worth more than $3 billion, and it is not unreasonable to think that some of those duckies will find their way into Trump’s campaign fund. Trump’s sometime lawyer Rudy Giuliani wanted a pardon for Kerik, while the spokesperson for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, Mercedes Schlapp, endorsed Safavian. DeBartolo, whose case was over and cold long ago, has a strong following in Ohio, a region Trump needs to shore up before the 2020 election.
The pardons also took the oxygen away from the growing story of opposition to his politicization of the Department of Justice, and Trump is always a master at stealing the headlines away from negative publicity. At the same time, the narrative that everyone is corrupt—deal with it!—reinforces the message of indifference and despair the Trump campaign would like its opponents to internalize.
And that all might be reason enough for these pardons. But what jumped out at me was that these high-profile pardons were all of individuals who had committed financial crimes investigated by the FBI. I wrote here on December 27 about how Trump appears to have gone out of his way to purge the FBI of employees with, as national security and intelligence community expert Natasha Bertrand put in August 2018 in The Atlantic, “extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.” These people include Robert Mueller, James Comey, Bruce Ohr, Andrew McCabe, and Lisa Page.
I wonder if these pardons are designed to discredit the FBI’s financial crimes unit even further, both to set up a pardon for his friend, advisor, and self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone, and to try to pull the fangs of the upcoming discussion of his own financial records, currently moving toward a crisis.
This morning, bright and early, Trump began tweeting about Stone, complaining about how the FBI had handled his case. “These were Mueller prosecutors, and the whole Mueller investigation was illegally set up based on a phony and now fully discredited Fake Dossier, lying and forging documents to the FISA Court, and many other things. Everything having to do with this fraudulent investigation is… badly tainted and, in my opinion, should be thrown out. Even Mueller’s statement to Congress that he did not see me to become the FBI Director (again), has been proven false. The whole deal was a total SCAM. If I wasn’t President, I’d be suing everyone all over the place… BUT MAYBE I STILL WILL. WITCH HUNT!”
(I always feel obliged to point out that these statements are factually untrue. The Mueller investigation was not based on the Steele dossier, and the DOJ Inspector General said the investigation was proper and warranted despite problems with FISA requests for surveillance of Carter Page—who was not working for Trump at the time.)
My guess is that a pardon for Stone is still very much on the table, but more than that, my guess is that Trump has his eye on the fact that the Supreme Court in March will begin to hear three cases concerning whether or not two banks and his accounting firm must hand over his financial records to congressional investigators, as lower courts have ordered.
In one of the cases, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has asked for financial records as he looks into potential lawbreaking in New York related to hush-money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. Trump’s lawyers are objecting to that investigation, building on the 1973 Justice Department memo that says sitting presidents cannot be indicted to argue that sitting presidents cannot be investigated, either. Lower courts have demolished this argument.
In the other two cases, Congress has subpoenaed the financial records on two grounds: first, to see if more ethics-in-government legislation is needed (this is to address the requirement that Congress must have a legislative reason to make such inquiries); and—this is the kicker—to pursue an investigation into foreign money laundering. There have long been questions about how Trump went from a developer who specialized in debt to one who paid lavish amounts of cash for real estate just as Russians were looking to launder ill-gotten gains, and it is well-known that the bank from which Trump borrowed more than $2 billion and which handled his assets—Deutsche Bank—has been deeply embroiled in Russian money-laundering.
I could be entirely off base about this. Perhaps Trump was using these pardons simply to try to line up money and goodwill for the upcoming election. But it seems to me as if Trump is working to dismantle and to undercut the reputation of the FBI’s financial crimes division… just as he is in danger of being investigated for financial crimes.
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February 19, 2020 (Wednesday)
The big news today in Washington was that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, the venue that dumped emails from Democratic officials hacked by Russian intelligence before the 2016 election, claims that the Trump administration offered him a pardon if he would say that Russia was not involved in leaking the stolen emails in 2016.
In London, where Assange is fighting extradition to the United States, Assange’s lawyer says that Assange will prove that former California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2017 to make the offer. The White House has categorically denied this story, although Rohrabacher’s visit to Assange, and his subsequent assertion that the Russians had nothing to do with hacking Democrats, is public record. So, too, is Rohrabacher’s meeting with Trump for 45 minutes before he went to see Assange.
All I can say on this is… maybe. That is, this story is entirely in keeping with what we know of Assange, Trump, and Rohrabacher. It fits the relevant timelines. But does Assange have proof? Maybe.
Assange is a terribly problematic witness, a man who has proven in his seven years holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy that he is all about protecting Julian Assange, and who is now facing 175 years in prison if he is extradited to America and convicted of espionage. Under those circumstances, who wouldn’t try virtually anything?
Still, on June 15, 2016, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now House Minority Leader, was caught on tape saying: “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” (McCarthy later took Russian money himself, from Lev Parnas.) The obvious way to figure out what really happened is for the House to subpoena Rohrabacher and the other two people allegedly present when Rohrabacher allegedly made the offer: Charles Johnson, a conservative activist, and Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer for Wikileaks. We shall see.
That’s really the big news, as Trump tours the West, so if that’s enough for you today, you can call it quits here with a clear conscience.
But (isn’t it always “but…” with me?) I have wanted to write about the presidential nomination process for ages, and there has never been a good time, as news kept intervening. Tonight seems tailor-made for such a post as the Democratic candidates debate in Nevada, trying to work their way toward a nomination. So here goes:
There are two important pieces to remember before you even think about nomination procedures. First of all, it is states, not the national government, that control voting. That means that each state has its own procedure, even though the parties are national. And second, our political parties are not affiliated with the government. That seems totally weird, I know, but while anyone can declare their allegiance to one party or another, the leadership of those parties is not part of the government. The parties can organize themselves however they wish, so long as they don’t run afoul of federal laws. (There is a totally byzantine procedure for reworking their bylaws, which they do frequently, and which I will spare you.)
In the nineteenth century, presidential candidates were chosen by party leaders, who were far less concerned with electability than they were with malleability: would the candidate do what party leaders wanted? Men (women could not vote) voted by party alone, and you could not “split the ticket.” You literally received a ticket from a party boss, printed by your party with all the party’s candidates for all offices on it, and color coded in case you could not read, and you put that ticket into a box, usually at a place like a saloon. So who was going to be at the head of the ticket wasn’t something leaders took lightly, but pleasing the voters was less important than making sure the presidential candidate was a straight party man.
Often, those candidates were chosen by a group of party regulars, a “caucus,” arguing until they could come up with a candidate they could all live with. Some state parties still use this system, although it is now open to regular voters. Caucuses are overseen by the parties, and now allot delegates to each party’s national convention. Today, Iowa holds the first caucuses in the country.
But by the end of the century, voters, and insurgents in the party leadership, were pressuring party elders to listen more closely to the voters. Leaders in a number of states began to let voters have a say in who would lead the party—not the final word, but a say—through primary elections overseen by the local government. These elections determine how many delegates each candidate will get at the party’s national convention. Today, New Hampshire has the country’s first primary of the election season.
The idea was to listen to the voice of the people, but the reality was that party leaders still controlled who was nominated to be president. This became painfully obvious in 1968, when the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey for president despite the fact he had not run in a single primary. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August was a horror show, with protestors demonstrating and police spraying them with mace and tear gas.
After the convention, the Democrats put together a commission to figure out a better nominating system. The McGovern-Fraser Commission required all delegate selection to be open and required representation for minorities. More states promptly adopted primaries. Voter participation in primaries skyrocketed, and in 1972, the party nominated South Dakota Senator George McGovern (who had a PhD in American history-- just saying) for the presidency. McGovern went down to a spectacular defeat in 1972, winning only Massachusetts and Washington D. C.—he lost even his home state, which is virtually unheard of. Then, in 1976, Democrats nominated the wild card Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, who won after the debacle of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation in 1974, but who lost to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. Democrats worried that their enthusiastic primary voters were nominating unelectable candidates.
So between August 1981 and February 1982, a 70-person team of Democrats tried to balance the fervor of primary voters with the political experience of party leaders. They added unpledged delegate slots for members of Congress and state party chairs. These are the “superdelegates” you hear about, and while the commission first wanted them to make up 30% of the party’s delegates to the convention, they finally settled on 14%. That number wiggled upward until by 2008 it was 20%; after 2016 it has been revised downward to 16%.
Recently, Republicans have joined the carping that the Democratic nomination is “rigged” because of the superdelegates, but while Republicans don’t really use superdelegates (there are unpledged delegates with different rules in the Republican Party, though), they have their own way for leaders to put a finger on the scales. The first major test for the Republican Party is on Super Tuesday, early in March, when more than a dozen states hold primaries or caucuses. Those states are overwhelmingly southern and conservative, and that early in the season, most voters will not know much about the candidates, so they will vote primarily by name recognition. Unlike the Democrats, many of the Republican delegates are allotted by a modified winner-take-all system, so with Super Tuesday Republican leaders can stop insurgent candidates. They can rest assured that candidates with name recognition will emerge strong… or they could assume that until 2016, when they expected Jeb Bush to lead the pack even though he hadn’t yet campaigned. Unfortunately, there was someone else running that year with greater name recognition than Bush.
This year, a number of Republican state committees have decided not to hold primaries or caucuses but simply to endorse Trump. That is not unheard of: it is a waste of money to hold primaries or caucuses when the party has a strong incumbent. But if an incumbent is weak, the party usually permits challengers, as it did in 1976 when Ronald Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford for the nomination. Some Republicans are unhappy that state parties are not permitting challengers to Trump.
It is no wonder people get confused. And this is just the basics. It does seem a crazy way to pick our nation’s leader, doesn’t it? But I hope this makes it all a little clearer.
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She ends up talking about Republicans, but I thought she was heading toward an explanation of why Dem Party leaders will be able to stop Sanders.
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When Trump says the system is rigged against
Bernie, he’s right.
Unless Bernie Sanders wins enough delegates to capture the Democratic Party nomination on the first ballot, he is not going to be the nominee. The reason will be that the superdelegates–those same people who were his wrath in 2016–will come back to deny him the nomination. . . .
In 2020 there will be 3,979 delegates to the Democratic National Convention who will be selected as a result of primaries and caucuses. To win the nomination one needs 1,991 delegates.
If Bernie Sanders does not get to this number by the first round, the 771 Superdelegates will get to vote, and he will need 2,376 votes to win. Fat chance!
Much in the same way that the Democratic Party and its leadership including Deborah Wasserman Schultz were stacked against Sanders in 2016, Tom Perez and much of the party leadership are opposed to him again. Perhaps proof of this opposition is the disappointment in this year’s presumptive presidential heir apparent Joe Biden and the search for his moderate replacement in Peter Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bloomberg.
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Quick question on the superdelegates: if ~300 of them are Dem congresscritters, won’t a good chunk of them go to Sanders? He does have support among Dem politicians. Also, he could easily get a fair number of state party chairs. There are definitely states where the Dem state party is much more progressive than the DNC.
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The DNC is part of the problem, not the solution.
Not that this is new.
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Likely so, but then, there are a LOT of other ones, and among the congresscritters, I imagine that many are likely beholden to the corporate interests that are against Sanders.
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February 20, 2020 (Thursday)
Today’s expected big story—that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Roger Stone and Trump took to Twitter to attack the process and its outcome—has been overshadowed by another, bigger story. On February 13, an election security expert working for the acting Director of National Intelligence told Congress that Russia is already interfering in the 2020 election in favor of Trump. That briefing made Trump so mad he has replaced the acting Director of National Intelligence (who covered for him in the Ukraine Scandal) with an even more compliant director.
Of course, these two stories are related.
A jury found Stone guilty on seven counts of lying to Congress during the Russia investigation and tampering with a witness. It found that Stone had lied to the House Intelligence Committee about his central role in finding out for the Trump campaign what was in computer files hacked by Russian intelligence, the files being leaked by Wikileaks strategically to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Stone also threatened a witness to keep him from contradicting Stone’s story.
Stone is a long-time associate of the president, and Trump is deeply interested in discrediting his conviction. While the hearing was in progress, Trump complained about it and wondered why other people whom he claimed had lied to Congress—FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and Hillary Clinton—were not in jail. (A grand jury decided not to indict McCabe because of a lack of evidence, and despite all the many investigations of Clinton, Republican investigators could not find a crime. While Trump has complained since 2018 that Comey lied before Congress, there is no evidence of that.) Trump suggested that he might pardon Stone if his conviction is not overturned on appeal.
As she handed down a sentence lighter than the 7 to 9 years the Department of Justice prosecutors originally asked for, Jackson pushed back against Trump’s carping, noting that Stone “was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.” She sentenced Stone to 40 months in jail, although he will appeal. She took the chance to push back on the disinformation coming from Stone, Trump, and their Republican associates. “The truth still exists; the truth still matters,” Jackson said. “Roger Stone’s insistence that it doesn’t, his belligerence, his pride in his own lies are a threat to our most fundamental institutions, to the foundations of our democracy. If it goes unpunished, it will not be a victory for one party or another. Everyone loses.”
As troubling as is this story about Russia’s attack in 2016, it pales in comparison to the news that our Intelligence Community has proof that Russia is already at work trying to disrupt the Democratic primaries and then to throw the 2020 election to Trump. Even worse is that Trump is angry not at the attack on America, but that the Intelligence Community briefed the congressional intelligence committees about it. On February 13, the intelligence official in charge of election security, Shelby Pierson, warned the intelligence committees in a classified briefing that Russia is already working to reelect Trump in 2020.
Although Trump has frequently insisted that he cannot share classified information with Congress because Democrats will leak it to the press, it is worth noting that there was no Democratic leak to the press. Instead, one of his own people at the classified briefing, Devin Nunes (R-CA) told Trump about it. Nunes is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and we now know he talked to Lev Parnas in the period when Parnas was smearing the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, although he did not reveal his role in the scandal while the impeachment hearings were going on and he was trying to discredit them.
Although it is the job of the Intelligence Community to keep the congressional intelligence committees informed of threats to our nation, Trump was apparently furious that Adam Schiff (D-CA) received the information. Schiff is the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. He was also the lead impeachment manager for the House during the Senate trial of the president.
Trump apparently unloaded on the acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who has been filling the role of acting DNI since August 16, for not telling him about the briefing before it happened. Trump denied that Russia is interfering, and insisted the intelligence community is getting “played,” according to an administration official. He claimed that the Democrats will use this information against him. Republicans on the committee apparently also took offense at the briefing, arguing that Trump has been tough on Russia so there is no reason Putin would want him elected.
It is important to remember that Maguire was perceived as a loyalist when Trump appointed him. He replaced Dan Coats, a former Republican Senator from Indiana, who irritated Trump by continuing to insist that Russia had attacked us in the 2016 election, and who told prosecutors that the president repeatedly urged him to deny any link between Russia and the Trump campaign. When Coates resigned, Trump passed over Coates’s deputy director, career CIA official Sue Gordon, who was strongly supported by senators of both parties, to take his job. The law said that Gordon should have become the acting director, but she resigned instead when Trump wanted Maguire.
As soon as he took office, Maguire had to deal with the whistleblower complaint over Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked for a “favor.” Maguire illegally withheld the complaint from congressional intelligence committees, and eventually had to broker a deal to hand it over.
Maguire’s acting appointment was about to come to an end and insiders expected Trump would appoint him to the job officially. Instead, Maguire is out as of today, and Trump is turning instead to a deep loyalist, Richard Grenell, who has been his Ambassador to Germany.
Grenell’s credentials for this post are thin at best, despite the fact that the law concerning the position requires that the director have “extensive national security expertise.” Grenell has never served in any U.S. intelligence agency, has never managed a large organization, and will not give up his ambassadorship to Germany—but he has been vocal about defending Trump on Twitter and the Fox News Channel. He is also personal friends with Trump’s children. Because he had to have Senate confirmation to take up the ambassadorship, he does not have to have another one to take over the acting DNI job. Like Maguire, he will simply be “acting,” which keeps him beholden to the president.
Nunes’s former top staffer, Kash Patel, who elbowed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman aside at the National Security Council and worked to push the story that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that attacked us in 2016, will become a senior advisor to Grenell.
So where does this leave us? The person now in charge of our national intelligence has no experience in intelligence, and is supported by one of Devin Nunes’s staffers, who has worked to discredit the intelligence community. The new DNI is a fervent supporter of the president, who insists—all evidence to the contrary—that Russia is not, and has not, interfered in our elections to put him in office.
This is not good.
It seems to me simple: if Republicans do not actively want Russia to interfere in the 2020 election, why do they simply keep trying to discredit our intelligence officers? Why don’t they say, “Okay, we don’t think this is happening, but we want to reassure everyone about the safety of our elections, so we’ll do everything possible to protect them?”
And yet they are not. Just this month, Senate Republicans blocked three election security bills that would explicitly require campaigns to alert the FBI and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) about foreign offers to help (such offers are already against election finance law), and that would ban voting machines from linking to the internet. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who blocked the bills, objected to them because she said they would take power from the states and give it to federal bureaucrats. At the same time, Trump has refused to make appointments to the FEC so it no longer has a quorum and cannot even meet, let alone protect our elections.
I would love to hear a believable explanation for all this that does not lead to the conclusion that Republicans are willing to invite Russia—or any foreign power-- into our elections, so long as it means they win.
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This is the most depressing Heather Cox Richardson article yet. I need a drink.
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I take heart with the tougher ones that at least someone is keeping track of all the awful details so well.
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