From the Trump website…
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Could we please get more MSM responding to Il Douche in this manner? Please? He deserves no respect and needs to be called on his assholery.
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June 11, 2020 (Thursday)
Considering that the stock market’s Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,862 points today, and that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly apologized for permitting himself to be used in Trump’s photo-op last week, the story I’m going to start with tonight might seem an odd one to choose.
Today, the chair of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel (who is a fervent Trump supporter despite the fact she is Utah Senator Mitt Romney’s niece) announced that Trump will accept the Republican nomination not in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Republican National Convention has been planned, but in Jacksonville, Florida.
I’m leading with this move because it is incredibly revealing. The public story is that Trump has changed the plan just 77 days before the convention because North Carolina’s Democratic governor Roy Cooper refuses to guarantee that the convention center can operate at full capacity despite the coronavirus pandemic. But today the Trump campaign illustrated that it is not, in fact, immune to pandemic fears. In order to register for Trump’s June 19 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where coronavirus infections are rising, attendees have to agree not to sue Trump’s campaign or the venue, “or any of their affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents, contractors, or volunteers,” if they contract Covid-19.
Moving Trump’s speech to Florida might well not result in more attendees, but it should help him shore up support in the state, which has been faltering. He needs to win Florida to win the 2020 election.
Because the RNC signed a contract to meet in Charlotte, it has to hold at least some of the convention there. Today the executive committee agreed to slash all the official business of the party. One of the things it cut was writing a 2020 party platform, the document that explains to voters what the party will try to accomplish if it wins power. Trump will run on the exact same platform he ran on in 2016. It is so out of date it actually contains language attacking “the president,” because in 2016, the president was President Barack Obama.
The abandonment of writing a party platform, which is, after all, the central purpose of a political convention, seems a remarkable admission that Republican leaders either can’t manage or can’t be bothered with the basics of our political system. There had been fights in the White House as senior officials, led by Jared Kushner, kicked around the idea of turning the 58-page platform into a single note card of bullet points. Now it appears leaders have simply given up on adjusting party policies to today’s issues.
Instead of making an argument for policy, the Republicans are simply backing Trump. (RNC national press secretary Mandi Merritt blamed the lack of a platform on North Carolina Governor Cooper, whose refusal to guarantee a fully populated convention center “left our members with no choice.”)
Trump will give his acceptance speech in Jacksonville on August 27. The date is the sixtieth anniversary of a brutal attack on Black Jacksonville residents by white mobs brandishing baseball bats and ax handles, an event known as “Ax Handle Saturday.”
The abandonment of our democratic political process in deference to Trump was also on full display today when the administration announced it would refuse to provide transparency for $511 billion in tax-payer backed loans awarded to 4.5 million businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program in the CARES coronavirus relief bill. Back in March, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin negotiated a deal with Congress for congressional oversight of the spending in that bill, without which congressional Democrats would not agree to it.
There were supposed to be three bodies overseeing the $2 trillion law. The first was a Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery, the inelegantly named “SIGPR.” The second was the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, made up of inspectors general from the agencies involved in the bill. It was placed under the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, which is sort of the oversight team of government inspectors general themselves. The third was a congressional oversight commission.
But once the deal was cut, the president issued a signing statement saying that the oversight provisions violated the separation of powers by intruding on the rights of the president.
Democrats cried foul. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to Mnuchin insisting that he defend the deal. “Given the substantial amount of taxpayer funds provided to address the economic impact of the coronavirus, and the considerable discretion you asked for,” they wrote, “Congress took special care” in creating oversight, and that oversight was “critical” to their support for the measure.
There is currently no SIGPR (I just had to work that horrible acronym in), although Trump did make a nomination that is currently before the Senate: he nominated Brian Miller, one of his own lawyers. Trump’s removal of Glenn Fine as the acting Department of Defense IG meant that Fine, who had been selected as chair of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, had to step down. Fine, whose firing drew a rare rebuke from former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who called him “a public servant in the finest tradition of honest, competent governance,” resigned from the DOD entirely on June 1.
So the weight of oversight has fallen to the congressional committee, and the government had indicated it would release detailed loan information to it. But today, Mnuchin said that information about the loans, which infamously went to large businesses and wealthy organizations at first (many later returned the loans) is “proprietary” and “confidential.”
Steve Ellis, president of the nonpartisan group Taxpayers for Common Sense, told reporter Aaron Gregg of the Washington Post: “Clearly, this is meant to prevent some entities from being embarrassed, or being revealed…. Nobody forced them to take the money, and it was already set up so that they could return it with no questions asked. And they were told that this information would be made public when they applied for the loan.”
The conflict between our governmental system and the president is becoming clearer every day. That clarity is solidifying popular opposition to the administration and thus putting Republican leaders into a tough spot. Today, Trump defended his administration’s attacks on peaceful protesters over the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, and announced he is finalizing an executive order to encourage police to use “force with compassion.” Trump’s handling of the protests is unpopular, and Republican lawmakers who don’t want to alienate either pro-Trump or anti-Trump voters are keeping their heads down.
But today some Republican Senators began to distance themselves from him. In the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) offered an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill calling for the removal of names of Confederate leaders from all military assets-- bases, aircrafts, ships, and so on—within three years. The amendment passed the Republican-dominated committee with some Republicans joining the Democrats. Trump has publicly opposed the amendment to this important bill, but stripping it out at this point will be awkward for Republicans.
So who’s going to blink first?
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I suspect there is a not-insignificant amount of taxpayer money that went to Trump or Trump-adjacent organizations, who really do not want that made public.
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I’d say that’s a safe bet.
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June 12, 2020 (Friday)
I kicked around on the internet for hours trying to find a way into today’s news, and at 11:23 p.m., Trump handed it to me.
He tweeted that he is changing the date of his June 19 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Noting that the date is Juneteenth—the day celebrating black freedom since 1865—he said “Many of my African American friends and supporters have reached out to suggest that we consider changing the date out… of respect for this Holiday, and in observance of this important occasion and all it represents. I have therefore decided to move our rally to Saturday, June 20, in order to honor their requests….”
As White House reporter Jonathan Lemire put it, “Trump blinks. Which happens very, very rarely.” A strong majority of Americans oppose his handling of racial issues, and apparently his advisors finally concluded that holding a rally on Juneteenth would hurt his election campaign more than it would help.
Trump’s bid for reelection is taking hits these days. Today Simon & Schuster, the publishers of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s book about his time in the White House, released some of the material from it. The book was supposed to come out in mid-March but was delayed by the White House. The administration has still not signed off on it, but Bolton has decided to publish it anyway. It will be out later this month, and the material released today is an indication that it will hit the president hard.
The book apparently says that everything Trump does is designed to help him win reelection, and that the Ukraine scandal, in which he tried to demand a political favor before handing over money that our ally Ukraine desperately needed, was just the tip of the iceberg: “Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy — and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them,” the Simon & Schuster press release states.
Since Bolton declined to testify before members of Congress during the impeachment crisis, there are now calls to boycott the 592-page book that apparently provides an eye-witness account of the Ukraine scandal that was so crucial in that impeachment investigation. Still, when the book comes out on June 23, it will get press attention, which will undoubtedly cause concern in the Trump campaign.
The news on reopening the nation’s economy is not great, either. As states are lifting lockdowns, active cases of Covid-19 are rising. In June, twelve states have seen increased hospitalizations for the virus: Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah. Our numbers appeared to plateau last month, but that was because the hot spots in cities, especially New York City, had begun to cool. As that happened, other hot spots opened up in states that had previously been less affected.
The realization that this epidemic is not magically going to go away made the stock market’s Dow Jones Industrial Average drop sharply on Thursday, sending it down 1,862 points, or 6.9%. It rallied up 477.37 points today, a little over 2%, but this has been the worst week on the stock market since March.
Increasingly, it appears that the president plans to run his campaign by stoking cultural, racial, and gender resentment. This afternoon, the administration announced that it has finalized a rule that removes nondiscrimination protection in health care and health insurance for LGBTQ people. The Affordable Care Act prohibits discrimination based on “race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability.” In 2016, the Obama administration defined “sex” as “male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”
Trump’s Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services today removed that definition. Director Roger Severino said that HHS intended to go “back to the plain meaning of those terms, which is based on biological sex.” This means that medical providers and insurers can discriminate against LGBTQ Americans. The Christian Medical Association, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, and the right-leaning Heritage Foundation all applauded the move, which is due to take effect by mid-August.
Opponents of the change note that this announcement, on this day, looks much like the planned Tulsa rally on Juneteenth and the convention speech in Jacksonville on Ax Handle Saturday, the anniversary of a deadly race riot in that city.
Exactly four years ago today, on June 12, 2016, a 29-year-old security guard opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle and a semi-automatic pistol inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. He murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in what was America’s deadliest one-time attack on LGBTQ Americans in our history.
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June 13, 2020 (Saturday)
People expecting a fire and brimstone performance from Trump today at West Point’s graduation got the opposite: a president slurring words, unable to move a water glass to his mouth with his right hand, and apparently unsteady on a gently inclined ramp from the platform to the lawn with a military officer beside him. What he said in the speech—that he had rebuilt a “totally depleted” military, destroyed ISIS, and ended “endless wars” (inaccurate, all)—has been completely overshadowed by his physical appearance during it.
The hashtag “TrumpIsNotWell” trended on Twitter, prompting the president to respond with his own tweet: “The ramp that I descended after my West Point Commencement speech was very long & steep, had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery. The last thing I was going to do is “fall” for the Fake News to have fun with. Final ten feet I ran down to level ground. Momentum!”
This prompted writer and political observer Charles Pierce to comment: “West Point put the commander-in-chief on a slippery ramp? Yeah, that could happen.”
A late Saturday night news dump came from Ukraine, where officials say they were indeed offered bribes to end an investigation of the energy company Burisma, but there was no connection to Hunter Biden, the son of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Three people have been arrested in the crime. Nazar Kholodnytsky, who heads anti-corruption investigations in Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office, said: “Let’s put an end to this once and for all. Biden Jr. and Biden Sr. do not appear in this particular proceeding.” Earlier this month, Ukraine’s former prosecutor told reporters that a separate investigation of Hunter Biden himself found no evidence of any wrongdoing on Biden’s part.
In North Korea Saturday, Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, who is emerging as a powerful force in her brother’s circle, threatened South Korea with military action. Her stated reason is that South Korean human rights activists drop pamphlets criticizing the North Korean government from balloons into North Korean territory. The real reason, according to experts, is more likely to be a desire to distract from the inroads Covid-19 is making in North Korea, and frustration that South Korea won’t buck US sanctions and trade with North Korea. What she means by military action is unclear, but it could mean weapons tests. Today, a senior North Korean Foreign Ministry official said that talk of denuclearization was “nonsensical,” and that his country would continue to expand its military capabilities.
Tonight’s last story is a big one. Basketball superstar LeBron James has started a group to protect black voting, along with a number of other African American athletes and entertainers. James has said the organization, “More Than A Vote,” will not just work with other voting rights organizations to register voters, but will explain to new voters how the process works and what sorts of obstacles they will face. James says he will use his strong social media platform to combat voter suppression, a major issue in the upcoming election.
As far back as 1986, the modern Republican Party has tried to win elections by keeping Democratic voters—usually people of color—from the polls. After 1993, when a Democratic Congress passed the Motor-Voter Law permitting voter registration when people got driver’s licenses or signed up for social welfare programs, Republicans accused Democrats of enrolling illegal voters. By the late 1990s, losing Republican candidates often charged they had lost because of “voter fraud,” although there is virtually no evidence of anything of the sort.
Calls to stop this alleged illegal voting led to increasingly complicated voter ID laws, especially after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Immediately after the Shelby County v. Holder decision was handed down, states instituted a series of voting regulations designed to make it harder for populations perceived to be Democratic to vote.
The switch to electronic voting machines in the 2000s further weakened voting rights. Not only are machines notoriously hackable—and they do not require a paper trail, so there is no way to verify vote tallies-- but also the simple act of not placing machines in an area can drastically suppress voting as people get stuck in long lines and eventually give up and go home.
This is what we saw in Georgia’s primary this week as new machines either went missing or malfunctioned in the system put in place by Republican Brad Raffensperger, leaving voters standing in line for hours at polling places that served people of color. This is always a problem, but it is a particular problem in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, when people’s lives are in danger in crowds. “It’s a hot mess,” state senator and the chair of the Georgia Democratic Party Nikema Williams told the New York Times. “Our secretary of state has not adequately prepared us for today. We knew today was coming. If you show up and there’s not a machine, that’s a problem.”
But voters in 2020 are determined enough that they are not, in fact, giving up and going home. Despite the voting problems in Georgia on Tuesday, which even Raffensperger said were “unacceptable,” voting surged in the state, especially among Democrats. Almost three times as many Democrats voted in this Senate primary than did in the Democratic Senate primary held just four years ago.
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June 15, 2020 (Monday)
Today was busy as the White House squared off against opponents. The president has personified his administration to such an extent that it increasingly feels like it is less a clash of political parties that fuels today’s political animosities than it is him against the world.
Today the rift between Trump and the military widened. General Robert B. Abrams, commander of the U.S. Army in South Korea, banned the display of the Confederate flag from all U.S. Army installations in South Korea. “While some might view it as the symbol of regional pride, many others in our force see it is a painful reminder of hate, bigotry, treason, and devaluation of humanity,” he wrote. “[O]ne thing is clear: it has the power to inflame feelings of racial division. We cannot have that division among us.”
In the New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni noted that Trump has always seemed to think of the military as his own—he has called it “my military”— sending troops to our southern border in 2018 on a false errand to support his narrative that the nation was being overrun by undocumented immigrants, for example, while also denigrating generals—“I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me”—and the “Gold Star” families who have lost a loved one in the service. The president’s desire to use the active military against citizens exercising their right to protest has finally pushed military leaders to the extraordinary step of denouncing the president publicly.
A bipartisan group of 23 national security leaders also took a stand against Trump today. Claiming to share the outrage and frustration that demonstrators have shown over police brutality and racial injustice, they insisted that military forces should not be used against civilians and objected to the use of the word “terrorists” to describe protesters. “We pledge to be allies in the work to heal the wounds of racism, injustice, and oppression. To implement positive and lasting progress we must come together and unite behind the ideals of this nation’s founding-- that we are all created equal and deserve equal treatment under the law,” they wrote.
The Food and Drug Administration also pushed back today against the president, revoking its authorization for the emergency use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. Trump has long touted the anti-malarial drug as a treatment for coronavirus infections, but the FDA said that BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, had concluded that “this drug may not be effective to treat COVID-19… and that the drug’s potential benefits for such use do not outweigh its known and potential risks.”
Former national security adviser John Bolton’s book detailing his time in the White House is due to go on sale June 23, and has already been shipped to bookstores. Trump is reportedly furious at what Bolton has written, and wants to stop the book’s sale. The White House stopped the book’s original planned publication date in March by holding up its review for classified information (although when transmitting the book for review, Bolton’s lawyer noted that Bolton believed he had avoided all classified information).
Today, Trump suggested a new angle: he said that “every conversation with me as president [is] highly classified…. [I]f he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he’s broken the law and I would think that he would have criminal problems. I hope so.” Attorney General William Barr agreed, saying the book was being published too quickly. Trump is reportedly looking at legal action against Bolton, but lawyers say it would be hard to block the book, since the Supreme Court in 1971 refused to let Richard Nixon block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the U.S. government had misled the American people about the Vietnam War.
I will admit that Trump’s attempt to browbeat Bolton amuses me. If there is one person who ain’t gonna be browbeaten, by Trump or anyone else, it’s John Bolton.
But the administration is having more luck silencing others. Although Covid-19 infections are spiking in states in the South and West, Vice President Pence today told governors to tell people in their states that the rise was due to increased testing, and to “encourage people with the news that we’re safely reopening the country.” In fact, the rise in at least 14 states is higher than that attributable to testing. Oklahoma, where Trump will restart his rallies on June 20, is one of those where cases are rising, although Pence said “The number of cases in Oklahoma is declining precipitously, and we feel very confident going forward.”
This weekend, we learned that the Centers for Disease Control had told its staff not to talk to reporters from the Voice of America, the government-funded news agency, because the independent news coverage there of the coronavirus was not positive enough to the president, who complained that VOA was run by “communists.”
Two years ago, Trump appointed to the head of the agency Michael Pack, an ally of his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. That position requires Senate approval, though, which was held up for two years because Pack’s film agency is under investigation by the D.C. attorney general’s office for financial improprieties. Under pressure from Trump, the Senate confirmed Pack earlier this month, despite his legal troubles. Today the two top editors at VOA, Director Amanda Bennett and Deputy Director Sandy Sugawara resigned.
The Trump administration continues to block oversight of the $1 trillion in spending authorized by the CARES coronavirus relief act. Today we learned that last Thursday two inspectors general wrote a letter to four congressional committee chairs. The letter revealed that lawyers for the Treasury Department have concluded that Congress left a loophole in the law that excuses the administration from telling Congress who has gotten money under the program.
The Treasury Department insists it is complying with all of the requirements established by the CARES act, but lawmakers of both parties object to the Treasury Department’s lack of transparency. A spokeswoman for Richard C Shelby (R-AL), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: “American taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent.”
And yet, for all this, today’s biggest news is that the Supreme Court began handing down this term’s decisions. It declined to hear appeals of ten cases involving gun rights, brought by advocates hoping to strike down remaining limits on gun ownership. It also declined to revisit the doctrine of “qualified immunity” for law enforcement officers protecting them from lawsuits for their actions while doing their jobs unless they violate “clearly established” constitutional rights.
Their landmark decision, though, was in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruling 6 to 3 that it is illegal to discriminate against LGBT individuals in employment. This is a huge deal. The decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, said that the prohibition against sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act covers sexuality and gender identity. This will give support to widespread challenges to discrimination against LGBTQ Americans in other areas. Chief Justice John Roberts surprised observers by joining the majority.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh disagreed with the decision. In his dissent, Alito called the decision “breathtaking” in its “arrogance.” Right-wing evangelical leaders agreed. Minister Franklin Graham, who has said that God ensured Trump’s election, wrote on Facebook that it was an attack on religious freedom. “Christian organizations should never be forced to hire people who do not align with their biblical beliefs and should not be prevented from terminating a person whose lifestyle and beliefs undermine the ministry’s purpose and goals.”
The reaction that surprised me, though, was that of the president. Asked about the decision, he said that while “some people were surprised,” “we live with that decision.” “That’s what it’s all about,” he told reporters, “we live with the decision of the Supreme Court…. Very powerful, very powerful decision actually, but they have so ruled.”
His apparently easy acceptance of a decision that contradicts his own recent executive order permitting discrimination against LGBTQ healthcare rights worries me. The court is about to hand down decisions about DACA (the policy allowing undocumented immigrants brought here as children to remain in some circumstances), abortion, and-- by far most important to the president-- whether or not Congress and state prosecutors can have access to Trump’s finances.
Is he resigned to whatever the court decides in those cases? Or does he trust that they will go his way?
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Some names I recognized. Some I did not.
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My guess would be that he doesn’t understand the situation.
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Also, it’s not an issue he really cares about. I think he’s willing to go along with the GOP’s persecution of LGBT people, but it’s not one of his pet issues. (Although if they frame it right, he may care. The military trans ban could have been sold to him by telling him that trans soldiers were making us weak, for example.)
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June 16, 2020 (Tuesday)
On May 25, the casual murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis as police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck, captured on film by a witness, led to protests against police brutality and the white supremacy that underpins it. The protests have lasted until today and show every sign of continuing. What has stood out about the protests is that it is the police who have been most conspicuously rioting. Their attacks on protesters with tear gas, pepper spray, flash-bangs, rubber bullets, clubs, and so on have led Americans to demand police reform.
Public anger against police has risen during the protests as more evidence of police misconduct has come out. On June 11, police in Louisville, Kentucky, released the incident report of the murder of Breonna Taylor in her own apartment during a botched raid. The sparse report listed her injuries as “none”—officers shot her 8 times—and said their entry into her apartment was not forced, although witnesses and crime scene photographs show police used a battering ram to gain access to the apartment while Taylor and her boyfriend slept.
Then, Friday, June 12, a police officer in Atlanta shot Rayshard Brooks in the back after he resisted arrest, stole an officer’s Taser, and then ran away. Brooks’s death sparked more protests in Atlanta, where people blocked highways and burned the Wendy’s restaurant where Brooks was killed.
Pressured to do something to reform the police, today Trump signed an executive order the White House claimed was written in consultation with police and with the families of those killed by police, although none of those families was present at the president’s press conference announcing the order. Police officials were. The order focuses on enabling police to identify and get help for officers who have shown violent tendencies, and calls for mental health professionals to ride along with officers to deal with calls concerning homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness.
Trump praised the families who had endured the loss of loved ones, but quickly veered into campaign language that used his growing emphasis on “law and order.” “Americans want law and order, they demand law and order. They may not say it, they may not be talking about it, but that’s what they want,” he said. “Some of them don’t know that that’s what they want, but that’s what they want. They understand that when you remove the police, you hurt those that have the least, the most.” He blamed former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden for letting the police problem fester “because they had no idea how to [fix] it and it is a complex situation.”
Then he turned to a celebration of the economy, and said that economic opportunity was the way to achieve civil rights. (It was a mishmash, but that was the gist.)
For their part, Democrats who control the House of Representatives are preparing legislation that sets national standards for police behavior, requires officers to wear body cameras, and abolishes the use of chokeholds. Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told MSNBC: “Over 1,000 people last year died at the hands of police in the United States. In most European countries it’s not more than 1 or 2. There’s something very wrong with the police culture and with the way we train police.”
In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) says the Democratic bill is a non-starter. He dismissed it as “typical Democratic overreach to try to control everything in Washington.” Senate Republicans are working on a bill without input from Democrats. It has not yet been released, so it’s not clear what’s in it, but it appears to try to incentivize states to try to clean up police tactics.
Both sides are hoping to have a bill on the president’s desk before the July 4 holiday.
Meanwhile, other fights are shaping up in Washington, largely over Trump’s apparent attempt to pack the government with loyalists rather than nonpartisan civil servants.
The big story today was that the Department of Justice, overseen by Trump loyalist William Barr, sued Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton to block his book from coming out on June 23.
It was a weird lawsuit. It claims Bolton is “compromising national security by publishing a book containing classified information,” but the government did not try to get a temporary restraining order, and it did not sue the book’s publisher: it went after Bolton alone, charging him with violating a non-disclosure agreement and demanding he hand over any money he makes from the book. Law professor Rick Hasen speculated on Twitter that the lawsuit “may be no more than a complaint written for an audience of one, more about looking tough against Bolton and claiming he’s violating the law than about getting actual court relief.”
We learned tonight that Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Elaine McCusker has resigned from the Pentagon. McCusker was the one who flagged the administration’s withholding of money from Ukraine in 2019 as illegal. A string of emails revealed in the Ukraine scandal showed that she continued to press the administration to release the money. After Congress learned of the illegal hold, an administration official emailed her to suggest that it was the fault of the Pentagon, rather than the White House, that the money had not been processed. McCusker would have none of it. She answered: “You can’t be serious. I am speechless.”
Also tonight, Eliot Engel (D-NY), chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, warned that Michael Pack, the new head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the agency that oversees the nonpartisan media outlet Voice of America, is planning a purge of the agency’s career leadership tomorrow morning. Pack is an associate of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and it seems he is intent on turning the VOA into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration. Engel warned Pack that “the law requires that our international broadcasting be independent, unbiased, and targeted toward audiences around the world.” He pledged to “use every tool at the Foreign Affairs Committee’s disposal to make sure career employees are protected, the law is followed, and USAGM’s credibility remains intact.”
The purge of career officials from government has been made easier by gutting the Merit Systems Protection Board, the federal agency that protects civil service workers from being fired without cause. Since 2017, the board has not had enough members to decide cases, and for more than a year there has been no one on it at all. The president has nominated enough people to get the board back to work, and only one of them faces serious objections. But McConnell has not put the nominations on the Senate calendar.
Still, the fight to protect a non-partisan civil service from turning into a tool of the president is not over. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating what Democrats say is the “unprecedented politicization” of the Department of Justice under Trump and Barr. Today it subpoenaed Aaron Zelinsky, who resigned from the team prosecuting Trump’s friend and former adviser Roger Stone after the Justice Department abruptly reduced its sentencing request for Stone. It also subpoenaed acting chief of staff of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division John Elias. At a hearing on June 24, Zelinsky will be asked about the Stone case, and Elias will presumably talk about whether the president exercised undue influence on DOJ business investigations.
A former deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, Donald Ayer, will testify before the committee without a subpoena. Ayer says he will explain how Barr has been “increasing the power of the president to the point that he’s almost an autocrat.”
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June 17, 2020 (Wednesday)
The book by Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton will not go on sale until June 23, but the material in it is already in the hands of the press. What its 592 pages say about the president is not exactly unexpected, but is damning nonetheless.
According to accounts by reporters who had access to the book early, Bolton shows a president who is so remarkably uninformed and impulsive that his own senior officials mock him. Bolton, who is famous for meticulous note taking, brings receipts. He details how Trump repeatedly sold out American interests in exchange for favors from foreign governments in the hope of getting reelected.
Bolton confirms that Trump directly connected the distribution of congressionally funded aid to Ukraine with the announcement of an investigation into presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter. This confirms the charge at the center of the House’s impeachment proceeding.
But, according to Bolton, Trump did not limit his bribery to Ukraine. The most dramatic leak about the book involves Trump’s request to Chinese leader Xi Jinping that China buy more American crops to help his chances of reelection in 2020. In exchange for a trade deal, Trump agreed with Xi that the way to handle the Muslim Uighur minority in western China was to concentrate more than a million of the Uighurs into camps, although American policy stood firmly against such repression. Trump told Xi that forcing them into camps was “exactly the right thing to do.” (Today, with Bolton’s book in the news and after Congress passed a bill imposing sanctions on China for its treatment of the Uighurs with only one “no” vote, Trump signed the bill).
Bolton wrote: “Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security. I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.”
Bolton goes on to attack House Democrats for mounting an incomplete and hasty impeachment of the president, saying that “These and innumerable other similar conversations with Trump formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency. Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different.”
(Bolton, of course, did not testify before the House, saying he would not do so without a subpoena, but also that, even if subpoenaed, he would wait for a court to decide whether or not the House had a right to subpoena a presidential advisor. Foreseeing a long court battle, the House declined to pursue his testimony. He then offered to testify before the Senate, but Republican senators refused to hear any testimony against the president.)
So where does the Bolton book—at least the leaks we’ve seen so far—leave us?
It should surprise exactly no one that Trump would be willing to bribe a foreign official to help him get reelected: we had ample evidence that he did so with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky not a year ago. (As Ellen Weintraub, the head of the Federal Election Commission reiterated repeatedly in 2019: “It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election.”)
But Trump’s apparent desire to get along with Xi in hopes of a trade deal that would smooth the way for his reelection appears especially chilling in light of the fact that it might well have affected the administration’s response to the coronavirus that has now claimed at least 119,000 American lives—more than died in WWI.
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, on January 15, Trump and Xi inked a trade deal that, among other things, required China “to increase purchases of U.S. products by at least $200 billion over 2017 levels, split into two tranches: $76.7 billion in 2020 and $123.3 billion in 2021.”
At the same time, news of the coronavirus was spreading. Trump praised Xi’s handling of the virus and claimed it had been contained. On January 22, he tweeted: “One of the many great things about our just signed giant Trade Deal with China is that it will bring both the USA & China closer together in so many other ways. Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country. Much more to come!” And on January 24, as the devastation of the novel coronavirus came clearer, he wrote: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
When the pandemic tanked the U.S. economy, the trade deal made less of a difference, and Trump’s close engagement with China just as the pandemic was breaking out suddenly became a liability that Biden was quick to hit. Trump turned on China, blaming it for the virus, and then took the US out of the World Health Organization, saying the WHO was responsible for the pandemic because it had been too willing to trust the Chinese.
But the trade deal remains, and for his part, U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee today and said he expects China will, in fact, abide by it. He cited as evidence that China has recently bought $1 billion worth of U.S. cotton.
The White House is determined to stop Bolton’s information from getting to the public. The Department of Justice—which, according to its mission statement, is supposed to “enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law,” and to “ensure public safety against threats both foreign and domestic”—yesterday filed a civil lawsuit against Bolton that appeared to be designed to force Bolton to surrender whatever money he makes from the book. Although it has language that suggests he must try to stop the book from being published, the fact that language was directed at Bolton himself, rather than the publisher, who actually owns the book at this point, made it seem largely window dressing.
But tonight, the DOJ requested a temporary restraining order to stop the book from appearing, arguing that the book contains “classified information… that, if disclosed, reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage, or exceptionally grave damage, to the national security of the United States.” Bolton insists that there is nothing classified in the book, and that the White House held up the classification review for political reasons. To protect Trump from oversight, the administration has been expanding what it considers classified since the time of the Ukraine scandal. On Monday, Trump made classification universal: “every conversation with me as president [is] highly classified,” he said.
The attempt to silence Bolton is an extreme position, made worse by the fact that Trump loyalist John Ratcliffe, newly confirmed as the Director of National Intelligence, has signed on to the effort, along with other top intelligence and national security officials. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the First Amendment over alleged national security interests in 1971, allowing the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers that revealed the government’s deliberate misleading of the American people over the Vietnam War.
While Bolton’s book focuses on Trump, the—ahem-- elephant in the room is the cadre of Republicans in the Senate who refused to convict the president of the charges on which the House impeached him in December 2019, insisting that his behavior did not rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
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June 18, 2020 (Thursday)
Today’s political news was chaotic, so you shouldn’t worry if you found yourself unable to make sense of what on earth was happening. Still, amidst the chaos, there was a feeling of desperation from the White House as the tide seems to have turned against the president.
The biggest piece of news from today is that the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s policy of ending DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Initiated by President Barack Obama in 2012, this program provides some legal protections and a pathway to obtaining a work permit for undocumented immigrants who were brought into America by their parents when they were children. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the majority decision, which said the administration had not provided a clear rationale for ending the program. DACA remains very popular in the country: 74% of Americans like it.
The administration’s attack on DACA had suffered losses in the lower courts, but rather than fixing the problems with it, officials decided to go to the Supreme Court, where Trump has appointed two justices—Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—during his term. The president has repeatedly said of controversial policies that he would take them to the Supreme Court, where he would win.
But this week, the court decided against the administration on two landmark cases. On Monday, it decided that employers could not discriminate against LGBT workers. Today, it ruled against one of Trump’s signature policies.
Trump was incensed, and Twitter heard about it. “These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!” He went on: “[W]e need NEW JUSTICES of the Supreme Court. If the Radical Left Democrats assume power, your Second Amendment, Right to Life, Secure Borders, and… Religious Liberty, among many other things, are OVER and GONE!”
He called the DACA decision “highly political… and seemingly not based on the law,” (which, by the way, seems to answer my question on Monday about his easy acceptance of the LGBT decision. When he said “That’s what it’s all about… we live with the decision of the Supreme Court…. Very powerful, very powerful decision actually, but they have so ruled,” he likely just didn’t know what the decision was and tried to fake it, expecting that the Supreme Court would have decided in his favor.)
Trump also attacked his former National Security Advisor John Bolton, whose forthcoming tell-all book from his 17 months in the White House apparently shows Trump begging Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a trade deal to help his reelection campaign just after endorsing the leader’s policy of forcing a million Chinese Uighurs into concentration camps. On Twitter, Trump called Bolton “wacko” and “incompetent, “a disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!” (Trump, of course, appointed Bolton, who lasted the longest of any of his four NSAs, so far.)
Trump’s supporters rallied to him. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom Bolton claimed had mocked Trump, issued a formal statement saying that while he had not read the book, he had seen excerpts. “Bolton is spreading a number of lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods.” He called Bolton a “traitor,” and concluded “To our friends around the world: you know that President Trump’s America is a force for good in the world.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who took Russian money from indicted political operative Lev Parnas, claims Bolton’s book is a national security risk. McCarthy charged that Bolton is putting America in danger to make money.
But the president is clearly worried that his grip on the country is slipping, especially as a new poll from Fox News shows him badly behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Today Trump tried to distance himself from the trade deal at the heart of Bolton’s book. He contradicted the testimony of U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer before the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday, saying that, in fact, the U.S. “certainly does maintain a policy option, under various conditions, of a complete decoupling from China.”
More revealing was that in the midst of his torrent of tweeting today were 21 tweets outlining pots of money the Department of Transportation is distributing to various states where Trump’s support is waning for them to spend on transportation infrastructure. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, who is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, announced today $906 million in discretionary spending for transportation under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, passed under Obama in 2015. One observer noted “Trump found out he’s losing to Biden by 12 points in the latest Fox news poll & started Tweeting like Oprah giving away cars at Christmas.”
But something significant happened today on social media: Twitter and Facebook both flagged the president’s publicity. Trump shared an ad that seems to show a black toddler (misspelled “todler” in the fake CNN chyron in the shot) running from a “racist baby” who is “probably a Trump voter,” then reveals “what actually happened,” a backstory showing the two children hugging in a joyous reunion before running off together, as shown in the original cut, which came from a viral video a few months old. The implication is that the recent emphasis on white racism is manufactured outrage by people with a political agenda. “America is not the problem,” the ad reads. “Fake news is.”
Twitter slapped a “Manipulated media” warning on the tweet.
The Trump campaign also published on Facebook an ad with images of a red triangle that mirrored the patches Nazis used to mark political prisoners in concentration camps. The ads apparently ran 88 times—88 is code for Heil Hitler-- and Facebook later removed the ads for promoting “organized hate.”
Parker Molloy, editor at Media Matters, noted that this sort of dog whistle is designed to attract like-minded racists, but also to make opponents seem “paranoid, easily offended, and see Nazis everywhere they look.” She also suggested that this was a deliberate attempt to avoid having to pay for more ads because media would pick up the story and run with it. “It’s expensive to run ads,” she wrote, “but media coverage is free.” She noted that it’s far cheaper to run something offensive, get banned, and then cry “censorship–” which feeds the right-wing’s existing narrative-- than it is to pay for ads.
So it was a chaotic day, and a confusing one, but the fact that the Trump campaign is openly sharing Nazi symbols suggests that the lines of the election are becoming very clear indeed.
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June 19, 2020 (Friday)
Tonight saw a Friday night news dump that will go into the history books.
Trump tried to fire the US Attorney from the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey S. Berman, who has managed a series of cases against Trump and his allies, including Trump fixer Michael Cohen, Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, and Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were indicted for funneling Russian money to Republican candidates for office. Berman is reported to be investigating Trump’s finances, among many other things.
It happened like this: Attorney General William Barr issued a statement announcing that Berman would be stepping down and that Trump would nominate Jay Clayton to replace him. Clayton has never been a prosecutor. He is currently the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but before he took that position he was a lawyer who, among other things, represented Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank is the only bank that would work with Trump after his bankruptcies. It might have given him loans he did not repay, and the Russian money-laundering that landed the bank in legal trouble might have helped Trump.
Legal analyst and Congressional staffer Daniel Goldman noted that this whole scenario was unusual. Normally, when a US Attorney leaves, that person’s deputy takes over. Bringing in a replacement from elsewhere meant that “Trump/Barr did not want anyone at SDNY running the office—likely because there was a serious disagreement.”
But then things got crazier. Berman issued his own statement, saying “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate. Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption. I cherish every day that I work with the men and women of this Office to pursue justice without fear or favor—and intend to ensure that this Office’s important cases continue unimpeded.”
What’s Berman saying? Well, it might be that Trump’s preference for “acting,” rather than Senate-confirmed, officials has come back to bite him. Berman was not Senate-confirmed; he is an interim U.S. Attorney. By law, the Attorney General can appoint an interim U.S. Attorney for 120 days. At the end of that time, the court can appoint that person indefinitely.
Berman was one of those interim appointees, put in place by Trump’s first Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.
Berman’s appointment raised an outcry because he was handpicked by Trump. The U.S. Attorney for the SDNY oversees Manhattan and thus the president’s businesses and at least nine Trump properties. Trump went out of his way to take the unusual step of personally interviewing Berman, who donated $2,700 to the Trump campaign, served on the presidential transition team, and was a partner at the law firm where Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is a member. Democrats vowed to block Berman’s nomination, but never got the chance because Sessions used the workaround so Berman would not come before the Senate.
Now, this means that because Berman was appointed by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, not the president, he apparently cannot be removed except by the court, or, possibly, by the president… but not by Barr. Lawyers are fighting over who, exactly, can remove Berman, but that itself says that any challenge he files will land in the courts for months… likely until after the election.
And that’s another notable thing about Berman’s statement. He suggests he is being fired because the administration wants to delay or interrupt an investigation, and his language suggests that both he and the administration know exactly what that investigation is. There are a number of reasons the SDNY might be examining the finances of the president or his family, but former National Security Advisor John Bolton suggested another reason in his forthcoming book: he apparently claims Trump assured Turkey’s autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan he would fill the SDNY with his own loyalists, which would enable him to do Erdogan a political favor.
As Berman’s predecessor in the job, Preet Bharara tweeted, “Why does a president get rid of his own hand-picked US Attorney in SDNY on a Friday night, less than 5 months before the election?” President of the Center for American Progress Neera Tanden noted: “To attempt a Friday night massacre 5 months before an election means there’s a pretty big investigation they are trying to kill.”
It seems worth noting that the Supreme Court is about to hand down a decision on whether Deutsche Bank and Trump’s accountants have to hand Trump’s financial records over to Congress and to the Manhattan district attorney, which might well spark legal trouble for the president in New York.
Law professor Stephen Vladeck also asked us to keep in mind that Barr “out-and-out * lied * in a written statement—and in a context in which there could have been little question to him that Berman would publicly call him out for doing so… And he did it anyway.” “Something * really * stinks,” Vladeck concluded.
Something else stinks about this crisis, too, and that is the Tulsa rally the president originally scheduled for tonight. Widespread objection to holding a Trump rally on Juneteenth—the historic celebration of Black freedom-- in Tulsa, where a race massacre destroyed the Black community of Greenwood in 1921, forced him to reschedule for tomorrow. But had the rally been held, with media focus on disturbances at it and on the spread of coronavirus there, it seems likely that Berman’s firing would not have gotten much attention.
Indeed, it has seemed all day as if Trump was deliberately stoking trouble in Tulsa. He began today by tweeting a threat: “Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!” (Americans have a constitutional right to protest.)
Then he made sure his supporters would be in the streets. In consultation with the Secret Service, the Tulsa police chief had asked Tulsa’s mayor to declare a curfew around the BOK Center where the rally will be held. He did so. But Trump pressured the mayor to rescind the curfew, which the mayor did. Trump tweeted "I just spoke to the highly respected Mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who informed me there will be no curfew tonight or tomorrow for our many supporters attending the # MAGA Rally…. Enjoy yourselves - thank you to Mayor Bynum!”
This crisis feels big. Trump and Barr know an investigation is out there barreling toward the president, and they are willing to take extraordinary steps, steps that undermine our democracy and threaten our citizenry, to stop it.
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I love that HCR can pull together disparate threads to make a cogent theory of WTF is going on with the political mess that we are rapidly descending into. If the country survives until 1/21/21, there will be some serious reckoning to undertake.
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Yes! That’s why I read and repost her summaries her every day. She makes the connections between significant, but seemingly disparate and chaotic events crystal clear. She x-rays the curtain, exposing the feverish machinations of the man behind it that we’re not supposed to be paying attention to.
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Your doing this is a real service to the BBS. Thanks for taking the time.
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As a side note, this is the kind of resistance I would expect from the career civil servants who actually run the government if Trump and his cronies attempt to hold onto power past their use-before date. It takes courage, but not a whole lot of work, to simply say “I don’t recognize your authority to tell me what to do.” When it comes down to it, 99% of the government is made up of these people, most of whom have worked for multiple administrations, and know the details of power in DC far, far better than the doofuses who have joined in the last few years. Very, very few are fans of the current administration.
And the resistance to being bullied is contagious. Berman resists; Barr tries to get someone to remove him, and they resist. Barr shops around to find someone who will try to remove Berman, but the only ones who will do so are even further removed from the legal authority. So the people at SDNY who protect Berman resist those cronies. Etc. It spreads exponentially, and pretty soon you have an entire government that either refuses to follow the order of the Executive or outright works against him.
The characteristic of Trump and his political appointees that they are unqualified and know very little about how our government works helped them to break it. As we’ve talked about before, they’ve been playing Calvinball. But as we get to the end of the presidential term, it’s going to work against them, as the career civil servants who know the fine nuances of the structures and functions of government start to use them against the tiny minority of Trump’s True Believers.
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