Heather Cox Richardson

[milliefink]

[Another full day! Thoughts on Brexit election too.]

December 12, 2019 (Thursday)

“’I was on the fence but I went with Trump’s GOP because I love listening to all of the Republican men screaming and yelling,’ said no female swing voter in the suburbs ever,” Nicolle Wallace tweeted this afternoon. And that’s the key to the yelling and table pounding going on in Washington in the impeachment hearings. The Republicans are not trying to make a case, or to persuade anyone; they are simply trying to dominate by making this all so painful we stop caring and let them get away with excusing their president for abuses that no one contests.

It is a travesty… but remember that they would not behave this way if they thought they had it sewn up. They know their only hope is to convince the majority of Americans, who disapprove of Trump, either to believe their lies or to get so tired of the screaming that they give up. It is classic abusive behavior.

This story was deep in something folks thought missing in yesterday’s post: the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. On Monday, Horowitz released his investigation into the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, concluding it was proper and not politically motivated. I wrote about it here, and noted that Trump and Attorney General William Barr, along with Sean Hannity, simply claimed the report said the opposite of what it did.

On Wednesday, Horowitz appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the pattern of all these hearings held. Republicans, led by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, misrepresented the report’s conclusions. Graham said the report had shown “a massive criminal conspiracy,” when, in fact, it showed the exact opposite. But then there was confusion. Barr appointed a different inspector back in April when he was concerned that Horowitz would not assail the FBI’s work on Russian links to Trump’s campaign. That man, US Attorney for Connecticut John Durham, gave a statement when the report came out, saying he did not agree with all of it. This statement, as I wrote before, was inappropriate and unprecedented.

Republicans focused on the discrepancy between Horowitz and Durham to undermine the report. But here’s what Horowitz testified was their disagreement: While both men agreed that it was proper for the FBI to investigate Trump advisor Carter Page, they disagreed about whether the case should have been opened as a preliminary investigation, which limits some of the steps the FBI can take, or as a full investigation, which does not. It is a narrow distinction, and not terribly important here because they did not actually do anything for the first month that wouldn’t have been okay under a preliminary case.

In a separate issue that kept getting mixed in, the report found errors with four FISA applications to surveil Page. He was a consultant in the Russian and Central Asia oil and gas industry, and had been recruited by Russian agents in 2013, leading the FBI to obtain a warrant from a FISA court to surveil him in 2014, long before he signed on as a Trump advisor. So Page had long been on the FBI’s radar as a possible Russian asset.

In October 2016, the FBI again wanted to look at Page, who was then working for Trump, after they had received a tip that another advisor had boasted that the Trump campaign had access to files Russia had hacked from the Democratic National Committee, but they made errors in the FISA application, and then made errors in the next three, too. (FISA applications run for short periods of time, so they had essentially to renew them, but they were overseen by a different judge every time and all signed off on them, so there was clearly no inside job. I’ve written about that here, too.) Those errors are serious—and FBI Director Christopher Wray has already taken steps to address them-- but they did not affect the investigation. Nonetheless, Trump tweeted “They spied on my campaign!” and called the FBI “scum.”

Horowitz’s testimony uncovered only one important thing, to my mind. In October 2016, two days before then-FBI Director James Comey announced the FBI had reopened Clinton’s email investigation, Rudy Giuliani said in a media interview: “I think he’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” Then, after Comey made his announcement, Giuliani said that Comey had bowed to “the pressure of a group of FBI agents who don’t look at it politically…. The other rumor that I get is that there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion [not to charge Clinton] being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face to the FBI’s integrity…. I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents.” There were rumors at the time that Comey made the damaging announcement to keep rogue FBI agents from leaking the news to the press.

Horowitz says the investigation into those apparent leaks is still open (although he is clearly not hurrying). Comey’s announcement, made after voting had already begun, hurt Clinton badly. Indeed, now that I look at it, it looks quite like what Trump and Giuliani were trying to do to Joe Biden, doesn’t it? Anyway, that was the only new thing that came out of that testimony.

A couple of other investigations are also on the radar screen: yesterday, a federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the State Department, and the National Archives and Records Administration saying that Pompeo must produce the missing notes to Trump’s phone calls with Russia. By January 10, they either have to say he complied with preservation laws or explain why not. Then he’ll have until March to produce the documents.

Tomorrow the Supreme Court will begin to decide whether or not to take up Trump’s appeals for two cases he lost in lower courts about whether or not he or his accountants have to produce his financial records and tax returns to Congress. If the Justices decline to hear the cases, he and his accountants will have to produce the information Congress has subpoenaed. If they agree to hear the cases, that does not mean they will decide in his favor. It would, though, buy him until next June or so before their decision.

Finally, tonight, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tweeted that he would be on Sean Hannity’s show to “explain how [Trump] will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media, et al attempting to oust him as [POTUS] so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.” My guess is that this is not really about 2024, which is a long way away, but for 2020, when Trump plans to argue that he has been cheated out of his full term and tries to get supporters to refuse to accept anyone but him in the White House. Trump has repeatedly floated the idea that he should get an extension for all the years he has been under investigation; I think this is more of the same. Remember, a Justice Department memorandum says a sitting president cannot be indicted, but once out, he’s fair game. He has no intention of leaving office, but needs to soften up his base to overthrow the Constitution so directly.

That’s it for today’s news from America.

And now, as a special surprise to you who have asked if I would do Brexit… on this fateful day I called in Jim Cronin, a British historian who studies it. He said:

“The exit poll released at 10pm has predicted a big win for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives and, in effect, for Brexit. The poll is likely to hold up and that will mean a Conservative government with a sizable majority for the next five years.

“The result is a very big defeat for Labour and its current leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Voters not only rejected him and his leadership; it is likely that Labour will have lost seats in the northern part of the country that have traditionally been Labour and where antipathy to the Tories has been deep and settled. Labour has already lost its formerly solid base of support in Scotland. Together, these losses mean that the road back from defeat will be long and hard.

“Johnson won by stressing the need “to get Brexit done”, but he also abandoned the Tory commitment to austerity. Can he deliver on Brexit? It surely won’t be as easy as promised. And are the Conservatives sincere about increasing spending on the National Health Service, on housing, and on other social programs? Delivering on Brexit will certainly be more difficult and protracted than promised; and it would require quite a leap of faith to believe that the Tories will deliver on domestic policy. Now, though, they will have the opportunity. Of course, will they lose Scotland and oversee the breakup of the kingdom? Perhaps."

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

Finally, tonight, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tweeted that he would be on Sean Hannity’s show to “explain how [Trump] will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media, et al attempting to oust him as [POTUS] so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.”

Funny, that’s not in my copy of the Constitution…

[milliefink]

I think Mr. Fuckabee is mostly just trying to puff up his own strained claim to political relevance.

[milliefink]

This was enough to draw former Republican and still staunch conservative Tom Nichols to tweet: “People ask me when I think protest is appropriate and matters, since I’m usually not a fan. This, right here, should bring people into the streets of every state with a Republican Senator. This is a direct attack on the Constitution, not by Trump, but by an entire party.”

December 13, 2019 (Friday)

Another Friday the 13th, like the one in September that launched this entire fiasco when House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff wrote to the acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire demanding that he release the whistleblower complaint to the congressional intelligence committees, as required by law. No one knew what was in it, but Schiff noted that Maguire’s refusal to transmit the letter on the grounds that the person it concerned was not a member of the Intelligence Community meant that “the Committee can only conclude… that the serious misconduct at issue involves the President of the United States and/or other senior White House or Administration officials.”

And here we are, three months later, in a full-fledged constitutional crisis.

Today’s drama started last night, when Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called a recess just after 11:00 and Republicans exploded. They had dragged yesterday’s hearings out as long as possible, hoping the impeachment vote would happen in the middle of the night and thus get less attention. Nadler wanted the vote when people were awake to watch it. After the session ended, Republicans gave media interviews insisting that the Democrats were not playing fair.

(As an aside, let me add here that it is very hard to give an accurate reporting of Republican behavior at this point without sounding biased. In this case, GOP leaders had played the system to their own ends all day, using parliamentary procedures to drag out the situation to their benefit-- that’s what all the requests to strike the last word were: for every amendment proposed, every member had the right to speak for five minutes. That’s fine; Congress has always had sharp parliamentarians in it. But when the Democrats did something much milder, simply gaveling down a session until Americans could watch what is one of the most momentous events in our history, the Republicans went ballistic and played the victim in front of the media. They are not acting at all in good faith; they are developing a narrative that plays to their base. But when you call them out, Trump supporters jump on you for being biased. Once again, this is classic abusive behavior, constantly keeping the actual victims on the defensive.)

OK, back to the story:

The impeachment vote took place this morning shortly after 10:00. The House Committee on the Judiciary passed two articles of impeachment against President Donald John Trump by a party-line vote of 23-17.

Now the case goes to the House as a whole, which will likely vote on the articles next week. They are expected to pass, although there may well be some Democratic defections from Democrats in swing districts. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she will not “whip” that is, pressure, Democrats to vote with the party. This is a “vote of conscience,” she says.

There might not be defections, though, as Republicans have made it clear they are simply sticking with Trump regardless of the facts, which are so clear that the GOP is either not dealing with them or denying them altogether.

It has been a bit of a scandal that Republican Senators have been coordinating their plans for a trial with the White House, and that went nuclear last night when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell met privately with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and another White House legal advisor, then told Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel that he would remain in “total coordination” with the White House. Although the Senate is supposed to act as an impartial jury in an impeachment trial, McConnell said “There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this….” “There’s no chance the president will be removed from office.”

This is awkward, since in 1998, the Senate developed quite detailed procedures for a Senate impeachment trial (they’re really weirdly detailed, like they are a film script). One of the requirements is that Senators must take an oath, saying: “I solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of ------ -------, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: So help me God.”

At stake is that McConnell’s statement erases our separation of powers and puts the legislative branch—Congress—at the disposal of the president. This was enough to draw former Republican and still staunch conservative Tom Nichols to tweet: “People ask me when I think protest is appropriate and matters, since I’m usually not a fan. This, right here, should bring people into the streets of every state with a Republican Senator. This is a direct attack on the Constitution, not by Trump, but by an entire party.”

Nichols is the very opposite of an alarmist. His statement is a very big deal indeed. Another conservative agreed with him. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin tweeted: “If McConnell continues to collude and four R’s do not defect to demand a real trial with witnesses then peaceful, mass protest is in order. This should not stand.” Democrats are also pushing back. Val Demings (D-FL) says McConnell needs to recuse himself. “He has effectively promised to let President Trump manage his own impeachment trial. The Senator must withdraw.”

McConnell’s declaration might leave room for voters to insist on a fair trial. McConnell can only cut off witnesses and evidence if he has 51 votes to do that. It is possible that, under pressure from constituents, some Republican senators would vote for openness. Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman in the Washington Post argued that this would enable Democrats to demand the testimony and witnesses Republicans previously blocked on the grounds that the House investigation was illegitimate.

In the end, if Congress caves to Trump, will the courts retain their independence? Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear three cases concerning Trump’s finances. He has insisted that Congress cannot investigate the president, and thus that the lower courts who have upheld house subpoenas for his taxes and finances are wrong. (You will remember Trump’s lawyers agreed with the hypothetical scenario that even if the president shot someone on Fifth Avenue he could not be investigated while president.) Precedent would say that the Court would uphold the lower court rulings-- of course the president is not above the law-- but now, with Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Court, the outcome is unclear. It will decide the cases in late spring, at the earliest (showing how effective it has been for Trump to tie everything up in lawsuits).

While McConnell seems to have ceded Congress to Trump and the Supreme Court’s stance is unclear, the president seems worried. He’s tweeting madly, and more bad news is coming his way. Yesterday, the Department of Defense and the Office of Management and Budget began releasing documents about the Ukraine scandal as required by a federal judge, but they were almost entirely blacked out, which will spark another court battle. Today a federal judge ordered the State Department to produce more documents about the Ukraine scandal, focusing on contacts between Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

And today, the Editorial Board of the Orlando Sentinel, in a state Trump will need for reelection, called not just for impeachment, but also conviction.

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Also available at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ (It’s free.)

[milliefink]

December 14, 2019 (Saturday)

This week was a big one in the history of this country.

The House Committee on the Judiciary voted to impeach the President for the fourth time in American history. But that was not, actually, the biggest story. The big story was that it became clear that the leadership of today’s Republican Party, a party started in the 1850s by men like Abraham Lincoln to protect American democracy, is trying to undermine our government.

Even as I write that, it seems crazy. But I can reach no other conclusion after watching the behavior of the Republicans over the past few weeks, from their yelling and grandstanding rather than interviewing witnesses in the Intelligence Committee hearings, to the truly bizarre statements of Trump and Attorney General Barr saying the report of the Justice Department’s Inspector General about the investigation into Russian interference in 2016 concluded the opposite of what it did, to the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee making a mockery of the hearings rather than actually participating in them, and finally culminating in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announcing on Sean Hannity’s program last night that “There’s no chance the president will be removed from office.”

A look at the members of the House Judiciary Committee who voted for or against impeachment explains how we got here. It was a strict party vote, and of the 23 Democrats who voted to impeach Trump, 11 were women, and twelve were people of color (California’s Ted Lieu did not vote because he was recovering from surgery). Of the 17 Republicans who voted against impeachment, two were women. Zero were people of color.

That the Republican Party has turned itself into an all-white, largely male party is the result of a deliberate campaign of industrialists to destroy the national consensus after WWII. Unregulated capitalism crashed the world economy in 1929, then an activist government both provided relief during the Depression and enabled the Allies to win WWII. By 1945, Americans of all parties embraced the idea that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. This belief was called the “liberal consensus,” and it was behind both the largest welfare program in American history—Social Security—and the largest infrastructure project in American history—the Interstate Highway System. Taxes of up to 91% under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower helped to pay for this popular system.

But a small group of businessmen loathed the idea that government bureaucrats could tell them how to run their businesses. Rather than having to abide by government regulations, they wanted to go back to the world of the 1920s, when businessmen ran the government. They insisted that the government must do nothing but defend the nation and promote religion.

They made little headway. The economy was booming and most Americans loved their new nice homes and family cars, and recognized that it was labor legislation and government regulation that enabled them to make a good living. The liberal consensus kept wealth spread fairly in society, rather than accumulating at the top as it had done in the 1920s.

But there was a catch. The logical outcome of a war for democracy was that all Americans would have the right to have a say in their government. The idea that men of color and women should have a say equal to white men in our government gave an opening to the men who wanted to destroy the nation’s postwar active government. When a Republican Supreme Court unanimously decided that segregation was unconstitutional in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the way was clear for these men to argue that an active government was not about protecting equality; it was simply a way to give benefits to black and brown people, paid for by white tax dollars.

This argument drew directly from the years of Reconstruction after the Civil War, when the Republican national taxes invented during the Civil War coincided with the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing black men the right to vote. In 1871, white supremacist Democrats in the South began to argue (disingenuously) that they had no problem with black men voting. What they objected to was poor men voting for leaders who promised “stuff”—roads and schools and hospitals in the war-damaged South—that could only be paid for with tax levies on the only people in the South who had money: white men. This, they said, was socialism.

One hundred years later, this equation-- that people of color would vote for government benefits paid for by hardworking white men-- was the argument on which businessmen after WWII broke the liberal consensus. Their candidate Reagan rose to power on the image of the Welfare Queen, a black woman who, he said “has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names." In his inaugural address he concluded, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He promised to take tax dollars from welfare queens and give them back to hardworking white men.

These new Republicans slashed government regulation and social welfare programs, as they promised, but their laws did not help middle-class white men. Instead wealth moved upward. Voters pushed back, and to stay in power, Republicans purged the party of people who still believed that the government should regulate business and provide a social safety net—people Newt Gingrich called RINOs, for Republicans In Name Only—and then began to purge opposition voters. As Republicans got more and more extreme, they lost more voters and so, to stay in power, they began to gerrymander congressional districts. Increasingly, they argued that Democrats only won elections with illegal votes, usually votes of people of color. Those voters were “takers” who wanted handouts from “makers,” as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney put it. It was imperative to keep people of color and women from voting. Their desire for government regulation, social welfare, and infrastructure funding was “socialism.”

A generation of vilifying Democrats as “socialists” has brought us to a place where Republican leaders reject outright the idea that Democrats can govern legitimately. To keep voters from electing Democrats, Republicans have abandoned democracy. They are willing to purge voting rolls, gerrymander states, collude with a foreign power to swing elections, and protect a president who has attacked Congress, packed the courts, and attacked the media, looking everything like a dictator on the make, so long as he slashes taxes and attacks women and people of color. While Republicans used to call their opponents socialists, they now call them traitors.

We are at the moment when Americans must choose. Will we allow these Republican leaders to establish an oligarchy in which a few white men run the country in their own interests, or do we really believe that everyone has a right to a say in our government?

For my part, I will stand with Lincoln, who in the midst of a war against oligarchy, charged his fellow Americans to “highly resolve that…, this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

[milliefink]

December 15, 2019 (Sunday)

On this mid-December Sunday, people took a deep breath before jockeying over impeachment began again tonight. There is movement against the Republican leaders’ rigging of the system, but whether or not that is going to matter remains to be seen.

Trump’s surrogates today continued their disinformation. On CNN this morning, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul tried to argue that Trump had not asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a rival. Anchor Jake Tapper noted that Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden. Paul said: “He does not call up and say investigate my rival. He says investigate a person.” Tapper had to point out that Biden was Trump’s rival. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani also began to run his One America News Network “documentary” attacking former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and claiming that the Bidens were laundering money.

If that was what was on display today as the defense of the president, there were Republicans who spoke out against the lockstep. On “Meet the Press,” Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) told host Chuck Todd that ““I think it would be extremely inappropriate to put a bullet in this thing immediately when it comes over…. I think we ought to hear what the House impeachment managers have to say, give the President’s attorneys an opportunity to make their defense, and then make a decision about whether, and to what extent, it would go forward from there.”

Democrats are trying to figure out a way to emphasize that Trump’s impeachment is about country rather than party. Today a group of 30 first-term Democrats in the House asked leaders to add Justin Amash, an Independent libertarian from Michigan, who was a Republican until last July 4, to the list of impeachment managers. Amash is no Democrat; he is a conservative libertarian, and his inclusion, they argue, would help illustrate that impeachment is bipartisan. It’s not clear that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who will name the managers, will include him. He is not on either the House Intelligence or Judiciary Committees, so would be an outside pick, and as a libertarian, would be a bit of a wild card for the Democrats.

The biggest news on the impeachment front today, though, came tonight, when Charles E. (Chuck) Schumer of New York, the Senate Minority Leader (which means he is the highest ranking Democrat in the Republican-controlled Senate) made an opening bid in negotiations over the form of an impeachment trial in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has faced a ferocious outcry over his statement to Fox News personality Sean Hannity that the outcome of a Senate impeachment trial was already decided: “There’s no chance the president will be removed from office.” McConnell has made it clear he wants a quick, quiet trial with no witnesses or documents, to avoid both further incriminating Trump and to avoid the kind of circus we saw in the House Judiciary Committee hearings. But there is pushback on such a whitewashing.

Schumer’s letter advanced quite reasonable terms for a trial, but those terms are going to chafe McConnell. Noting that he based his provisions on the ones Republicans passed during the Clinton impeachment, Schumer asked for a fairly tight schedule. But he and McConnell will part company over Schumer’s request for witnesses “with direct knowledge of Administration decisions regarding the delay in security assistance funds to the government of Ukraine and the requests for certain investigations to be announced by the government of Ukraine.”

I quoted that line in its entirety because it’s important: Schumer is threading the needle of asking for witnesses without opening up the possibility for Republicans to drag in all the people that have been identified in their circles as being part of a grand Ukrainian conspiracy, including, of course, the Bidens. Schumer has asked for only four people: acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who withheld the funds; Robert Blair, his senior advisor; Michael Duffey, the Associate Director for National Security in the Office of Management and Budget (which withheld the funds); and John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor. The House asked or subpoenaed all four of these people to testify and all refused. Schumer said the Democrats would be happy to hear from additional witnesses, but only those who had direct knowledge of the issues identified in that line I quoted. So not Hunter Biden or Adam Schiff or Nancy Pelosi, all of whom Trump has insisted should testify.

Schumer also asked for documents, again, limited to the narrow focus on aid to Ukraine in exchange for Zelensky’s announcement of an investigation into the Bidens. That is, essentially material related to the July 25 phone call which started this whole thing.

(By the way… remember Sharpiegate, when someone altered a weather map with a Sharpie to make it look like the path of Hurricane Dorian would follow Trump’s offhand comment that it threatened Alabama and we heard about it for days? That began on September 4, right when Trump would have learned about the whistleblower complaint. Interesting timing, huh?)

Schumer suggested other rules, too, but the witnesses and documents are the big ticket items. He told McConnell that he is not open to monkeying around with these requests, and will not take the chance that the Republicans try to maneuver around them by breaking them into individual rules and then either altering them or voting them down piecemeal. “We believe all of this should be considered in one resolution,” he wrote. “The issue of witnesses and documents, which are the most important issues facing us, should be decided before we move forward with any part of the trial.”

This is going to be hard for McConnell to get around if Senators like Toomey are serious about not simply rubber stamping Trump’s behavior. Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, who is one of our foremost experts in Constitutional law, liked Schumer’s proposal. If McConnell “rejects these reasonable ground rules & insists on a non-trial,” Tribe wrote, “the House should consider treating that as a breach of the Senate’s oath & withholding the Articles until the Senate reconsiders.”

I have been an agnostic about whether or not the House could refuse to send articles of impeachment to the Senate, but if Tribe says it’s constitutional, then as far as I’m concerned, it’s on the table.

Finally, just after midnight tonight, the House Judiciary Committee published its full report on impeachment. The 658-page document explains the committee’s process and argument for the two articles of impeachment it passed. I am not going to read it tonight (!) but reports say it includes this:

“President Trump has realized the Framers’ worst nightmare. He has abused his power in soliciting and pressuring a vulnerable foreign nation to corrupt the next United States Presidential election by sabotaging a political opponent and endorsing a debunked conspiracy theory promoted by our adversary, Russia.”

Indeed.

[milliefink]

December 16, 2019 (Monday)

There are four big stories for today. Three add up to a single narrative of Trump and his Republican Party in trouble and desperate to stay in power. The fourth—the Washington Post’s crucially important story about the 18-year war in Afghanistan—is just tragic.

Trump’s lawyer, and apparently fixer, Rudy Giuliani has been in the news again, first because his “documentary” on the pro-Trump One America News Network accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 elections and attacking the Bidens has played on state television in Russia; and second because investigations into his business dealings show how Trump has been remaking our government along the lines of an oligarchy in which powerful men work to please him in exchange for government favors.

On December 9, Josh Kovensky at TalkingPointsMemo revealed how Giuliani was working with Ukrainian oligarchs for access to the president. In the Washington Post today, David Ignatius detailed how Giuliani became the man to see for access to Trump. Foreigners in trouble with the law in America hired Giuliani for huge sums of money to pilot their cases into safer waters; businessmen in Ukraine eager to make corrupt deals in the natural gas industry hired Giuliani to get rid of anti-corruption figures like U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Casey Michel at the New Republic has a similar story today, in which a Ukrainian oligarch offered dirt on Biden in exchange for getting US charges of money laundering against him dropped. (He allegedly used shell companies and real estate purchases to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in the US.)

There were suggestions a few weeks ago that Trump might throw Giuliani under the bus, but the opposite has happened. Trump has hosted Giuliani at the White House as recently as last Friday, and a Wall Street Journal article describes Trump talking to Giuliani as soon as he got back from his recent Ukraine trip. According to Giuliani, Trump asked “What did you get?” and Giuliani answered “More than you can imagine.” A New Yorker article by Adam Entous quotes Giuliani as saying that he had, indeed, torpedoed US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch “because I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way. She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.” (This is a major concession.) And today, Trump praised Giuliani as “a great person who loves our country and he does this out of love.”

This sort of oligarchic system, in which rich men evade the law by cozying up to the nation’s leader, is what Republican leaders are now stuck trying to defend. As expected, last night’s letter from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has boxed Republicans into a corner. Schumer’s requests were based on rules the Republicans set during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and his request for fact witnesses and documents was kind of a no-brainer.

So Republicans today have floated the idea that the Senate is simply a jury and that the place for pursuing facts was in the House. If the Democrats missed that opportunity it’s not the Senate’s problem. Law professor and former US Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said “The technical legal term to describe this argument is… dumb. It would mean prosecutors could never introduce testimony or evidence that wasn’t presented to the grand jury. McConnell should just say what is really motivating him: he is scared silly of what the witnesses will say.” [I cleaned up the punctuation in Katyal’s tweet.]

Democrats are talking about passing the articles of impeachment but then simply holding onto them, leaving Trump impeached but not exonerated. This would keep the Senate from whitewashing the Ukraine scandal. It would also drive Trump nuts. We’ll see how that plays out.

The Republicans are doubling down on Trump in part because he has solidified his hold on the Republican Party by alienating everyone else. Today’s Republican leaders know they cannot win in a free and fair vote, so they are working to purge Democrats from voter rolls.

On Friday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that last year’s poll closures in Georgia prevented between 54,000 and 85,000 voters, primarily Democrats, from casting ballots. In last year’s governor’s race, Democrat Stacey Abrams lost to Georgia’s Secretary of State, Republican Brian Kemp, who oversaw the voting procedures. (Kemp was also the only state election official to refuse help from the Department of Homeland Security to protect against Russian cyberattacks in 2016, and when election observers sued to examine the insecure servers for signs of a breach, technicians wiped the servers clean and, two months later, also wiped clean the backup servers.) Abrams lost by just over 50,000 votes. She refused to concede the race, acknowledging that Kemp had won, but maintaining that the election had been tainted.

Today, a federal judge in Georgia permitted Georgia to purge more than 313,000 voters, about 4% of the state’s total. Fair Fight, an organization Abrams started to fight voter suppression, asked for an emergency hearing hours before the purge was due to begin. The judge has scheduled the hearing, but is permitting the purge to start with the expectation that people culled from the rolls unjustly can be quickly reinstated.

Georgia’s voter purge looks much like what we saw happen on Friday in Wisconsin. In a victory for Republicans, Judge Paul Malloy ordered a purge of more than 234,000 voters from the rolls in Wisconsin, a key state for Trump’s ability to win the Electoral College even if he loses the popular vote.

Just as happened in Georgia, conservatives employed a technique known as “voter caging.” They sent out letters to 234,000 voters, primarily in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and if those voters did not return the letter, they were marked as having moved and thus no longer eligible to vote from that location. It’s an old trick. The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is evenly split between the parties, asked Malloy to put the decision on hold until after the 2020 election, but he declined. The case will be appealed and will go to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 split that favors Republicans.

There things stand in the impeachment crisis, but I cannot let one other blockbuster story go by. None of us has paid enough attention to last week’s Washington Post story about the war in Afghanistan. Post reporter Craig Whitlock examined documents and interviewed generals both on and off the record to reveal that "senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” The parallels to the Pentagon Papers, which indicted political leaders of both parties for misleading the American people about Vietnam, is unmistakable.

America has sent more than 775,000 troops to Afghanistan. Twenty-three hundred have died and 20,589 have been wounded in action. More than 64,000 Afghan security forces have died, along with more than 43,000 civilians. More than 5000 aid workers, contractors, coalition troops and journalists have also died. We have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, and that does not include money spent by the Department of Veterans Affairs or the CIA. Observers estimate true numbers closer to $1 trillion dollars. And all, it appears, for naught.

I watch news stories like this, and the mounting outrage against Big Pharma for lying about the safety of opioids, and repeated stories about how tax cuts that were supposed to help us all have only helped the wealthiest Americans, and the increasing pressure of evidence against Trump’s gaslighting, and it seems to me that after almost forty years of refusing to grapple with reality, America is coming to a reckoning.

---

Also available as a free newsletter at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/

[milliefink]

December 17, 2019 (Tuesday)

Today, pressure mounted on Trump over impeachment and Russia, and he cracked.

The day started with a letter from 700 historians—now more than 1500—saying “It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.”

Then an op-ed in the New York Times by Republican heavy-hitters, including lawyer George Conway and former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, attacked Trump’s “crimes, corruption, and corrosive nature.” Afraid of “the Republicans’ flirtation with authoritarianism,” they wrote: “Mr. Trump and his enablers have abandoned conservatism and longstanding Republican principles and replaced it with Trumpism, an empty faith led by a bogus prophet.” “As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.”

They announced the formation of the “Lincoln Project,” a superPAC designed to turn swing state voters against Trump and pro-Trump candidates, even if it means losing the Senate. Reports say their war chest already has millions of dollars.

Trump’s people sneered at this “pathetic little club of irrelevant and faux “Republicans,’ who are upset that they’ve lost all of their power and influence inside the Republican Party,” but I think they’re worried, and they should be. The Republican Party is long overdue for exactly this split, which it has made twice before. Once that split gave us Dwight Eisenhower, and once it gave us Theodore Roosevelt, for whom the new superPAC was originally named.

The news kept coming. We knew that Giuliani associate Lev Parnas had concealed from the government $1 million he had received from an account in Russia. Today, US prosecutors told a judge that the source of that money was Dmytro Firtash, a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch associated with the Russian mob. The money went to the account of Parnas’s wife, Svetlana Parnas.

This means that Firtash was paying Parnas, and Parnas was paying Giuliani, who was working for Trump for free. This ties Trump to Russian mobsters.

Also, Devin Nunes, the Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, tried to sidestep the issue of his own calls with Parnas by saying: “I got a call from a number that was Parnas’s wife….”

And there is yet more evidence that Russia is part of the Ukraine scandal. A social media analysis firm has traced false posts about US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, amplified by reporter John Solomon at The Hill, to Russia. Images of a “do not prosecute” list, which were entirely fabricated, originated in Russia. They were used to get her removed from her post.

All this, while Republican Senators have opened an investigation into the discredited argument that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election and into the Bidens. Their investigatoin focuses on the unsubstantiated claims of Andrii Telizhenko, a former staffer at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, who says the Democratic National Committee colluded with the Ukrainian government in 2016. (He has produced no evidence, but says he will share documents for the impeachment trial.) Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein from the Committee on the Judiciary, Gary C. Peters from the Committee on Homeland Security, and Ron Wyden from the Committee on Finance wrote a letter to the Republican chairs of their committees noting that their investigation was the same one Trump had tried to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing. It accused them of advancing Russian disinformation that would interfere with the 2020 election, and it reminded them that, if they persisted, they must share any evidence they were using, that is, to show they had cause to investigate and were not simply giving Trump his investigation announcement.

Tonight Pence got dragged in again, when House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff wrote to the Vice President to warn that classified witness testimony indicated that Pence might have deliberately misled the committee about his own conversations with Zelensky. (Early on, Trump told reporters that his own call with Zelensky was no different than Pence’s.) That Schiff dropped this news today suggests he is deliberately applying pressure.

But the president’s machinations in Ukraine have not stopped. Tonight we learned that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has recalled the acting US ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, who testified about the administration’s effort to pressure Ukraine president Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Bidens. His text, “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” was a big deal in the impeachment hearings. And Guiliani continues to boast that his ongoing investigations will help Trump’s reelection.

While all this was going on, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow any witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial. Minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) asked: “Why is the president so afraid of having these witnesses come testify?” Good question. A Washington Post/ ABC News poll showed that 71% of Americans think that Trump should allow his top aides to testify, and that 53% of Americans disapprove of Trump while only 39% approve. If only four Senate Republicans break ranks, they could force McConnell to allow testimony.

Talk that first-term Democrats in red districts might vote against impeachment ended today with Jared Golden’s (D-ME) announcement that he would support one of the two articles. Right now, it looks like only two House Democrats will vote no: First-year Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who has announced he is switching parties (most of his staff has resigned in protest), and Collin Peterson (D-MN) whose district Trump won by 30 points. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is also a cypher.

Tonight, protesters turned out across the nation to call for impeachment and a fair trial.

All this pressure led to today’s biggest news. This afternoon, Trump published a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, copied to both the Senate and the House of Representatives, “for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.”

He wrote the letter with Legislative Affairs Director Eric Ueland, Stephen Miller, and Michael Williams, an advisor to acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, permitting his lawyers to review it only after it was written. It was a six-page single-spaced unhinged rant that echoed his tweets and conspiracy theories. It began by sneering at Pelosi’s statement that she prays for the president and ends just after: “Perhaps most insulting of all is your false display of solemnity. You apparently have so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. No intelligent person believes what you are saying.” In between is a litany of all the wrongs Trump feels he has endured, including that “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

Normally, Trump’s performances are designed for his base, but this is a raw roar of anger. His base is not going to read six single-spaced pages, and if they do, even they will find it embarrassing and sad, the fury of a man who sees that he is losing control of a situation.

Later tonight, Pelosi sent a short, serious letter to her caucus. She needled Trump with a comment about this “very prayerful moment in our nation’s history,” but also emphasized that “Our constituents look to us to be respectful of the Constitution and Defenders of our Democracy, and to proceed in a manner worthy of our oath of office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Tomorrow’s schedule for the House of Representatives is historic. It reads: “H.Res. 755—impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.”

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

The Republican Party is long overdue for exactly this split, which it has made twice before. Once that split gave us Dwight Eisenhower, and once it gave us Theodore Roosevelt, for whom the new superPAC was originally named.

And the GOP itself was formed mostly from the dissolution of the Whigs.

@milliefink

If only four Senate Republicans break ranks, they could force McConnell to allow testimony.

I could also see a motion directed at the presiding judge, John Roberts, that McConnell, Graham, and any other GOP senator who has announced prior to the proceedings that they have already determined their vote, to be dismissed as jurors in the impeachment trial. Roberts, while conservative, is also a stickler for the law and would probably consider it seriously. That would go a long way to leveling the playing field. I don’t know if dismissing senators from the jury would also lower the 2/3 bar for conviction, but that would be cool, too.

@milliefink

"No intelligent person believes what you are saying.”

“And I am clearly no intelligent person, so I must believe you.”

@milliefink

Normally, Trump’s performances are designed for his base, but this is a raw roar of anger. His base is not going to read six single-spaced pages, and if they do, even they will find it embarrassing and sad, the fury of a man who sees that he is losing control of a situation.

Also, clearly written not by Trump but mostly by Stephen Miller. It reeks of his inferiority-complex dweeb-rage.

[milliefink]

December 18, 2019 (Wednesday)

Just after 8:00 tonight, Donald J. Trump became the third president in American history to be impeached. The others were Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Nixon resigned between the vote of the House Committee on the Judiciary approving the articles and the vote of the House as a whole. This makes Donald Trump the only Republican ever to be impeached, a singular status he will not celebrate.

The vote in the House of Representatives was 230-197 on the first charge—abuse of power—and 229-198 on the second, obstruction of Congress. Republicans were solidly opposed to both articles, while two Democrats voted against the first article and three against the second. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) voted “Present” on each count.

There were only 432 House official members to vote today because two Republicans—Chris Collins (R-NY) and Duncan Hunter (R-CA) have been forced out of office after being convicted of felonies. Collins and Hunter were the first sitting congresspeople to endorse Trump for president. One Democrat was also missing; Katie Hill (D-CA) resigned after nude photos of her were published by the right wing blog RedState, apparently leaked by her estranged husband. George Papadoupoulos, the Trump advisor who tripped the Russia investigation by boasting in summer 2016 that the Russians had damning documents about Hillary Clinton, and who pled guilty to lying to the FBI, announced he would be running for Hill’s seat even before she resigned.

It was a long day of debate in the House, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi treated it somberly, dressed in black and silencing the few members of her caucus inclined to cheer at the final votes when Republicans booed. What we saw today was more of what we saw in the impeachment hearings: Democrats invoked the Constitution and democracy and their oaths of office; Republicans railed against the process, denied well-established facts, and did not defend the president so much as attack the Democrats and try to whip up their base, all the while accusing the Democrats of being partisan. Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin tweeted: “The gap in character and intellect between the two parties is stunning.”

In one of the most quoted comments of the day, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) compared Trump to Jesus, saying that “When Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats have afforded this president in this process.” Leaving aside the fact that Trump has refused to participate in the impeachment process, Loudermilk’s comparison of Trump to Jesus offers a glimpse of how the GOP has devolved from a political party to apparent worship of Trump.

Loudermilk’s quotation emphasizes Jesus as an individual man persecuted by an empire, the exact same theme Ronald Reagan used to rally voters in 1980, although Reagan identified taxation, rather than execution, as the means of death. Reagan insisted that growing government bureaucracy was crushing individuals by siphoning tax dollars from hardworking white men to benefit lazy people of color and grasping feminists. He vowed to curb the size of the government. The theme of the individual fighting an empire was attractive; it was at the heart of Star Wars in 1977, when Luke Skywalker destroyed the Empire with the help of a ragtag band and the mysterious Force that marked him as special, despite his lack of education or money.

Since then, Republicans have justified their tax cuts and shrinking of government, as well as their emphasis on religion, as support for such mythic individualism against “communism,” both real—in the USSR-- and imagined, at the hands of Democrats who vote for programs that cost tax dollars. The idea that the GOP protects individual men and their families by protecting religion and destroying the government is now deeply imbedded in the party, and Trump is delivering on both counts. Loudermilk’s comparison suggests that Republicans have come to see Trump not just as an instrument of the individual against the state, as other Republican politicians have been, but as the embodiment of the persecuted individual come to save them… just as they see Jesus.

Now Speaker Pelosi will name House impeachment managers to present the case against Trump at a Senate trial. But after tonight’s vote, she signaled that she is considering following the course legal scholars have suggested in the last few days. After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced that the trial would be strictly for show-- Trump would never be convicted under his watch—and then declined to allow the four witnesses the Democrats wanted, observers began to suggest that the House should simply refuse to send the articles to the Senate for a trial.

It appears Pelosi is considering that option. She holds a strong hand in this, since 71% of Americans believe the Senate should hear from the witnesses. The Senate trial cannot begin until the House names impeachment managers, and Pelosi said tonight she will not name managers until McConnell commits to fair procedures for the trial. The only reason Pelosi has to rush is to force Senators to vote before registration deadlines for the primaries, so that Republicans will face pro-Trump primary challengers unless they vote to acquit, but if they do, they will have to face angry voters in the general election. This is a problem for the GOP. There are 23 GOP seats in play in 2020, while only 12 Democratic seats.

The case for waiting, though, is perhaps stronger: there are a number of legal cases in the works that could lead to more information, and every day brings more negative news stories about Trump. He is clearly becoming unhinged, and will do himself no favors as he twists under this cloud. My guess is that Pelosi will use impeachment as a cudgel more than as a conclusion as she waits for the story to develop.

Although the White House claimed that Trump was working today, and would only watch today’s debate sporadically, in fact he spent the day tweeting and retweeting more than 50 times, often in capital letters, blaming the “radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, AND I DID NOTHING WRONG!.. Say a PRAYER!” “SUCH ATROCIOUS LIES BY THE RADICAL LEFT, DO NOTHING DEMOCRATS. THIS IS AN ASSAULT ON AMERICA, AND AN ASSAULT ON THE REPUBLICAN PARTY!!!” While the House was voting, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were holding a “Merry Christmas Rally” in Battle Creek, Michigan. Pence warmed up the crowd with economic news before Trump took the stage to speak.

At 2 hours, 1 minute, his speech was one minute shorter than his longest ever, possibly to distract his audience and the media—and maybe himself—from events in Washington. CNN reporter Daniel Dale, who covers Trump rallies, said it was one of his most bitter and rambling speeches ever. Notably, Trump’s anger splashed over into an attack on Michigan’s beloved recently deceased congressman John Dingell, whose wife, Representative Debbie Dingell, voted for impeachment. Trump made fun of Debbie Dingell’s call to him after her husband’s death, and then suggested John Dingell was in hell. He said this in Michigan, where Dingell is loved. Aside from anything else, this riff suggests he is so isolated in his own anger that he is no longer reading crowds effectively.

After the rally, Trump continued to rile his base, emphasizing the theme of his persecution by the government, in the form of Democrats who had just voted to impeach him. With a dark image of himself, he tweeted a warning: “IN REALITY THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME. THEY’RE AFTER YOU. I’M JUST IN THE WAY.”

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

The only reason Pelosi has to rush is to force Senators to vote before registration deadlines for the primaries, so that Republicans will face pro-Trump primary challengers unless they vote to acquit, but if they do, they will have to face angry voters in the general election. This is a problem for the GOP. There are 23 GOP seats in play in 2020, while only 12 Democratic seats.

Isn’t this also an argument for waiting? I get it that if Collins or Gardner voted to acquit and are primaried by a more extreme Trumpophile that it might help Dems win those seats, but wouldn’t it also open the door for them to vote to convict if they were free and clear from the thread of primary challenger? It wouldn’t be enough to lead to conviction, but the value of even a handful of Republicans breaking ranks would be significant.

[milliefink]

It does seem like yet another argument for waiting. I hope Pelosi does so.

It’d be fun to watch Trump and other Repubs foam and froth at the mouth about how she’s not letting them have the trial they’ve basically said they’re not going to have.

[DukeTrout]

Already heard one doing so on NPR this morning.

[milliefink]

Fingers crossed that she’s still strategizing (and doesn’t consider her work done).

[milliefink]

December 19, 2019 (Thursday)

For most of the day, it looked like today’s big story would be that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), along with Senate Minority Leader Charles (Chuck) Schumer (D-NY) had finally found a way to shove a stick in the spokes of the Republicans’ determination to acquit Donald Trump of all charges, no matter what the evidence said. But a surprise article in Christianity Today calling for Trump’s removal from office upstaged everything.

After the House passed articles of impeachment against Trump last night, Pelosi indicated that she was in no rush to send the case over to the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had vowed to acquit Trump and had refused to entertain the notion of asking for the testimony of relevant witnesses. McConnell wants badly to get this case buried, and in a speech this morning complained bitterly that Schumer was not following precedent. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) accused the Democrats of committing “Constitutional extortion” if Pelosi did not hand over the articles immediately.

It was an interesting moment, for the Republicans under McConnell have repeatedly broken precedent for their own ends, most notably in their determination to dominate the federal courts. In 2016, McConnell refused to hold hearings for the nomination of President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, the moderate Merrick Garland, declaring that it was imperative to wait until after the 2016 election to fill the seat. Indeed, he stalled many of Obama’s judicial appointments, leaving a backlog that Trump has filled at such a breakneck pace he has picked more judges at this stage of his presidency than any other president in American history. Their outrage felt to me much like the outrage of bullies who are accustomed to calling all the shots when finally someone stands up to them.

And, as I wrote last night, Pelosi and Schumer hold a strong hand. They are asking for the testimony of four men closely involved in withholding aid to Ukraine, and 71% of Americans would also like to hear that testimony. McConnell and Graham haven’t much of a leg to stand on except to hope that their outrage will convince Americans that such testimony is unnecessary. Trump is pushing, as well. He rage tweeted about the impeachment all morning, then tweeted tonight to complain, once again, about the process of impeachment and to claim that the Democrats “want out.” He wrote: “I want an immediate trial!”

Well, of course he does. McConnell has already promised his acquittal in a short event that features no testimony and no witnesses. It does not seem unreasonable for the House leadership to demand that senators conduct a real trial, as the oaths they must take in an impeachment trial require.

But that was not today’s big news.

That came in the form of a short editorial in Christianity Today, a magazine that speaks primarily to mainstream evangelicals. Written by retiring editor-in-chief Mark Galli, the article calls for Trump’s removal from office on grounds of his immorality. “[T]he facts… are unambiguous,” he wrote. “The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.” It continues: “President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath…. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.”

The editorial lists the president’s many moral failings, and warns evangelicals—including those in Congress-- that support for a man with such a “blackened moral record” will injure the cause of evangelical religion. It charges Christians who support the president to “remember who you are and whom you serve…. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency.”

Christianity Today was started by evangelical leader Billy Graham, and while it has a readership of only about 250,000 people, they are influential. This break in the evangelical ranks was huge. White evangelicals are Trump’s most fervent supporters, clocking in at over 80% support for the president. This editorial provides an off ramp for those increasingly uncomfortable at their association with Trump.

The piece has done more than that, though. It has dominated the news, possibly because it is so refreshing to see a leader stand up to Trump and call out his behavior. At a time when Republicans in Congress seem to be operating in bad faith, it is an enormous relief to see someone in that camp actually act out of principle.

Indeed, Trump’s people seem to be pulling back a little after the craziness of the performances during the impeachment hearings and debates. Lindsay Graham yesterday spoke about his invitation to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about what he claims to have turned up in Ukraine. But Graham told reporters, “I don’t know what Rudy’s got, but I’m going to send him a letter. If you’re going to go on national television and tell the country that you’ve found evidence of a cover-up, then I hope you know what you’re talking about…. I like Rudy a lot, but we’re going to have to watch what we say.”

And there is more jockeying in advance of next year’s elections. Leaving open the idea that he might go work for Trump in some capacity, Representative Mark Meadows (R-NC), a staunch Trump supporter and one of the most powerful people in the House, became the twenty-first Republican to announce he is retiring. About 10% of Republicans have announced they’re out.

I suggested last night that the delay in delivering the articles of impeachment would allow time for more troubling material to come to light, and tonight—or rather this morning, just after midnight— some did. News dropped that lawyers for the administration told a federal judge that they have found as many as 2000 documents they should have disclosed in lawsuits over the citizenship question the administration tried to add to the 2020 census. Documents have already proven that the question was designed to suppress the political power of minority communities by enabling GOP legislatures to gerrymander more effectively, and it seems tied to Trump officials, especially Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and Attorney General William Barr. This is the third time the administration has acknowledged that it has neglected to turn over required documents about this case.

Look for more news dumps in these days before the holidays, when the administration will look to bury bad news. If today is any indication, there might be a lot of it.

---

Also available in a free newsletter. Sign up at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/

[milliefink]

December 20, 2019 (Friday)

Today began with Trump melting down on Twitter over the editorial yesterday in Christianity Today calling for his removal from office. He called this influential paper of American evangelicals “a far left magazine,” and charged it with preferring “a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President.” “The fact is, no President has ever done what I have for Evangelicals, or religion itself!”

And he said something quite revealing: “No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage. I won’t be reading ET again!” Aside from the extraordinary unlikelihood that Trump ever read CT (not ET, who has gone home),* these lines indicate that Trump’s view of the world as a series of transactions, made up of winners and losers, extends to governing. He thinks evangelicals owe him their votes in exchange for his anti-abortion judges, and feels betrayed at the suggestion that he has not bought their permanent allegiance. While all politicians think about keeping their supporters happy, this suggests a transactional view of politics that illuminates a lot about, for example, his payments to midwestern farmers hurt by his tariffs, or to his willingness to ask a favor of the president of Ukraine.

The president is counting on evangelical support to win reelection. While evangelical leaders like the Reverend Franklin Graham, son of Christianity Today’s founder, Billy Graham, reacted to the CT editorial by defending the president—Graham claimed his father had voted for Trump-- it’s clear Trump was rattled by it. The White House rushed the announcement it would hold an “Evangelicals for Trump” rally in early January—the event had been in the works but not announced-- but observers note that the editorial will empower younger evangelicals to speak up against the president.

Trump is also apparently stressing out about the decision of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to name House impeachment managers, and thus to delay the delivery of the articles of impeachment until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agrees to a fair trial, including key witnesses. Law professor Seth Abramson suggests that Pelosi holds a winning hand unless the media gets involved, and in its desperate desire for conflict and clicks, convinces Americans that the impeachment case must move forward quickly. Trump has always dominated news cycles by making demands; now he is the one under pressure. It is showing. Tonight he tweeted: “Nancy Pelosi is looking for a Quid Pro Quo with the Senate. Why aren’t we Impeaching her?”

Today Pelosi invited Trump to give the State of the Union in the House of Representatives on February 4, 2020. The letter said: “In their great wisdom, our Founders crafted a Constitution based on a system of separation of power: three co-equal branches acting as checks on each other. To ensure that balance of powers, the Constitution calls for the president to ‘from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union’…. In the spirit of respecting our Constitution, I invite you to deliver your State of the Union address before a Joint Session of Congress….” Her repeated references to the very issues that are now at stake in the scheduling of his impeachment trial were heavy-handed, and he will blister under them: he has never been able to tolerate her.

It is possible, of course, that the Senate impeachment trial will be underway while he speaks.

A number of stories dropped today about Russia’s role in the Trump administration. Last night, the Washington Post ran a story based in interviews with fifteen former White House officials who claimed that Trump’s conviction that it was Ukraine, and not Russia, who hacked our 2016 election—all evidence to the contrary—came directly from Putin. Former Department of Justice spokesman Matthew Miller told Post columnist Jennifer Rubin: “If it is true that Trump was literally repeating talking points given to him by Putin, then it raises even more questions about his behavior.”

Trump today retweeted a post from the Associated Press (AP) saying “Russian President Vladimir Putin says U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment is far-fetched and predicts the U.S. Senate will reject it.” Trump commented “A total Witch Hunt!”

Unfortunate timing.

Also yesterday we learned that the Department of Justice was investigating a Russian woman behind an internet science piracy website for attempting to steal US military secrets from defense contractors. The website Sci-Hub publishes paywalled scientific academic papers after hacking into university computers and stealing them. A former US intelligence agent says he believes she is working for Russia’s military intelligence—the same folks who stole emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and gave them to Wikileaks to hurt Hillary Clinton.

This afternoon, The Bulwark, the conservative magazine headed by Charlie Sykes and William Kristol, ran a series of video clips that highlighted how closely the talking points from Fox News personalities and Trump track with those coming from RT, Putin’s propaganda channel. It is no wonder that Democrats increasingly are pushing back on Republicans in Congress who simply parrot the idea that it was Ukraine that attacked us in 2016, and that there is some nefarious story about Joe Biden. Both of those stories originated in Russia.

Tomorrow was the deadline for funding the federal government through September, and on Tuesday, the House approved a massive $1.4 trillion spending package. The package contained $250 million in military aid to Ukraine, and today we learned that the White House threatened to veto that bill and send the country into a government shutdown if House Democrats insisted on language calling for prompt release of that money. The White House says the president, rather than Congress, should have say in how money is released.

Finally, one of Trump’s top reelection advisors was just caught on tape telling top Republicans in Wisconsin that while the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to win swing states, a legal change will let the GOP go on “offense.” He was referring to the 2018 law that reversed a decision in place since 1982 that had kept Republicans from policing the polls. They had been credibly accused of voter intimidation after they had hired off-duty police officers in New Jersey, some of whom were carrying guns, to wear armbands saying “National Ballot Security Task Force.” In 2018, though, that ban was lifted, and the RNC can once again do its own policing of polling places.

The conservative magazine National Review will run an article in the next edition by editor Ramesh Ponnuru supporting Trump’s impeachment on the grounds that “The Constitution provides for impeachment and removal to protect us from officials, including presidents, who are unable or unwilling to distinguish between the common good that government is supposed to serve and their own narrow interests…. Trump is just such a president. Congress should act accordingly.”

---

*Sorry. I couldn’t resist. It’s very late and I’m very tired and I just finished the index to put my book into production and so am very, very punchy.

[milliefink]

December 21, 2019 (Saturday)

Two new pieces of information on the Ukraine/impeachment crisis. The White House is trying to say that Trump has not actually been impeached because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate. One of the four legal scholars the House Judiciary Committee invited to testify, Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, made this argument in Bloomberg on Thursday. Feldman’s opinion is not widely shared. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, my go-to for constitutional law, says it’s flat wrong. The White House is trying to force Pelosi to send over the articles, so Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) can bury them quickly, without calling the witnesses that Democrats and a majority of Americans want to hear.

They need a way out. Today’s second piece of information was a 146-page document dump from the Pentagon in response to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request by the Center for Public Integrity. These documents covered the president’s infamous July 25 phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump asked for “a favor” before he released congressionally approved money for Ukraine’s military defenses against Russian aggression.

The documents are heavily redacted, but show Trump asking about funding on June 19, just after reading about the Ukraine aid in a news article. Then, immediately after the July 25 phone call, Michael Duffey at the White House Office of Management and Budget, overseen by acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, ordered the Pentagon to suspend the military aid Congress had appropriated for Ukraine. Worse, Duffey noted the “sensitive nature of the request” and asked his Pentagon contacts to keep it “closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction.”

Duffey and Mulvaney are both on the list of witnesses Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wants to testify in the Senate impeachment trial.

The documents also show that Trump released the aid on September 11, after he learned that there was a whistleblower complaint about his withholding of it. Duffey wrote an email that night saying he hoped the release would take place quickly and that he was “glad to have this behind us.”

It is no wonder the White House, and Senate Republicans, do not want Duffey and Mulvaney to testify.

One of the things that flew under the radar while we focused on impeachment in the last few days was that on Wednesday, a federal court struck down the central pillar of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Two justices, one appointed by Republican George W. Bush, and one by Republican Donald Trump, said that the part of the law requiring people to have insurance—the “individual mandate”—was unconstitutional. A third, appointed by Democrat Jimmy Carter, disagreed. The issues surrounding this decision are complicated, but at stake is whether or not the fact the court found this aspect of the law unconstitutional will lead to the entire law being declared unconstitutional.

This has a much larger meaning.

It is, in fact, a question about the role of government in American society.

In the 1930s and 1940s, after the unregulated capitalism of the 1920s had sparked the Great Depression, Americans rallied around the idea that the government had a duty to keep the economic playing field level between those at the bottom of society and those at the top. Under Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the government began to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. It regulated our financial system to guarantee no one could game it based on whom they knew. We got new laws to regulate minimum wages and maximum hours for workers, workplace safety, Social Security and welfare relief. We got bridges and roads and schools and libraries.

Under this “New Deal for the American people” as FDR put it, the nation thrived. Business boomed, wealth became far more evenly distributed than it had been in the 1920s, and standards of living rose. Americans of all parties liked the new activist government that had restored American prosperity after the Depression. This way of looking at the world became known as the “liberal consensus,” and virtually all Americans thought that government intervention in the economy to keep the wealthy from abusing their workers and taking the majority of the nation’s capital, as they had done in the 1920s, was a good thing.

But not everyone agreed. Some clung to the system of the 1920s, in which businessmen had run the government. These folks worried that government intervention in the economy would keep men from running their businesses as they saw fit. Between regulations and taxes they would be unable to accumulate capital as they otherwise would be able to, and would be less able to invest in new technologies and endow museums and libraries. They saw themselves as enlightened patriarchs protecting their workers—so long as those workers behaved—and believed government intrusion into their affairs was essentially a form of communism that would destroy American individualism.

So they set out to destroy the liberal consensus. Gradually they took over the Republican Party. Now they control it.

Americans have not been able to wrap their heads around this ideological conflict. They assume that the policies of the liberal consensus which have underpinned our lives since the 1930s-- Social Security, well-maintained bridges, and food safety laws, for example-- will always be here. The people who hated the liberal consensus have always been a small minority: most Americans like government regulations, a social safety net, and infrastructure. We disagree about how those things should be done, but generally we agree that they should exist. Even anti-government activists famously say things like “Get your government hands off my Medicare.”

The people in charge of today’s GOP reject this premise altogether. They believe that an activist government, supported by tax dollars, weakens American individualism and sets the nation back. Even if voters want things like national healthcare, they oppose such activism on the grounds that anything not expressly set out in the Constitution is off limits. This strict construction, as it is called, severely limits the role of the government in national affairs.

In addition to strict constructionism, GOP leaders combat government activism through tax cuts, like the ones Trump’s Republicans passed in 2017. Tax cuts keep the national budget deeply in the red, enabling them to accuse Democrats of being fiscally irresponsible when they want money for national programs. The plan is not to balance the budget, as they argue; it is to guarantee that we get rid of the activist government they believe is weakening America.

Most people don’t recognize that there is a larger ideology behind the policy debates over taxes or health care or business regulations that we hear about. I have written here before about the recent Gundy v. United States decision, in which Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaled his willingness to help the other four conservatives on the Court dismantle the delegation doctrine, adopted by the Court during the New Deal, saying the government can delegate policy making to bureaucracies. Overturning that doctrine would destroy the modern administrative state. Congress, rather than departments and bureaus, would have to debate every single aspect of every single regulation.

The reexamination of the delegation doctrine, like this latest court decision over the Affordable Care Act, is a front in the struggle between two ideologies: the one saying that the government has a role—any role— in keeping the playing field level in the American economy, and the other, saying it absolutely does not and that we must trust our leaders to do what is best for all of us.

[milliefink]

December 22, 2019 (Sunday)

Today was a relatively quiet day.

The big(gish) news was that Trump and his surrogates are pushing as hard as they can to get House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate immediately. Relying on an article in Bloomberg by Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, who testified before the House Judiciary Committee in the impeachment hearings, Trump and his supporters are arguing that the president has not, in fact, been impeached.

It’s important to remember that scholars argue over things all the time, and in this argument, Feldman stands virtually alone. The Constitution establishes that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” which seems pretty definitive in its awarding of the House the final say about what it means by voting for impeachment.

Nonetheless, the White House has decided to use this as a major talking point to try to force the case into the Senate as quickly as possible, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has vowed to push it to an acquittal quickly, without permitting any witnesses. In short, he has promised Trump he will kill it. So Pelosi is taking her time appointing impeachment managers, which is delaying the transmission of the case to the Senate. She is in no rush, while they are. Stories are dropping constantly that look bad for Trump, so why send the case to its doom? Just last night, the release of emails from the Office of Management and Budget clearly showed that one of the witnesses Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wants to testify in a Senate trial was nervous about the legality of withholding aid from Ukraine.

For my part, I cannot see what difference it makes right now if Republicans say Trump has not been impeached. I mean, Trump loves the idea, and is already insisting that’s the case. But what harm does it do to the process? A delay would not hurt Trump if he could produce witnesses to exonerate him; it would help him. There are several outstanding subpoenas his people are ignoring, and they could simply go forward with testifying to clear him while we are waiting on the trial.

A canny observer suggests the real drumbeat for a quick Senate trial is coming from the media, which loves drama. But that means media interests are putting their fingers on the scale in McConnell’s favor, which is entirely inappropriate. McConnell has used parliamentary rules to get what he wants out for years; it seems entirely reasonable to me for Pelosi to wait on sending the case over until she can get McConnell to promise to hear witnesses and to figure out how to deal with the fact so many Senators are already on record saying they will acquit, a declaration at odds with the oaths of impartiality they have to take in the impeachment trial.

I’m also hearing, suddenly, people say that Trump can be elected to a third term because House investigations mean he lost his first term. This is flat wrong. The twenty-second amendment to the Constitution reads: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” We added this to the Constitution after FDR was elected four times in the 1930s, to codify what had until then just been a practice established by George Washington in which presidents stepped down after two terms. There is no loophole in this amendment. Those suggesting otherwise are directly attacking our Constitution.

There has continued to be fallout from the Christianity Today editorial on Thursday calling for Trump’s removal from office. The backlash has been strong, but CT has stood firm behind the editorial, warning that “this presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian Witness.” The editorial clearly hit a popular chord. The editor of CT has said that the magazine has lost subscribers, but has picked up three times the number it has lost. “A stereotypical response is ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ with a string of a hundred exclamation points — ‘you’ve said what I’ve been thinking but haven’t been able to articulate, I’m not crazy,‘” editor Mark Galli told MSNBC.

The power of that editorial showed up today in the Fargo (ND) Forum, which ran its own article entitled “How can Christians be Trump supporters?” It said: “Regardless of one’s faith tradition, Trump stands as a leader who has shredded norms and values and morals. He has undeniably used his office for personal gain — and for the benefit of his sons, daughter and son-in-law — yet the far-right refuses to hold him accountable…. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, not of men. Our Constitution spells out separation of powers as well as checks and balances between equal branches of government.”

The bruhaha over the CT editorial also called attention to the statement from Mormon Women for Ethical Government, released on Wednesday, the day before the CT piece, saying “Any president or leader who forces political support and fails to honor and protect the free and legitimate elections on which our republic rests has lost the moral right to govern. By attempting to compel Ukraine to announce investigations benefitting only his re-election efforts, President Trump forced every American taxpayer to become an unwitting contributor to his political campaign and a supporter of his re-election.” The statement endorsed the House of Representatives’ following of established procedures, and called on the Senate to hold “a full and fair trial with impartial jurors.”

The MWEG went a step further, though, to say that while they were in favor of peace, peace is not an absence of conflict. Rather, they said, “it requires… a courageous defense of truth and justice.”

Republican leaders continue to lie to their base, echoing Russian propaganda as they construct a false story of what happened in 2016. This morning, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who took Russian money from Rudy Giuliani’s associate Lev Parnas, went on Fox News to claim that “The FBI broke into President Trump’s campaign, spied on him, then tried to cover it up. This is a modern-day Watergate.” Hours later, Trump elaborated: the Democrats and Crooked Hillary paid for & provided a Fake Dossier, with phony information gotten from foreign sources, pushed it to the corrupt media & Dirty Cops, & have now been caught. They spied on my campaign, then tried to cover it up - Just Like Watergate, but bigger!”

The FBI did not wiretap Trump; James Comey, who was the FBI Director at the time, has denied it under oath. It DID wiretap former Trump advisor Carter Page, legally, in October 2016, the month AFTER he left the campaign. It was a Republican operative who initially hired the company that employed investigator Christopher Steele. Once Trump got the nomination, the Clinton camp hired that same company and Steele stayed on the job. He did not know who his client was. When sources told him Trump could be blackmailed, he took his information to former colleagues at the FBI.

Finally, a picture posted on Instagram last night showed that Trump hosted Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher at Mar-a-Lago. Gallagher was convicted of posing with the body of an ISIS captive, but Trump intervened before a review hearing to insist that Gallagher would retire with his rank as a SEAL intact. In the struggle over that order, Trump’s Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, fired Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, who objected to the short-circuiting of the hearing.

Also at the party was Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, suggesting that two are maintaining close ties.

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

This morning, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who took Russian money from Rudy Giuliani’s associate Lev Parnas, went on Fox News to claim that “The FBI broke into President Trump’s campaign, spied on him, then tried to cover it up. This is a modern-day Watergate.”

This is the same McCarthy who was recorded during the 2016 election on an open mic joking with Paul Ryan about how Trump (along with former Rep Dana Rohrbacher) works for the Russians, to which Ryan swore them to secrecy. So was McCarthy a hypocrite in 2016? Or did he find out the RNC was already eyeballs-deep in Russian money, and double-down rather than retiring (as so many of his colleagues have.)

@milliefink

It was a Republican operative who initially hired the company that employed investigator Christopher Steele. Once Trump got the nomination, the Clinton camp hired that same company and Steele stayed on the job. He did not know who his client was. When sources told him Trump could be blackmailed, he took his information to former colleagues at the FBI.

I have a conservative friend who asked what makes the Steele Dossier different for Clinton than the Russia meddling or Ukraine call for Trump. I pointed out that the FECA of 1971 does not make it illegal to hire a foreign person to do work for your campaign; it prohibits “soliciting, accepting, or receiving any contribution or donation” of any value, including non-monetary aid. So they would be similar in nature if Steele had done the work for free, but he got paid, rather handsomely at that.

@milliefink

Trump hosted Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher at Mar-a-Lago. Gallagher was convicted of posing with the body of an ISIS captive, but Trump intervened

Let’s not forget that Gallagher didn’t just pose with the body of an ISIS captive, he allegedly killed the 15 year old boy who was a wounded prisoner being treated by medics, whose body he posed with. He was witnessed cutting the prisoner’s throat while the boy was lying in a stretcher with IVs in his arms and under sedation. Witnesses had already made sworn depositions to that effect against Gallagher, but before his trial, it is likely he intimidated those witnesses, who were members of his own Seal team, to change their story. Some did not, but the medic who was treating the boy, who saw Gallagher cut his throat, changed his testimony and confessed to the killing himself. He testified that he killed the boy with a scalpel, but the wound could not have been made with a scalpel; it was consistent with the hunting knife that Gallagher received as a gift just before the murder.

So that’s the kind of person Trump thinks is a “hero;” a grown man trained to kill who murders a wounded child in bed while sedated in order to test out a new knife, then posts the evidence to social media, then threatens and intimidates his own team members to avoid punishment. Sounds about right.

[milliefink]

@DukeTrout

So that’s the kind of person Trump thinks is a “hero;” a grown man trained to kill who murders a wounded child in bed while sedated in order to test out a new knife, then posts the evidence to social media, then threatens and intimidates his own team members to avoid punishment.

Yes, sadly, sickly true.

Thanks for spelling out those details. They usually get left out during the few objections that do get raised to this horrific pardon. Imagine what kinds of monsters Trump will pardon when he leaves office!