Heather Cox Richardson

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December 23, 2019 (Monday)

Two stories jumped out at me today because they illuminated larger ideas.

First is the discovery by Heidi Przybyla of NBC News that the morning of the infamous call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, July 25, 2019, Trump tweeted about a Fox News poll claiming that the US was enjoying “best Economy in DECADES.” But Przybyla didn’t stop there. She looked at what else the poll said. It said that Biden had a “commanding” lead for the Democratic presidential nomination and that he would beat Trump by 10 points in a general election. An hour after Trump’s tweet, he pressed Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden.

I love this, not because of the story, which remains sordid, but because it illustrates so well what historians do. Przybyla followed the trail of primary sources, and hit paydirt: evidence that explains just what was in front of Trump when he made that fateful request, and what he might have been thinking.

The second story is complicated, but worth untangling. In August, the House Judiciary Committee sued to make Donald McGahn, who had been Trump’s White House Counsel from January 2017 to October 2018, answer a subpoena for testimony about matters covered in the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Last month, a judge said he had to answer the subpoena, so Department of Justice officials acting for McGahn appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

On a parallel track, the House Judiciary Committee also sued to force the Department of Justice to release to it the materials Mueller’s grand jury collected, and a lower court agreed. The Justice Department appealed that, too.

After the impeachment vote last week, the courts asked both sides to brief them on how impeachment changed the cases, since the articles of impeachment do not address anything in the Mueller report, but instead focus just on the Ukraine scandal. Lawyers for the Department of Justice (who accept in their brief that impeachment is a done deal, by the way… so much for the idea it’s not done until it goes to the Senate) say there is no need for the court to rush a decision because the testimony and documents are no longer necessary. Lawyers for the Judiciary Committee disagreed, saying that the testimony and documents could well lead to more articles of impeachment, as well as legislation necessary to protect the 2020 election. A hearing is scheduled for early January.

But while the hint that there may be more articles of impeachment in the works is what will grab headlines, what caught my eye was to what extraordinary lengths the administration is going to stonewall Congress from conducting any oversight of its actions.

It is not wildly unusual for someone in an administration to refuse to answer a subpoena, usually on the grounds that to do so would intrude on executive privilege, the president’s need to be able to get information and make decisions in private without overbearing congressional intrusion that would hamper the ability to get free and full information. But Trump has simply declared that Congress cannot have any information at all, making a blanket declaration that Congress has no right to compel testimony from key White House advisors or to see documents.

This sets up a major conflict between two branches of government: the Legislative Branch, Congress, which has the duty of oversight and the need for information to write legislation (which is reflected above where the House Judiciary Committee says it needs to hear from McGahn so it can write new laws). The Executive Branch, overseen by the President, needs to be able to enforce the laws without interference from Congress. In the past, both branches tried to accommodate each other over these tensions to avoid a constitutional crisis. Congress would try not to subpoena material it knew would overstep its bounds; the White House tried to comply with subpoenas even when it suspected Congress was simply fishing for damaging information (which it’s not supposed to do). On the rare occasions when a White House denied testimony, the issue went to court and took so long to get resolved that it generally became moot. But Trump is simply declaring that he has the right to do whatever he wants, without oversight. It’s breathtaking.

And there is not much Congress can do to force the issue. If someone ignores a congressional subpoena, each house of Congress can vote that the person is in contempt of Congress. Theoretically, Congress could then send the sergeant-at-arms to make an arrest. This hasn’t been done for close to 100 years, and it would raise the hideous spectacle now of Congress trying to arrest a member of the Executive Branch. Imagine what Fox News personalities would do with that.

Congress could also try to bring criminal charges against the person ignoring the subpoena. There is a criminal law that deals specifically with this. But Congress would have to ask the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who oversees federal prosecutions, to pursue the case. The U.S. Attorney operates within the Department of Justice, overseen by Attorney General William Barr, who has an expansive view of Trump’s power and is unlikely to move against the administration.

To avoid such a conflict in the past, Congress instead tried to enforce a subpoena by bringing a civil lawsuit to make the person comply. That’s where we are now, litigating Congress’s subpoenas all the way to the Supreme Court. There are two downsides to this. The first is that the process takes a huge amount of time. Trump has been banking on this, trying to drag the process out until after the 2020 election, which would buy him four more years of protection since the Department of Justice has a policy (which has never been tested) that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

The second problem is what the Supreme Court will say. In the past, courts upheld Congress’s right to conduct oversight, and Trump has lost repeatedly in the lower courts. Now, though, with two Trump appointees on the Supreme Court, it is not clear how a final decision will swing. (And I do mean it’s not clear, not that he will win. Lots of factors in play at the Supreme Court right now.)

So House Committees are taking the only step left to them: warning witnesses that failure to comply with a subpoena will be considered evidence of obstruction of Congress, which can be tied to a host of criminal laws. It was that pressure that opened a door for witnesses to ignore Trump’s blanket declaration that they must not testify.

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December 26, 2019 (Thursday)

Today began and ended with Trump melting down. This morning, after a silence during the holidays, he came out swinging at the Democrats generally, and at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi specifically. Then this evening, apparently against the advice of his lawyer, he retweeted a story that named someone claimed to be the whistleblower, a person who currently has a security detail for protection, not in a foreign war zone, but in our own nation’s capital.

It seems clear that Trump cannot bear that Pelosi—whom he is calling “Crazy Nancy”-- is not rushing to send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate for a trial… a trial that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already promised will exonerate Trump. It is worth noting that it has been only a week since the House passed the articles of impeachment, and we have had major religious holidays in that time, and yet Trump is obviously angry and desperate for movement on impeachment. But he’s got to wait even longer. The House will not be in session again until January 7—twelve days from now—and the Senate calendar for January is still in flux.

In other impeachment news, you will recall that Noah Feldman, the Harvard Law Professor who testified before the House Judiciary Committee in favor of impeachment, wrote an op-ed last week saying that Trump was not officially impeached until the House sent the articles of impeachment over to the Senate. Trump jumped on this idea, and has been saying that he is not really impeached. Today one of the other law professors who testified, George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley, who was called by the Republicans and was opposed to impeachment, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “I testified against Trump’s impeachment. But let’s not pretend it didn’t happen.” The title pretty much sums it up. As Turley concluded: “The House speaks in its own voice and in its own time. It did so on Dec. 18, 2019.”

For all the drama of these two stories, I have been more interested in what feels to me like a changing trend: it appears that media is finally recognizing that it cannot simply report “both sides” of the news as if they are equally valid when one side is lying. On the evening of December 24, Rolling Stone magazine published a short interview with Chuck Todd, an NBC journalist who moderates Meet the Press and who is the Political Director for NBC NEWS. On December 29, Meet the Press is doing a show on disinformation and how it is weaponized, and this interview was a teaser.

It’s really important to understand that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are different things. “Misinformation” is bad information caused by errors-- someone makes a mistake. “Disinformation,” though, is deliberately false information intended to manipulate public opinion. Another word for disinformation is propaganda.

In the interview, Todd laments that he has been “absurdly naïve.” Right up until he had Senator Cruz on his show recently and Cruz echoed Russian propaganda, Todd apparently believed that the Republicans were acting in good faith when they talked to the media. Todd says he was “stunned” by Cruz’s embrace of Russian disinformation, especially since he was the third senator to do exactly that on the show. Cruz had asked to come on, and Todd thought that since Cruz had always been a Russia hawk, he wanted to set the record straight. When, instead, he followed the party line, Todd finally got it: Trump Republicans are using the media to spread propaganda.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, responded to this revelation by pointing out that it was on Todd’s own show in January 2017 that Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway launched the concept of the administration’s lies simply being based on “alternative facts.” But, Rosen writes, media leaders nonetheless treated officials’ lies as hyperbole, just Trump and his spokespeople being ridiculous.

The upshot is that, three years later, Trump’s base is divorced from reality, while other Americans are so tired from incessant gas lighting we have lost faith that we can still perceive reality. This is why gaslighting is effective propaganda: having lost confidence in their own perceptions, people are so eager for peace they are willing to accept a strong leader who will promise to create stability.

I’m with Rosen on this. There is no excuse for such “naivete” on Todd’s part. He’s the Political Director for NBC News, after all, and should have had a better handle on the well-known methods at play here.

Even more, it has been very clear that today’s Republican Party has risen to power by rejecting facts and creating its own reality. After World War Two, Republicans and Democrats both shared a belief that the government had a role to play in regulating the economy, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure. Indeed, that belief about government was so widely embraced it became known as the “liberal consensus.”

In 1951, William F. Buckley, Jr., fresh out of college, wrote a book attacking that consensus by attacking fact-based argument. In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” Buckley said that trying to reach the truth by constructing arguments out of facts—the premise of the Enlightenment-- was a worse superstition than the Dark Age traditions the Enlightenment tried to root out. When presented with fact-based arguments, voters kept choosing the liberal consensus. So far as Buckley was concerned, that consensus flew in the face of God’s laws. So, Buckley concluded, it was imperative to stop arguing based on facts, and simply promote a “Conservative” view of the world by whatever means necessary.

The construction of a narrative undercutting the popular liberal consensus took the modern Republican Party further and further away from a fact-based reality, until by 2002, journalist Ron Suskind had this extraordinary exchange with one of President George W. Bush’s aides.

"The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles…. He cut me off. 'That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ‘…When we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

Ten years later, in 2012, Thomas E. Mann from the left-leaning Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute warned that it was imperative to stop saying “both sides do it,” because the parties were not equally polarized. “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they wrote. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

We now have a president who has made more than 15,000 false or misleading claims in fewer than three years in office, and it has become increasingly clear recently that those lies echo Russian propaganda. Senior officials repeat his claims to the media, creating their own reality.

It is my sense that Todd’s revelation is a sign that media figures are starting to see how they are being used to advance disinformation. There has been discussion emerging of how to report the news without providing a platform for lies. If it takes hold, there will be an important shift in media coverage of the administration and congressional supporters in the new year.

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December 27, 2019 (Friday)

Until tonight, when Trump once again retweeted the name of the alleged whistleblower, today has been remarkably quiet on the political front. This quiet gives me a chance to share something I found a year or so ago that, to me, illuminated the present political crisis more than anything else I have seen.

It’s a speech Robert Mueller gave in January 2011 in New York City, when he was the Director of the FBI.

Mueller explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. Rather than being regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, sophisticated, and had multi-billion dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

These criminal enterprises, he noted, were working to corner the market on oil, gas, and precious metals. And to do so, Mueller explained, they “may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

To combat that threat, Mueller said, the FBI had shifted focus “from a law-enforcement agency to a national security service that is threat-driven and intelligence-led.”

With the FBI focusing on organized crime and national security, its interest in the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016 not only makes sense, but also illuminates what they were afraid was going on.

Trump had sought Russian business since 1996, but his financial connections with Russians really took off in 2008, when wealthy Russians poured money into Trump’s US properties at a time when few others were interested in working with Trump. In September 2008, Don Jr. told a reporter: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Trump pursued the idea of a Trump Tower in Moscow, and in 2013, took the Miss Universe pageant there.

In June 2016, political consultant Paul Manafort took over the Trump campaign. For ten years, Manafort had worked for a Ukraine politician, Viktor Yanukovych, who was closely connected to Russia and whose party the US State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs.” With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the Ukraine presidency in 2010 with the promise of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which organized after World War Two to protect Europe from the encroachments of the USSR, and which continued to try to contain Russian aggression after oligarchs began to monopolize the country in the 2000s. Yanukovych tried to pull Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, and in 2014, after months of popular protests and brutal repression of them, Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Shortly after Ukraine turned Yanukovych out, Putin invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea. America and the European Union imposed economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in their territories. Those sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of oligarchs.

Manafort had made millions from his connections to Yanukovych and his friends—including Dmytro Firtash, who we now know gave Giuliani associate Lev Parnas $1 million, which Parnas spread around to certain Republican politicians-- but their ouster found him about $17 million in debt to them and to their ally, Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In 2016, Manafort’s friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Manafort began to help in March 2016, and was present at the June 9 meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and a number of other people, including a Russian lawyer associated with Russian intelligence services (that is, a spy). Rick Gates, who worked for Manafort when he was with the Trump campaign, testified before lawyers working for Mueller when he was Special Counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and my read of his testimony suggests that the people at the June 9 meeting discussed smearing Hillary Clinton.

Three days later, on June 12, Julian Assange tweeted that Wikileaks had damaging information on Clinton and would release it. On June 20, Manafort became Trump’s campaign chairman, working for free. Between July 18 and 21, the platform committee of the Republican National Convention abruptly watered down a plank in the Republican platform that had called for arming Ukraine to fight Russian forces.

When then-FBI Director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election at the end of July, he was operating in a bureau that had been pursuing Mueller’s iron triangle of business, government, and criminals. Then Trump fired Comey and told Russian officials visiting the Oval Office: “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” The popular outcry induced the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, to name a Special Counsel to investigate (the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, had recused himself because he had been involved with Trump’s campaign himself) and Rosenstein chose… Mueller. A specialist in this new form of international organized crime.

And that brings up another interesting document that surprised me, although once you read it its revelations seem no-brainers. In August 2018, national security and intelligence community expert Natasha Bertrand noted in The Atlantic that the FBI and Justice Department agents Trump attacked most relentlessly had one major similarity: “their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.”

For example: Trump has been obsessed with getting Bruce Ohr fired from the Justice Department: Ohr was a friend of Christopher Steele and the men stayed in touch after Steele left the British intelligence service. Steele contacted Ohr when he became concerned about the ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI who was fired two days short of being able to collect his pension, was a specialist in Russian organized crime and had handled the Russia investigation before Mueller was appointed. Lisa Page worked for the Justice Department trying organized crime cases, focusing on international organized crime and money laundering.

The more we learn about the politicians who took Russian money, the Russian businessmen whom Congress excludes from sanctions to do things like, say, open up aluminum plants in Kentucky, the more we hear pro-Trump voices echoing Russian propaganda, the more Trump goes after experts in international crime… the more I think about Mueller’s warning about the terrible danger of an iron triangle of international criminality.

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December 28, 2019 (Saturday)

Today Trump continued to rage tweet at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, and retweeted people who called Democrats “rats” and an account that called former President Barack Obama “Satan’s Muslim Scum.” Also today, the New York Times ran an article by Astead W. Herndon exploring the world of far-right Trump supporters who traffic in conspiracies and fear and who believe the president is reclaiming America for people like them. One man says he has been stockpiling weapons in case Trump loses in 2020. “Nothing less than a civil war would happen,” he said. “I don’t believe in violence, but I’ll do what I got to do.”

American politicians and their followers used similar language about American Indians in the nineteenth century, and their rhetoric helped to spark a catastrophe almost exactly 129 years ago.

On the morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man who refused to give up his hunting weapon, the only means he had to keep his family from starving. As they struggled, the gun fired into the clear blue sky. Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys they had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers standing on the other side of the Indians. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists. As the men fought hand-to-hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. The soldiers placed on a slight rise above the camp turned rapid-fire mountain guns on the running people. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.

But it is not December 29 that haunts me: it is the night before the killing, the night of December 28. On December 28, there was still time to avert the Wounded Knee Massacre.

In the early afternoon of December 28, the Lakota leader Big Foot-- Sitanka-- had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia and his band was hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south from their own reservation in the northern part of South Dakota across the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There, they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, inside the reservation boundaries.

For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka’s band marked the end of the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But, at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.

Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.

But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka’s band, and it didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Indians let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the Indians were on their way to Pine Ridge anyway, and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.

By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn’t sit up and was dripping blood from his nose. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon-- for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration, and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.

And they celebrated, for they were heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakota’s surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka, and officers were determined he would not escape them again. In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment.

For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome, and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?

On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing and visiting with each other, and anxious Indians either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.

One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to.

But while we cannot challenge the terrible inevitability of the past, it is never too late to change the future.

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December 29, 2019 (Sunday)

These days, I often hear people despair of America. They’re afraid our democracy is doomed.

Maybe. But what I was trying to say yesterday was that nothing, nothing, nothing is written in stone until it actually happens. And sometimes, underneath what seems to be a consensus, there is an alternative story developing. When it comes into view, it seems the world turns on a dime.

We have an example of that before us tonight, as Americans are mourning the news that 79-year-old Georgia Representative John Lewis has Stage IV pancreatic cancer. Now a beloved congressman, helping to construct laws for our nation, Lewis began his adulthood breaking the laws of his state: those upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington D.C. to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.

An adherent of the philosophy of non-violence, Lewis was beaten by mobs and arrested 24 times. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC—pronounced “snick”) he helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington where the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., told more than 200,000 people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial that he had a dream. Two years later, as Lewis and 600 marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, mounted police troopers charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured Lewis’s skull.

To observers in 1965 reading the newspapers, Lewis was simply one of the lawbreaking protesters who were disrupting the “peace” of the South. But what seemed to be fruitless and dangerous protests were, in fact, changing minds. Shortly after the attack in Selma, President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) honored those changing ideas when he went on TV to support the marchers and call for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically under-represented.

New black voters helped to elect Lewis to Congress in 1986. He has held the seat ever since, winning reelection 14 times.

If you had told the angry men beating Lewis unconscious in Montgomery that he would one day serve more than a dozen terms in Congress and the news that he is ill would bring an outpouring of lament…. Well, the world can turn on a dime.

We have had a lull in political news since Christmas, but there were glimmerings today that the past week has shifted some minds in Washington as more and more media outlets are warning that Republican talking points simply echo Putin’s disinformation. This morning, Meet the Press ran its special on the techniques of disinformation and Russia’s use of them.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has been carrying water for Trump over the Ukraine scandal, has suddenly started to sound more cautious. After asking Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Graham chairs, about whatever he turned up in his recent dirt-digging trip to Ukraine, today Graham warned Giuliani that he should share his information with the Intelligence Community to make sure “it’s not Russian propaganda.”

Graham and other GOP Senators have good reason to be cautious. The extremism and antics of Representatives like Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Devin Nunes (R-CA) made for good theater in the House of Representatives, where they were in the minority. But the Republicans cannot use a similar game plan in the Senate because they are the ones in charge.

Perhaps more important, there was another big development today in the Ukraine scandal. The New York Times reported that Trump’s demand that the Pentagon withhold money from Ukraine at a crucial time in its war with Russia roiled the White House. The hold was implemented from the Office of Management and Budget, and was overseen by Mick Mulvaney. Aides were concerned that the hold was illegal and at one point tried to rope the Pentagon into assuming responsibility for it, prompting one official to respond: “You can’t be serious. I am speechless.” Eventually, lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget began to develop the argument that Trump could override Congress’s law based on his role as commander in chief. (The whistleblower’s report cut that argument short: Trump released the funds once he knew the scheme had been exposed.)

The story reveals that Trump’s own top national security advisors tried to talk him out of his determination to withhold the money. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton met with Trump together to convince him to release the aid because it served American interests. He refused.

It is no wonder he does not want any of them to testify. We can now safely exclude the possibility that their testimony would exonerate him.

It is also appalling that this crisis—one that weakened our ally Ukraine in its war against Russia, thereby giving Russia a huge advantage in upcoming ceasefire negotiations—went on for almost three months without anyone knowing until the whistleblower called it out. That helps to explain Trump’s furious insistence that the whistleblower was out of line to object to the scheme. It also illustrates how much the whistleblower deserves our thanks.

Republican Senators might reasonably be nervous about more revelations continuing to turn public sentiment against Trump and against the GOP in general. So they are continuing to try to suppress votes. In 2013, in the Shelby v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act… the same law that LBJ endorsed shortly after police fractured John Lewis’s skull as he and fellow demonstrators prayed for voting rights.

As soon as the decision came down, states began to implement various methods to cut down on voting by populations that tend to vote Democratic. This has been a big issue in Georgia, especially after 2018 candidate for governor Stacey Abrams inspired new minority voter registrations. At the beginning of December, Georgia officials purged more than 300,000 voters from the rolls because they had not voted since 2012 (the last election in which President Barack Obama, who turned out new minority voters, was on the ballot). Opponents challenged the purge of about 98,000 of those voters on procedural grounds, but on Friday, the same federal judge who approved the purge rejected the challenge.

Georgia’s Secretary of State, Republican Brad Raffensperger, told a newspaper that “Proper list maintenance is not only required by long-standing laws but is also important in maintaining the integrity and smooth functioning of elections.”

It’s an interesting quotation on a day when we are thinking of Representative John Lewis. “Proper list maintenance,” long-standing laws, and “the smooth functioning of elections” were precisely what he marched against sixty years ago.

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

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December 30, 2019 (Monday)

Big news today in the fight over Trump’s attempt to declare the president above the law, although it is hideously confusing, so it was easy to miss.

Today, federal judge Richard Leon pulled the rug out from Trump’s expansive idea of presidential power when he dismissed a lawsuit brought by Charles Kupperman, who had been Deputy National Security Advisor under John Bolton during the Ukraine crisis and briefly Trump’s Acting National Security Advisor.

The House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Kupperman to testify in October, but Trump insisted that he refuse, claiming that the president’s top advisors enjoy constitutional immunity from forced congressional testimony: that is, they do not answer to Congress. Kupperman sued both the House Intelligence Committee and the White House, saying he needed the court’s guidance about which directive to obey. (I wrote about all this here on October 26, if you want more backstory.)

Eager to avoid having the subpoenas tied up in the courts, the House Intelligence Committee promptly withdrew its subpoena. But Kupperman would not drop the suit, likely because his lawyer also represents John Bolton, who wanted the issue of primacy resolved before he, himself, decided whether or not to testify.

Today, Judge Leon declared the case moot, since the House withdrew the subpoena. That is, the case is dead; it doesn’t matter anymore.

This decision means that another court decision, by the DC district court, is the one that remains in force. In that November 25 decision in a different case, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson shot down the argument that top White House officials enjoy “absolute immunity” from compelled congressional testimony. She wrote: “presidents are not kings,” and “no one is above the law.” Former US Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal tweeted after the decision: “Now that Judge Leon has dismissed the Kupperman/Bolton case, Judge Jackson’s ruling is the definitive word. Bolton must testify.”

Indeed, with yesterday’s revelation that Bolton tried to get Trump to release the Ukraine funding, and our previous knowledge that Bolton furiously opposed the attempts of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Bidens, it seems that Bolton’s testimony is vital. In fact, as angry as he seems to have been at the White House’s handling of his portfolio, it is possible he wants to testify.

There has been another sign recently that Trump is running into roadblocks as he tries to consolidate power. There was a tidbit buried in the New York Times article I wrote about yesterday, the one that said leading members of the administration tried to convince Trump to release the Ukraine military funding. Almost in passing, that article said that executive branch lawyers were trying to justify Trump’s withholding of money by coming up with a theory that Trump’s role as commander in chief meant he could override Congressional decisions about funding. That, of course, would give him the power to direct every aspect of our government; it would essentially make him a dictator. But while the fact anyone considered it is appalling, it is of note that even the administration lawyers recognized their argument was absurd and they ended up dumping it in favor of another theory.

It seems that the decision of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to withhold the articles of impeachment as Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) negotiates for testimony of Bolton, as well as three other crucial figures, is paying off as more and more information drops.

And more information is certainly dropping. Tonight the lawyer for Giuliani associate Lev Parnas (who gave Russian money to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy) asked a federal judge for permission to share with the House Intelligence Committee materials the Justice Department confiscated from his home, including documents and the contents of a cell phone. Parnas wants to share them to prove that he has important things to say to the committee—he is under indictment and hopes to get credit for cooperating.

Remember, after the House Intelligence Committee hearings, in which ranking member (that is, the top Republican on the committee) Devin Nunes (R-CA) insisted the whole hearing was a farce, phone records indicated that Nunes was involved in the scandal himself: Parnas had been communicating with Nunes during the time period when US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was recalled. Now Parnas wants to share a cell phone with the House Intelligence Committee. It seems likely the phone calls he wants to share are important. The Justice Department has agreed to let him share the material.

You know, I’m writing all this down, trying to make sense of very convoluted events, and it seems more like the notes I would take for an academic book on some complicated topic than real life.

But something happened today that reminds me this is all very real, and very much about us, and about who owns our government.

This morning, on Twitter, I retweeted a video clip of a veteran cornering Senator Marco Rubio about the Ukraine scandal. In the video, Rubio claimed not to have read any of the relevant documents for the impeachment proceedings, including the material about the Ukraine scandal. Rubio is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, meaning it is literally his job to know this material, and the veteran, who was polite but firm, kept bringing up established facts and expressing surprise that he, a veteran, knew more about the crisis than Rubio, whom voters hired to do the job.

A few minutes later, my brother (who was clearly reading my Twitter feed instead of working—Hi Irv!) texted me, asking if I recognized the veteran in the clip. When I answered no, he told me the man was Perry O’Brien, the son of one of my brother’s oldest friends, who had served as a medic in Afghanistan and had come home to start Common Defense, an organization of veterans to “preserve the core values we swore to uphold and defend… to protect our communities from hate and violence, to serve on the front lines for social, economic, and global justice, and to champion a truly equitable and representative democracy.”

The last time I saw Perry he had just learned to crawl, and as my mother and I watched his labored journey across my brother’s living room floor, Mom mused that the most amazing thing about getting older was watching the journey children took as they grew into adults. Today, I shared with thousands of other people the journey that that now-grown baby is taking as he tries to reclaim American democracy.

The struggle for American democracy is one made up of many different battles, from confusing court cases and cell phone records to tweets and the combatting of disinformation, but it is, ultimately, about us and our neighbors, and what we want our journey to be.

---

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

[milliefink]

December 31, 2019 (Tuesday)

And so, the sun sets on the year 2019 and the decade of the 2010s.

2020 will be the year that determines whether or not American democracy survives.

Our system has never lived up to its fullest potential, but until recently, its aspirations have driven us to fight to perfect it, guaranteeing everyone equality before the law and the right to a say in our government. The democracy that began as equality for a handful of the people in the new nation—just white men of property—expanded first to include poorer white men, and then immigrants, then African American men, then women, then Asian immigrants, Latinos, and native peoples. That expansion has never been smooth. Indeed, it has been obstructed at every turn. But even as people in power sought to prevent those they considered inferior from being treated as equals, the principle expanded.

American democracy has never been perfect, and of late, voices—many those of Russian bots—have dismissed it as a sham. On the one hand, naysayers insist that our country is broken because we have given too much power to minorities, women, and the poor. Those people, this argument goes, vote for Democrats who will give them handouts: programs that redistribute tax dollars from hardworking white men to their own pockets. Those who back this argument want to keep those people from voting through voter suppression measures, or with under representing them in Congress through gerrymandering laws.

On the other hand, voices attack democracy because we have never really allowed full rights to any but white men. Democracy was never real, and will never be real, they say, so what’s the point in fighting for it?

But, see, here’s the thing: Once you give up the principle of equality before the law, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have granted your approval to the idea of rulers and servants. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in one of the lesser groups.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men and excluding black Americans were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will-- whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on, “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it… where will it stop?”

We are in a new era, in which an international economy is concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a very few men. We have seen how an oligarchy rose in Russia after the fall of communism, when a few strongmen under Vladimir Putin rejected democracy, monopolized the country’s industries and resources, and took over the government. We are watching a similar movement in our own country, where wealth has moved upward dramatically since 1981, our government increasingly answers to the demands of wealthy men rather than to the majority of us, and leaders appear more eager to work with the rising international oligarchy than to defend our democracy.

America is in a precarious spot.

But for all that, what stood out most to me in 2019 was that it felt as if Americans have finally woken up. Democracy is not a spectator sport, and people are now speaking up, demanding our leaders listen to us, warning us when officials break the law. And at the end of 2019, at long last, our House of Representatives took a stand on the principle that no one is above the law, impeaching a president who has declared that he and his cronies are.

2020 is an election year. Let’s approach it with the clear eyes it demands, and get to work.

—-

Available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

[milliefink]

January 1, 2020 (Wednesday)

Happy New Year!

If yesterday was about looking backward and taking stock, today is about moving forward.

The biggest story today, by far, is that yesterday, on December 31, supporters of what appear to be an Iranian-backed militia laid siege to the US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. The immediate cause was the US airstrikes that killed 25 in retaliation for a rocket attack that killed a US military contractor. But the larger protest was anger at American presence in the region. It was significant that the embassy is not simply a building, it is a 104-acre area, and the protesters had to push past Iraqi soldiers to take up their positions, which suggested to observers that the Iraqi soldiers agreed with the protesters.

The protest highlighted the increasing tension in Iraq between Americans, who retain about 5000 troops in Iraq, and Iran, which controls the Iraqi militias. Tensions with Iran ratcheted up when in 2018 Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that eased sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits to its development of nuclear technology.

The siege conjured up memories of the 1979 seizure of the Iranian embassy by Islamic militants, as yesterday’s protesters echoed their calls of “Death to America” and embassy staff hunkered down in a safe room inside the compound. It also invited comparisons to the 2012 attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, as American officials were blindsided by the attack. Nervous about those comparisons, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham repeatedly noted that there would be “no Benghazis” on Trump’s watch.

In one of history’s little twists, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on whose watch this has happened, was on the House Select Committee on Benghazi when it investigated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the sixth time in the House (and, for the sixth time, found no wrongdoing). This was the investigation Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now House Minority Leader, told Fox News personality Sean Hannity was intended simply to keep Benghazi in front of voters to hurt Clinton before the 2016 election. (It has recently been revealed that McCarthy took Russian money from indicted political operative Lev Parnas.) And now, Pompeo and Trump have their own incident.

The larger crisis is that it is falling into Trump’s lap to deal with the fallout of a war that began in 2003 and has cost more than a trillion dollars, and which seems to have accomplished very little except to strengthen the hand of Iran in the area. And it is happening at a time when he is facing an impeachment trial and is more and more erratic.

Today, unexpectedly, the protesters ended their siege out of deference to Iraqi leaders, they claimed. “You have won a victory,” one of the leaders told the militias. “You have delivered your message. We will take our fight to expel U.S. troops from our land to parliament, and if we don’t succeed, we will return."

Also on the table today is that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has declared that he will no longer be bound by his self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range ballistic missile tests since talks between him and Trump have not resulted in an end to the sanctions crippling his country. Kim appears to be jockeying for a better position at home and against Trump, who is weakened by impeachment and his growing unpopularity.

Both of these issues illustrate the problem of trying to engage in international relations without the steady hand of professional diplomats and without allies. Both of these situations are critical, and Trump is now facing them without a strong diplomatic corps and without the support of our former allies.

The other big today story is that last night Chief Justice John Roberts released the annual report on the federal judiciary.

Roberts is in a touchy position right now. As the head of the Supreme Court, he is responsible for the health and well-being of the entire judicial system, and he cannot be unaware of the disdain Americans have conceived for Chief Justices who used the court to achieve unpopular political decisions. Roger Taney, for example (whose name is pronounced “Tawney,” for unfathomable reasons), led the court in the years before the Civil War, and has been consigned to the dustbin of history for his role in deciding the 1857 Dred Scott decision in such a way that it gave elite slaveholders control of the newly acquired American West while both denying the humanity of African Americans and the rights of poor white men. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who presided over a slew of horrid decisions at the turn of the last century, including the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that rubberstamped “separate but equal” justifying segregation, was such an embarrassment that virtually no one even remembers him: we call his court the “Lochner Era court” rather than the “Melville Fuller court.”

Roberts was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush and presided over Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which gutted the Voting Rights Act, as well as Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010), which said that the government cannot restrict the amount of money corporations can give to politicians. He is a firm believer in a small federal government and the power of corporations, but he is also an intelligent man who cares about his legacy.

Roberts will preside over the upcoming Senate impeachment trial of President Trump, and he has already exchanged words with Trump over the independence of the judiciary: Trump has tried throughout his administration to sow distrust of judges appointed by Democrats, while Roberts has countered that judges must be impartial.

So Roberts’s introduction to the annual report was not idle. He began by attacking the use of propaganda and mob rule and went on to defend the independence of the judiciary. He went out of his way to praise Judge Merrick Garland-- although not by name–, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court whom Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in an unprecedented attack on the presidency, refused to consider.

But most interesting to me in his report was that when Roberts talked at great length about the role of the courts to educate Americans about the rule of law, his primary example was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation. That case is pivotal in American history not only because of its role in desegregation, but because it sparked an outpouring of scholarship suggesting that society changes not because of social trends or economics or politics, but because of court decisions. In the wake of Brown v. Board, the great historian C. Vann Woodward argued that segregation itself came only after Jim Crow laws, and that popular acceptance of civil rights would come only after legal desegregation.

Roberts seemed to me to be saying that the job of reclaiming democracy and the rule of law belonged to the courts now—a major declaration at a time when Trump has a number of court cases pending, as well, of course, as his impeachment trial. I absolutely could be reading too much into Roberts’s declaration, but it seemed to me significant.

What exactly Roberts means by the rule of law, though, remains to be seen.

Kind of a rocky start to 2020, but I’m guessing it’s going to be a rocky year.

[milliefink]

January 2, 2020 (Thursday)

I sat down to write tonight about a number of stories I had saved over the course of the day, and opened the laptop seven minutes after news broke that the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds force, Qassem Soleimani, along with the deputy head of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, had been assassinated in Iraq. At the time it was not clear who had done it, but the US government claimed responsibility minutes later.

This is a giant wildcard. General Suleimani led the Quds Force, a special forces unit that took care of Iranian military operations outside of Iraq, putting him in charge of Iran’s actions in Iraq. At home, he was in charge of intelligence gathering and covert operations, and was very close to the country’s supreme leader, Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei. Yesterday, Khamenei taunted Trump on Twitter after the president tweeted “Iran will be held fully responsible for lives lost, or damage incurred, at any of our facilities. They will pay a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning, it is a Threat. Happy New Year!” Khameini responded: “1st: You can’t do anything. 2nd: If you were logical – which you’re not—you’d see that your crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan… have made nations hate you.”

Immediately after news of the attack came, Representative Chris Murphy (D-CT) said: “Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question. The question is this – as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?” Murphy later -pointed out that this action was very different than the strikes against Osama bin Laden or al-Baghdadi, both of whom had no official ties to a state. Soleimani was an Iranian government official.

Apparently, the Gang of Eight was not briefed. The Gang of Eight is an informal name for the eight leaders who must be briefed on classified security issues. They are the leaders of each major party in each house—so Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy from the House, and Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer in the Senate—along with the top members of each party from both the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was not told, although McConnell’s spokesman refused to comment on whether or not he was. (Eric Trump, who holds no security clearance, might have been: on December 31 he tweeted: “Bout to open up a big ol’ can of whoop ass.” The tweet has now been deleted.)

Many nations have diplomatic corps in Tehran and our former allies opposed Trump’s 2018 US exit from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to ease sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran’s slowdown of nuclear development. As of midnight, neither Israel, nor Saudi Arabia, nor any of our NATO allies had issued any statements about the killing.

Iranian state TV used the word “martyred” when it announced their deaths. Tonight, the NBC News Tehran Bureau Chief & correspondent Ali Arouzi tweeted that “State tv in Iran has cut all broadcasts and is showing pictures of Qassem Soleimani on a loop accompanied by prayers.” Iran has promised “severe revenge” for the killing.

There was no announcement from the White House or the Pentagon until 9:35, when Trump, who is at Mar-a-Lago, tweeted out a graphic of an American flag. A half-hour later, the Department of Defense stated that the attack was a “defensive” move made “At the direction of the President,” to deter “future Iranian attack plans.” Trump has made no further statements.

Republican war hawks are celebrating Soleimani’s death, as Trump had designated him as a terrorist (which was unusual because he was part of a government, rather than a non-state actor). Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) said that Soleimani “got what he richly deserved.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said: “Wow- the price of killing and injuring Americans has just gone up drastically…. I appreciate President Trump’s bold action against Iranian aggression. To the Iranian government: if you want more, you will get more.” Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) said: “The President made the brave and right call, and Americans should be proud of our service members who got the job done.”

Despite this triumphant note, political reporter Robert Costa claimed that his sources on Capitol Hill said there was “very little to no appetite inside GOP for attacking Iran in Iran, but support for taking steps to protect embassy in Baghdad as long as intel is solid. Emphasis on securing compound, stability. Uneasiness tho about POTUS…” Costa continued: “the sources generally describe POTUS as a noninterventionist who doesn’t want to be bullied by Tehran, but they know he has rarely if ever been tested in this way. For now, several said they will rally behind him but push privately to move slow, keep action contained.”

And that, to me, is enormously revealing. The biggest story in the news today before this attack was about the unredacted emails I wrote about a day or so ago, the ones establishing that the president himself directed withholding the Ukraine aid appropriated by Congress. Those emails also proved that the officials involved in the withholding recognized that it was illegal, and tried to keep it quiet. This news, combined with the recent news that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and National Security Advisor John Bolton all tried to persuade Trump to release the funds and he refused, meant that Trump was facing a crisis in his ability to ward off testimony in the Senate impeachment trial.

Soleimani has been doing what he does for years. So why go after him now? Further, on December 27, Iran participated in its first joint naval drill with Russia and China, underlining a new power structure in the Middle East. Trump is close to Russia… he would not have done this without thinking through what it means for his relationship with Putin. It seems to me unlikely he would’ve done this on national security grounds alone at this particular time, when so very much is at stake.

To me, this feels like it comes down to Trump’s increasingly precarious position at home. Traditionally, since the time of the Civil War when northern Democrats attacked President Lincoln and the Republican government, sparking deadly riots like the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 and earning hatred for their actions, Americans have rallied behind the president during a time of war. Trump used to taunt President Barack Obama by claiming he was so weak and ineffective the only way he could get reelected “is to start a war with Iran.”

Trump has always been the master of projection.

And almost immediately, Representative Pete King (R-NY) tweeted: “Vital that Americans unite behind @POTUS Trump decision to attack and kill Iranian terrorist Soleimani. No time for political sniping.” And Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) suggested congressional Democrats were disloyal for questioning the justice of Soleimani’s death.

No one knows what will happen next. Perhaps Iran expert Barbara Slavin from the Atlantic Council put it best: “I don’t think Donald Trump understands the implications of what he has unleashed.”

---

available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

[milliefink]

January 3, 2020 (Friday)

Last night’s news about the assassination of Iran’s military leader Qassem Soleimani has today turned into a predictable split. Defenders of the president insist that Soleimani was an evildoer and the United States absolutely should have taken him out. They have no patience for anyone questioning Trump’s decision, suggesting that those questioners are anti-American and pro-terrorist if they do not support the killing of a man they insist has been one of our key enemies for years.

Those questioning the president’s decision to assassinate a member of a foreign government as a terrorist—remember, this is unusual because people like Osama bin Laden were rogue, non-state actors—freely acknowledge that Soleimani was a dangerous man. But they are concerned that Trump appears to have ordered the man assassinated illegally and has, in the process, ignited a firestorm.

The White House did not notify the Gang of Eight, the leaders of the House and Senate from both parties, but Trump did tell South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and Representative Kevin McCarthy, both Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has declined to say whether or not he was briefed in advance, but he has spoken up to praise the raid. News also broke today that apparently Trump told guests at Mar-a-Lago that something big with Iran was in the works.

Apparently, he informed Republicans and cronies, but not Congress.

White House has offered three arguments for why the assassination of Soleimani without notifying Congress was legal. First it vaguely asserted that the president could do this under Artlcle II of the Constitution, which is a non-starter. Then it suggested it was legal under the law 10 USC 127e, but this concerns budgeting, so the idea it enables the president to do something like this unilaterally is absurd. By tonight, it said the authorization for the assassination of Soleimani was the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. That law very specifically deals with the president’s ability to use force against Iraq…but it never specified if that meant Iraq’s government or its landmass, and it was amended in 2012 to include the words “associated forces.” Under this AUMF, the president can make unilateral decisions, but must inform Congress within 48 hours.

But, the AUMF requires that the president’s actions intended to prevent acts of future terrorism against the United States. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said repeatedly that the killing of Soleimani stopped just such a threat against Americans. But he has refused to produce proof, and this afternoon a congressional aide told NBC News that the overwhelming evidence the administration cited looked very much like Soleimani’s normal actions. “The case for acting this week was not made.”

The problem here is the same as it has been with this administration all along. This is a democracy. Our leaders are supposed to make a case to Congress about why they must risk military action on our behalf, because Congress is supposed to hold the power to declare war. But Trump has made no such case. Rather than addressing the nation, he told reporters only that he ordered the killing to “stop a war,” and has not yet briefed Congress. In a wonderful Twitter thread, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that until last night, 99% of Americans—including me, I might add—had never heard this man’s name, so the angry preaching that he was one of our chief enemies sounds forced. We need our leaders to explain to us the specifics of what this man did, and how the world is safer with him gone.

Representative Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a former CIA analyst of the Shia militia who served multiple tours in Iraq and worked at the White House under both Presidents Bush and Obama, took on the firestorm concerns. She noted that she had been part of countless discussion of how to respond to Soleimani’s campaigns. What kept other presidents from targeting Soleimani was that they concluded the retaliation for such a strike, and the likelihood it would draw the US into a long war. Trump has come to a different conclusion, she notes, but “it is crucial that the Administration has thought out the moves and counter-moves this attack will precipitate….” Most serious thinkers expect that Iran will retaliate in a big way for this killing, and they are concerned that the administration is not equipped to handle that retaliation in a measured, intelligent way.

The unilateral attack on Soleimani and his entourage reveals the escalation of Trump’s refusal to answer either to Congress or to the American people. He highlighted that today when he simply refused to respond to a court order that the White House turn over 20 emails between a Trump aide and Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney about freezing the congressionally ordered funding for Ukraine aid. He just… refused. This will go to the courts, of course, but Trump is sending a clear message that he, alone, calls the shots.

And in the midst of all this is Russia. Putin and Trump spoke on December 30, and we have no readout of what they discussed—we only have what Russia produced. In an unprecedented development, Russian news defended a US president today, floating the idea that Trump had been tricked into the attack by our intelligence agencies.

And here’s the one that jumps out to me: today the Moscow stock exchange hit all-time high thanks to the rise in oil stocks after the assassination.

[LurksNoMore]

@milliefink

And here’s the one that jumps out to me: today the Moscow stock exchange hit all-time high thanks to the rise in oil stocks after the assassination.

Donald Trump, the Kremlin Candidate.

Thank you for posting these essays here!

[milliefink]

January 4 (Saturday)

More details are emerging about Trump’s decision to assassinate Qassem Soleimani and his entourage. Apparently, the evidence that there was a specific plot afoot to attack Americans was, as one observer put it, “razor thin.” Instead, assassinating Soleimani was a “far out” option advisors presented to Trump to make other responses to the attack on the Baghdad embassy seem more measured. To their surprise, he chose that option, apparently—at this point; we still are operating much in the dark—out of deep concern that the attack on the embassy would be seen as his “Benghazi.” Rukmini Callimachi, New York Times reporter covering ISIS and al-Qaeda, concludes that this attack cannot be decoupled from the impeachment crisis.

It appears that the idea that there was an imminent attack was an attempt to justify the assassination after the fact. Today, the White House notified Congress about the attack (the president has 48 hours after an attack to tell Congress, although presidents almost always inform the Gang of 8 ahead of time, and, by the way, the Gang of 8 is sworn to secrecy and does not leak, so the excuse you’re hearing that Trump didn’t notify Congress because it would tell the Iraqis is, frankly, BS). The White House took the unusual step of classifying the entire briefing, making it impossible to have a public discussion of the reasons for this attack.

Led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrats criticized the notification, saying that it “raises more questions than it answers.” Pelosi said: “This document prompts serious and urgent questions about the timing, manner and justification of the Administration’s decision to engage in hostilities against Iran. The highly unusual decision to classify this document in its entirety compounds our many concerns, and suggests that the Congress and the American people are being left in the dark about our national security." She urged the president to give Congress a full briefing on the military engagement and what it planned as a “clear and legitimate strategy” to de-escalate the growing conflict.

Our former allies in Europe are not supporting the assassination, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complained to Fox News personality Sean Hannity about their disapproval, insisting that this strike had made the world safer.

For his part, Trump took to Twitter, claiming to have targeted “52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!”

Attacking cultural sites is a war crime. As former US Ambassador Michael McFaul tweeted: “ISIS targets cultural sites. The Taliban destroys cultural sites. The United States of America should not join this list.” He begged the State Department and the Department of Defense to “roll back this horrific statement” and “make clear that we will not target Iranian cultural sites."

Meanwhile, 3,500 more of our sons and daughters in uniform are headed for Iraq.

In all this, two things stand out for this political historian First, Trump is continuing to press his insistence that he can act unilaterally, this time bringing American close to-- and possibly into-- a hot war. Until he provides solid information and a clear plan for moving forward, we should see this attack as part of his growing authoritarianism.

Second, the president chose a maximally distracting response to the attack on the American embassy in Baghdad, surprising even his advisors, who apparently had laid out the assassination as a far out option to increase the attractiveness of more measured responses. The evidence does not suggest that there was any need for this extreme a response right now… which suggests that he chose it to distract from impeachment.

And distract it has. Headlines around the country are all about the assassination, and Trump supporters, fed heavily by bots and trolls, are swamping public media with support for the president. They are trying to overawe all debate over the wisdom of the attack, and over Trump’s decision to launch it without informing Congress, both of which are quite legitimate concerns. If you have been watching, you will see that this Facebook page, even, which is generally remarkably free of trolls, has been so swamped that it took me more than an hour tonight to clean up the comments on a single post. This is a colossal waste of my time, as it is intended to be, so that pro-Trump trolls will eventually make it impossible to cull them, and thus they can swing public debate away from what had been growing support for his removal from office.

Trump and his team appear to be doing anything they can to harden up his base before an approaching trial… a trial that Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro today suggested to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)-- who took Russian money from indicted political operative Lev Parnas (why is he still in office?)-- was no longer viable because the statute of limitations for impeachment had passed. (This is delusional.)

If you weren’t being careful, you could almost forget that in the last week, new evidence has shown that Trump himself ordered the withholding of congressionally mandated aid to Ukraine, that his own advisors knew it was illegal, and that he has flat out refused a subpoena requiring him to release 20 crucial emails about this issue.

But I am being careful.

---

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

[FGD135]

Let’s hope that some of the presidiot’s advisors have first-hand experience in parenting and know how to keep an obnoxious three year old from doing really stupid stuff.

[dfaris]

Too late.

[milliefink]

January 5, 2020 (Sunday)

Today the fallout from the killing of General Qassem Soleimani continued, and Trump doubled down on the idea he can act unilaterally.

First, the fallout: In Iran, Soleimani’s funeral today drew hundreds of thousands of mourners stretching almost twenty miles in what some observers called an unprecedented show of unity in the country which had, until the killing, been divided by civil unrest. Iran announced it would no longer honor the 2015 nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew the United States in 2018 but which France, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia had continued to honor. It says it considers the killings an act of war.

In Iraq, the Iraqi parliament met in an emergency session and, with lawmakers chanting “Death to America,” voted to expel the 5,200 U.S. troops in the country, although the unanimous vote is somewhat misleading: groups traditionally supportive of US involvement in Iraq did not show up for the vote. The Iraqi government needs to approve this vote before it expels the troops, but the Iraqi government has wanted the U.S. presence to prevent the resurgence of ISIS, and today the U.S. announced it will stop fighting ISIS in order to protect our own bases in Iraq.

A story in the Washington Post lays the burden of Trump’s decision on pressure from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has wanted to target Soleimani for months. Pompeo has focused on Iran since Trump appointed him to direct the CIA in 2017. Since then, he has become friendly with Yossi Cohen, the director of Israel’s intelligence service, and both men worried about the power of Iran. Notably, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been the only foreign leader who had praised the attack. Pompeo, like Vice President Mike Pence, is an evangelical Christian who believes in the rapture after the Jews have been returned to the Holy Land.

I am concerned that these facts are not separable.

Retired General David Petraeus, who led the U.S. surge in Iraq, said: “There’s no question that the tensions have been dramatically increased as a result of this action…. This is clearly heading in a very bad direction. Make no mistake about it: There will be losses on all sides if this escalates further.”

It is important to remember that Trump cannot ever admit to a mistake. His personality type means he simply doubles down on whatever he has done, insisting that it is others that have done something wrong, not him.

True to form, although his argument for pulling our troops out of northern Syria was that he wanted to bring the troops home (in fact, they were simply reassigned), he told reporters on Air Force 1 today that the US would not leave Iraq. “We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there…. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it…. We will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before.”

Faced with pushback on the idea that he could bomb Iranian cultural sites (it’s a war crime), he said: “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.” (In fact, this is inaccurate on so many counts I’m not going to tackle it all, but will point out at least that cultural heritage sites do not matter just to the people of the nation in which they are located. Cultural sites are valuable to all of us as scholars study them to understand our past and human society. Destroying a cultural site in Iran is no different than destroying Notre Dame cathedral, for example: I am neither French nor Iranian, but those sites are part of my heritage as a human being.)

Finally, faced with criticism of his launching of the attack without alerting the Gang of Eight (the leaders of both parties in both houses of Congress, as well as on the intelligence committees, who must be notified by law within 48 hours), he tweeted: “These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner. Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!”

Legal notice of an emergency strike to Congress is, of course, required within 48 hours, and Congress alone can declare war. Further, the notion that a tweet is an acceptable way to announce a war is nuts.

The official Twitter account for the House Foreign Affairs Committee answered: “This Media Post will serve as a reminder that war powers reside in the Congress under the United States Constitution. And that you should read the War Powers Act. And that you’re not a dictator.”

OK, fine. But OUR LEADERS ARE ARGUING ABOUT STARTING A WAR WITH IRAN OVER TWITTER. It is hard to imagine that this deteriorating state of our politics can continue much longer.

A couple of things about those defending the assassination of Soleimani: As I said last night, the pro-Trump propaganda forces are desperately trying to turn this event into a way to defend Trump against those they are now calling “pro-terrorist.” They are insisting that Soleimani was one of our top enemies, and it was high time we killed him. A Twitter user thought to check how often top Trump supporters tweeted about Soleimani before yesterday, and the results are illuminating: there was virtually no discussion of him by anyone now claiming he was one of our very top enemies. The contrast between their heated and quite uniform presentation of him after the attack as one of the world’s worst terrorists, and their dead silence before it, suggests a concerted propaganda effort. (The link is in the notes, and is worth checking out.) Donald Trump mentioned Soleimani exactly once, in 2015, in the context of complaining about a reporter asking him “gotcha” questions (he did not know who Soleimani was).

But here’s an important point. Both those in favor of the killing and opposed to it are fighting over what is going to happen thanks to the assassination. We. Do. Not. Know. The future is unwritten. All we can do is to make guesses, based on what experts tell us they have learned to expect through their knowledge of the region. Overwhelmingly, they say the attack has increased volatility and presents new dangers. I am not an expert on Iran, and have nothing original to contribute to this debate; I am simply gathering up for you what others have said.

What I do know cold, though, is the nature of the American presidency and political power. Trump upped the ante of authoritarianism today, announcing he can launch a war without notifying Congress and that he can commit war crimes with impunity.

---

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

[milliefink]

January 6, 2020 (Monday)

Today was chaotic, but there did seem to be a pattern underneath it all.

The backdrop to everything today was always Donald Trump. He has been impeached by the House of Representatives, and is furiously angry about that fact. He has taken the stand that he does not have to answer to Congress, declaring that his top advisors enjoy “constitutional immunity” from having to testify before Congress, and has stonewalled investigators, refusing to honor subpoenas for documents as recently as last week.

He has also expressed support for military men whom he considers tough guys, guys who refuse to be bound by rules, guys like Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, whose review Trump overruled so that Gallagher could retire with full rank despite his conviction for committing the war crime of posing for a photograph with a corpse. Trump has expressed interest in having Gallagher, and two other military men either accused or convicted of war crimes he pardoned, campaign with him in the upcoming election.

When what appeared to be Iran-backed militias rioted in the US Embassy in Baghdad, it seems that Trump worried he would be vulnerable to political attacks like those thrown at Hillary Clinton over the attack on Benghazi. To undercut that potential, he chose an extreme response favored by his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one that both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama dismissed as too dangerous. Choosing it was a tough guy move. And when that assassination sparked exactly the sort of backlash Bush and Obama had feared, Trump doubled down, saying he would not be bound by international law about destruction of cultural sites, and continued to taunt Iran on Twitter. He also declared he did not have to tell Congress before going to war. Tough guy stuff. Eddie Gallagher stuff.

Once again, Trump knows his base, which has rallied around him, cheering on the death of a man almost none of them had heard of before the attack, dismissing concerns about the way in which Trump went about the attack and what the future might bring. In an eerie echo of Gallagher’s actions, they are sharing photos that they claim are of Soleimani’s corpse.

But here’s where things suddenly get tricky.

In America, Trump could pull off this manipulation of reality by narrative, because there have so far been few repercussions of his fantasies that regular Americans could see clearly. Even the tariffs that have hurt the nation so badly have made little headway in the media, as Trump has continued to drive the headlines with his own erratic actions. And he could get away with it with our allies who, until recently, humored him. But Iran and Iraq, and China and Russia, are not going to enable Trump; they are forcing Trump’s narrative to deal with reality. The attack on Soleimani has sown confusion here at home as that reality threatens to burst the bubble Trump has constructed.

The Iranian government has continued to threaten retaliation for the killings. On Twitter, the account for the President of Iran responded to Trump’s tweet about 52 cultural sites for 52 American hostages in 1979 with a tweet reminding the U.S. of the 290 victims when the U.S. bombed an Iranian passenger jet in 1988 (which the U.S. called a “terrible human tragedy” and paid $131.8 million in compensation).

It is possible the Iranian response will be measured—certain experts point out that Iran does not want a war with the U.S.—but it is also possible it won’t be. We don’t know… which is a key reason why you don’t want tough guy actions like this: they create terrible uncertainty. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi acknowledged this immediately, laying the blame for the situation on the U.S. when he told Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif that the “dangerous US military operation violates the basic norms of international relations.” For its part, the Pentagon did what it could to get back inside established lines. It ruled out attacking cultural sites, with Defense Secretary Mark Esper saying the U.S. would “follow the laws of armed conflict.”

Reality is also asserting itself in Iraq. After the Iraqi legislature voted to expel U.S. forces yesterday, today a memo leaked to the press from the U.S. Iraqi command that sounded a lot like a plan for leaving the country. The Defense Department confirmed that the letter was real, but insisted it was a draft that had been poorly written, and that the U.S. was simply moving forces around the country and didn’t want Iraqis to misinterpret those movements. But the leak was embarrassing, as was the initial inability of leaders to explain what the memo was about. When CNBC reporters asked the White House to explain the implications of the memo, and as well to explain whether or not Trump was going to impose sanctions on Iraq, as he threatened when they voted to expel U.S. troops, no one responded.

Further, observers are already noting that if the U.S. leaves Iraq, it will create a vacuum that will benefit not only Iran but also Russia, which will be as happy to move into Iraq as it was to move into Syria when the U.S. pulled back.

Meanwhile at home, the chaos in the Middle East has prompted Democrats to push back on Trump’s unilateral decision making about hostilities with Iran. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the House would vote on a resolution to limit Trump’s ability to go to war with Iran. The measure is like that of Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), introduced on Friday, which would reassert Congress’s power to declare war and prevent Trump from acting unilaterally.

Today also brought a new challenge to Trump’s stonewalling of congressional investigators. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton offered to testify before the Senate if it subpoenaed him. This is an interesting gesture. Bolton is a key witness to events surrounding the Ukraine scandal—you will remember he allegedly called it a “drug deal”—but the House did not subpoena him because it seemed clear he would take the same stand Charles Kupperman did: that the courts needed to sort out whether or not Trump was right to claim constitutional immunity for his top advisors.

Now, with Kupperman’s case declared moot, Bolton has volunteered to testify before the Senate. It’s not clear what he’s up to. Currently, McConnell is refusing to allow any testimony, so Bolton’s offer itself might be moot. But conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin thinks Bolton is deliberately putting pressure on McConnell to have a real trial. I am skeptical of that, but there is no doubt that Bolton’s declaration that he is willing to testify undercuts the argument that he cannot be subpoenaed.

Trump promptly retweeted the statement that only the White House could decide if Bolton could testify, but it is unclear to me how he is going to stop Bolton from talking, whether before the Senate now, or perhaps the House, or on his own in the future. If he has damning things to say, Senate Republicans should want to hear it before they tie themselves to Trump’s acquittal, or they will have sunk themselves along with him.

Still, for now, Republicans seem to be falling into line behind Trump and his narrative in the Iranian attack as they have over Ukraine. In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lamented the Democrats’ refusal to unite behind the president. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley tweeted that Democrats were “mourning the loss of Soleimani,” which, of course, entirely misrepresents the Democratic concerns about the killing. Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted a photoshopped image of President Obama grinning and shaking hands with an image of Iran President Hassan Rouhani, with the caption: “The world is a better place without these guys in power.” Obama never met with Rouhani, who is still in power; observers suggested that Gosar was trying to make people think Rouhani was Soleimani. Gosar’s tweet was, of course, an example of the disinformation about which I wrote the other day.

Linking the Iran narrative to their support for Trump domestically, the official Twitter feed of the Senate Republicans published a video that insisted “America—and the world—are safer because [Trump] took action.” The video compares Soleimani to Osama bin Laden and notes his “20-year SPAN OF TERROR is FINALLY OVER.” The video is now the pinned tweet on that feed.

[milliefink]

January 7, 2020 (Tuesday)

All eyes have been on Iran and Iraq today. I am not in any way an expert on the Middle East, so as I try to cover today’s events, please remember that while I can tell you what news sources say about that region, I can offer informed assessments of my own only on America.

Tonight, in retaliation for the killing of Qassem Soleimani, Iran launched 15 ballistic missiles against two Iraqi military bases that have American troops on them. Ten hit the Ain al-Asad base in western Iraq, the base at the center of US operations. One hit a base in Irbil, in the Kurdish region, a base that is the hub of special operations. Four failed to hit their targets. Initial reports say there were Iraqi casualties at the bases. No American casualties have yet been reported. (A “casualty” in war means someone injured or killed).

Immediately after the attack, Iranian officials echoed Trump’s tweet of the American flag after he targeted Soleimani by tweeting images of the Iranian flag. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards also echoed Trump when they issued a statement saying: “If America responds to these attacks there will be bigger attacks on the way. This is not a threat, it’s a warning.”

Vice President Mike Pence, rather than Trump, briefed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about the strikes. U.S. stock futures dropped badly and oil stocks rose upon the news of the strikes.

After the attack, Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, tweeted: “Iran took & concluded proportionate measures in self-defense under Article 51 of UN Charter targeting base from which cowardly armed attack against our citizens & senior officials were launched. We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression.”

Moments after the Foreign Minister’s tweet, Trump tweeted: “All is well! Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties & damages taking place now. So far, so good! We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world by far! I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.”

Trump declined to address the nation tonight, and delaying a public speech permitted him to watch Fox News personalities discuss what he should do next. Tucker Carlson tonight was dead against escalating the conflict and instead said Trump should concentrate on his base issues: immigration and getting rid of homeless camps. But Carlson was alone. Sean Hannity, Pete Hegseth, Laura Ingraham, and Lou Dobbs all want Trump to escalate the conflict.

Fox News Channel personalities are invested in the tough guy narrative I wrote about last night, because it excites their viewers. Trump’s campaign is already trying to take advantage of that narrative by running almost 800 new Facebook ads highlighting Soleimani’s killing. One senior administration official told a reporter that before the backlash, Trump told aides that killing Soleimani would be politically popular and that Iran would not retaliate with “anything too stupid.”

But Trump is suddenly realizing that tough guy actions create consequences in the real world. He knows Americans do not want to go to war with Iran; he ran in part on that issue. He cannot afford trouble in the stock market. And the blowback for the Soleimani killing is already mounting (hence the ads trying to argue it was a triumph). Evidence continued to grow today that there was, in fact, no “imminent danger” that required Soleimani’s killing. The man was instrumental in much violence in the Middle East, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred only generally to “the history” as justification for killing him at this particular moment. Responding to reporters’ questions today, Trump offered nothing more concrete.

This matters because if there was no imminent threat, Trump was required to inform Congress before taking action against Soleimani.

There is speculation that Trump is going to take the off ramp that this attack has given him, declaring victory and walking away from the conflict. That would be in keeping with his personality—to cause a crisis and then claim victory when it resolves-- and the rapid about face of tonight’s tweet, with its three cheery exclamation points and the “All is well!”, suggests he’s headed that direction. But while de-escalation right now is imperative, journalist Yashar Ali tonight warns that none of us should think this is over. He pointed out that this will not be the end of Iran’s retaliation. That government’s revenge for attacks tends to come later, and to be against “soft” targets, such as diplomats or specific groups.

There is other news surrounding Iran tonight, and folks are speculating in irresponsible ways. Late tonight, a Boeing 737 carrying 180 Ukrainians crashed near Tehran shortly after it took off. First reports say it suffered a mechanical failure. We’ll see. Immediately thereafter, two earthquakes hit Iran. My seismologist friends say this was certainly natural. While there have been suggestions it might have been caused by a nuclear test, the seismologists say this is dead wrong: it was far deeper than nuclear testing, and had an entirely different pattern (apparently they use the data from nuclear tests as controls for earthquake science so they know the patterns very well. Who knew?!). They say not to make the mistake of linking the quake to politics.

In news closer to home, we learned today from Khalid bin Salman, the younger brother of the Saudi Crown Prince MBS—the man our intelligence community believes approved the murder of Jamal Khashoggi—that he met today with Trump “to deliver a message from the Crown Prince, and review aspects of our bilateral cooperation, including efforts to confront regional and international challenges.” Americans learned this because KBS tweeted about it. The photo he tweeted included Jared Kushner at his side. The meeting was not on the president’s public schedule, and the White House did not provide a read-out for it.

[milliefink]

January 8, 2020 (Wednesday)

This entire day felt like an exercise in gas lighting. From this morning’s statement by the president to the announcement tonight that Vice President Mike Pence has indefinitely postponed a Monday speech on Iran policy, we seem to be operating in a fog.

While we have come to expect disinformation from Trump and the leadership of the GOP, and certainly from the Fox News Channel, I was surprised by today’s media coverage of McConnell and impeachment, which gave the impression that the Senate trial was about to start on McConnell’s terms. This confused me because I had not heard that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had decided to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate. An evening of digging says that, despite media suggestions, it has not happened.

This morning Trump gave a very short—less than ten minute—statement to the press about hostilities with Iran. It was a very weird speech. Trump came out to stand before a group of generals, who stood expressionless as he spoke. He seemed breathless and subdued, and slurred a number of words.

The speech itself was exactly what we have come to expect from him. He claimed victory over Iran, said that he had defeated ISIS, listed the terrorism he laid at the door of Iran, called on NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization put together after WWII to push back on Soviet expansion and continued recently to hold the line against an aggressive Russia, an organization he has worked hard to undermine—to take a bigger role in the Middle East, and, stunningly, blamed President Barack Obama for funding Iranian terrorists. He also announced new sanctions on Iran. After the speech, political reporter Joan Walsh tweeted “’Slurring,’ ‘Adderall’ and #TrumpSpeech are trending. Sounds like it went really well.”

(An aside here. If I hear any more assertions that Obama sent planes full of American cash to Iran my head is going to explode. Obama did not pay Iran $150 billion for the 2015 “Iran Deal,” or JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. In fact, the JCPOA, approved by China, France, Germany, Russia, UK, and the US, involved the release of billions of Iran’s own assets, frozen here and elsewhere around the world after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, in exchange for the end of Iran’s nuclear weapon development. After Iran paid its debts with the money, it had between $32 billion and $50 billion left. The deal itself is linked in tonight’s notes, as well as couple of explanatory articles. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming….)

Today Congress heard the evidence that Qassem Soleimani presented an “imminent threat” to the United States, thus giving Trump legal authority to attack him without notice to Congress until after the fact. It did not go well. Democrats told reporters that the intelligence was “sophomoric, and utterly unconvincing,” which puts the attack on shaky legal grounds.

Representative John Rutherford (R-FL) called Democrats who rejected the claim that there was evidence of an imminent attack “Ayatollah sympathizers” who are “spreading propaganda that divides our nation and strengthens our enemies.” An ayatollah is a high-ranking Muslim cleric, but is associated in American with the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader at the center of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah and led to the taking of 52 American hostages. Rutherford was accusing Democrats of supporting America’s enemies.

Meanwhile, Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity gushed about the intelligence evidence about Soleimani, and falsely told viewers that he had always distinguished between the 99% of wonderful US intelligence officers and the 1% he called the Deep State (in fact he has been attacking the Intelligence Community wholesale since the beginning of the investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, at least in part because, of course, he was one of Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s three clients, and was beside himself when the FBI raided Cohen’s offices and made that discovery).

But it was not just Democrats who were unimpressed with the evidence. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah seemed incensed by the briefing, calling it “insulting” and “probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the United States Senate.” He went on to note, angrily, that “What I found so distressing is one of the messages was do not discuss, do not debate appropriateness of further military intervention against Iran.” If Trump needed a justification for war, Lee claimed Trump’s people said, “I’m sure we could think of something.” Lee says he will vote for a resolution limiting Trump’s power to make war without Congress’s approval.

With the fevered expectation of war with Iran quelled for the present, the media turned back to the ongoing impeachment saga, and reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had the votes to hold the Senate trial without admitting the witnesses from whom a strong majority of Americans-- including 2 out of 3 Republicans-- want to hear testimony.

Lost in these stories was that Pelosi still has not turned over the articles of impeachment, and clearly sees no reason to do so when McConnell has already said that he will guarantee that Trump will be acquitted. The Senate cannot start a trial until it gets the articles of impeachment, and the House has complete authority to run the process of impeachment any way it sees fit, no matter how much Republicans squawk about it.

GOP leaders are desperate to get the trial over with and impeachment buried. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump supporter now, although he loathed Trump early on, claims to be about to submit a Senate resolution demanding that Pelosi send over the articles immediately, claiming that withholding the articles “is a flagrant violation of the separation of powers expressly outlined in the bicameral impeachment process under the Constitution of the United States.” This is a complete fiction, designed to gin up the Republican base. The Constitution gives the House complete control over how it handles impeachment. “If we don’t get the articles this week,” Graham told the Fox News Channel, “then we need to take matters into our own hands and change the rules,” a revealing statement about the determination of Republican leaders to defend Trump, no matter the cost to our system of government.

But much has changed since the House passed the articles of impeachment on December 18, 2019, and it seems to me unlikely the House will simply hand over the articles to McConnell to let him kill them.

Two blockbuster stories have made things look even worse for the president: newly released emails reveal that Trump himself directed the withholding of military aid to Ukraine immediately after his July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and that White House officials recognized the hold was illegal; and we have learned that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and National Security Advisor John Bolton spoke to Trump as a group to get him to lift the hold, telling him it was against American interests, and yet he still refused. With those stories in the backdrop, Bolton has volunteered to testify in a Senate trial if the Senate subpoenas him. Bolton is one of four key witnesses Senate Democrats want to hear from in a trial.

And now, hanging over even the Ukraine scandal, is that Trump came perilously close to getting us into a shooting war with Iran by assassinating their top military official on grounds that even members of his own party find unconvincing, only to back down and, after a brief, odd statement, go silent. As the president stumbles, we have no Director of National Intelligence, no Deputy Director, no Secretary of Homeland Security, no Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, no Navy Secretary, and a badly gutted State Department.

He has gathered power into his own hands, and this week revealed just how dangerous those hands are.

---

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

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah seemed incensed by the briefing, calling it “insulting” and “probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the United States Senate.” He went on to note, angrily, that “What I found so distressing is one of the messages was do not discuss, do not debate appropriateness of further military intervention against Iran.” If Trump needed a justification for war, Lee claimed Trump’s people said, “I’m sure we could think of something.” Lee says he will vote for a resolution limiting Trump’s power to make war without Congress’s approval.

More evidence that this administration is in way over their heads. They are not playing 4-dimensional chess; checkers is probably optimistic; losing at Tic Tac Toe is probably the best strategy game metaphor. The primary thing that could push the Senate over the line to seriously consider conviction and removal from office is if a handful of GOP senators get sufficiently pissed off at Trump. So what do they do? They piss off some of the group that are least likely to break ranks. It wasn’t just Lee who was pissed off at the briefing. Rand Paul also spoke out against it, and is now publicly feuding with Lindsay Graham over it.

They might as well have sent a drone strike against Donny’s foot.

[milliefink]

January 9, 2020 (Thursday)

Wow. Remember yesterday, when Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah was so furious at the congressional briefing about the attack on Qassem Soleimani, calling it “insulting” and “probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the United States Senate,” and complaining: “What I found so distressing is one of the messages was do not discuss, do not debate appropriateness of further military intervention against Iran”?

Today, on the Fox News Channel, he did an about face, reiterating how much he applauds and respects Trump for his restraint as commander-in-chief, and blaming the briefers for misrepresenting the president.

Wow. Just wow.

Lee seems to have discovered the dangers of questioning the president. As anger over what increasingly appears to have been an illegal attack rises, Republican Trump stalwarts are digging in on their argument that you either support the president or you are an enemy. In an interview on the Fox News Channel, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who took Russian money from indicted political operative Lev Parnas, argued that the attack on Soleimani was the fault of Adam Schiff (D-CA), who has been leading the impeachment investigation. If Schiff had been focusing on Iran rather than impeachment, McCarthy said, Trump would not have had to kill Soleimani. Representative Doug Collins (R-GA) went further, accusing Democrats of being “in love with terrorists.” And Trump made the death of Soleimani a centerpiece of his rally tonight in Toledo, Ohio, saying: “I see the radical-left Democrats have expressed outrage over the termination of this horrible terrorist.”

A number of pundits have pushed back on those comments, saying, for example, that it is not unAmerican to question the president, especially when it appears that his actions might have been illegal. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) who lost both her legs and some of the use of her arm during her service in Iraq was incensed at Collins’s comment. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response,” she said. “I’m disgusted. I would never, ever use … military men and women or their families as any pawn in any political game. Let me tell you something: This issue is about America’s national security. It is not a partisan political issue.”

Former Senator and Reagan’s Navy Secretary Jim Webb asked: “How did it become acceptable to assassinate one of the top military officers of a country with whom we are not formally at war during a public visit to a third country that had no opposition to his presence?” Webb notes that if we want to start defining other country’s governments as terrorist, as was the case here since Soleimani was part of the Iran government, Congress simply must have a bipartisan debate of this drastic step.

But the Republican attacks on Democrats for their quite reasonable concerns about the fact the president dragged us to the point of a hot war with Iran for no apparent national security reason actually has me thinking in a different way. It reminds me of Roger Stone’s comments when he was part of the Brooks Brothers Riot that stopped the Florida recount in 2000, sending the election to the Supreme Court and handing victory to George W. Bush.

Stone told a reporter: “It’s attack, attack, attack. Al Gore thought the recount was a high-minded policy debate. He didn’t understand that it was an extension of a war….” Stone, of course, pushed Trump’s presidential bid and has been convicted of witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and making false statements, all in connection with his apparent collaboration with WikiLeaks in its attempts to discredit Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton with information stolen by Russian spies.

Since Stone’s victory in 2000, putting Bush into the White House by short circuiting the recount while Democrats tried to honor our longstanding American tradition of accepting the outcome of an election, the GOP seems to have focused more and more at simply winning at all costs. But to what end? They have given up the norms of democracy and are now throwing all their weight behind a man who came perilously close to starting another war entirely on his own.

You know, we get all tangled up in the details of the daily events (and yes, the House can continue to investigate Trump; yes there can be more articles of impeachment; yes he can be impeached again even if acquitted, for those of you who have asked), but between Lee’s 180 and the accusations at the highest levels of government that if you do not toe the GOP line you are disloyal, it seems like a good time to step back and look at the larger picture. If the GOP has abandoned democracy and our security… why exactly are they so determined to hold power?

When parties behaved this way in the 1850s and the 1890s, the answer was quite simple: Democrats in the 1850s and Republicans in the 1890s each fervently believed their opponents would hurt business and thereby destroy America. To stay in power, they increasingly limited the vote, and accused those who wanted to level the playing field between those at the top of the economic ladder and those at the bottom of wanting to destroy individualism by redistributing wealth. They were, in short, socialists. In the 1850s, the Civil War stopped the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a rich elite; in the 1890s, the elite consolidated power and took the vote from people of color and wage laborers.

Aren’t we looking at pretty much the same conflict right now? GOP voters want power just to dominate people of color and women, while GOP leaders want power to consolidate wealth?

Sure looks like that to me.

Under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrats are pushing back against this GOP. Today the House passed a war powers concurrent resolution requiring Trump to get permission from Congress before any further military action against Iran. Three Republicans joined the Democrats to vote for the measure, while eight Democrats voted against it. A similar measure is in the Senate, and allegedly Republicans are expressing a willingness to sign it (I am unspeakably tired of Maine Senator Susan Collins’s deep concerns), but because it is a concurrent resolution, it simply expresses the sense of Congress, it is not legally binding. Pelosi says it is a strong rebuke; McCarthy (who took Russian money from Lev Parnas) says: “This is a meaningless vote that only sends the wrong message that the House Democrats would rather stand with the socialist base than stand against Iran.” (There’s that cry of socialism again.)

In other news:

–Noah Bookbinder pointed out today that, contrary to what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says as he tries to justify a Senate impeachment trial without witnesses, “The Senate has heard testimony from witnesses at every trial it has completed in its 231-year history.” While media is faulting Pelosi for failing to hand over the articles of impeachment to the Senate, the blame falls far more accurately on McConnell, who is refusing to permit the Senate to do its job.

–Yet another investigation into Hillary Clinton has wrapped up without finding any evidence of wrongdoing. In 2017, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions started an investigation into the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, as well as her emails. It has quietly ended, having found nothing worth pursuing.

–Today the New York City Bar Association asked Congress to investigate Attorney General William Barr. They are concerned that he is using the Justice Department and its prosecutors as “political partisans willing to use the levers of government to empower certain groups over others.”

I’m sick, and falling over with exhaustion, so will leave this as is, unedited. I hope it is not too incoherent, but if so, please bear with me until I’m up and around again.

And finally, do so in your own way, but let’s acknowledge that the 176 people who died on the Ukraine passenger jet that apparently was accidentally shot down by Iranians expecting an American attack are forever linked to us, and to what we have allowed our politics to become.