Heather Cox Richardson

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September 4, 2020 (Friday)

Most of the oxygen in the world of American news media today has been taken up by last night’s story about Trump’s contempt for the military, which said, among other things, that Trump called soldiers “suckers” and dead service members “losers.” Today, the story was confirmed and expanded by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and the Fox News Channel, among other outlets.

As more and more voices spoke out against Trump’s sentiments, the White House madly pushed back. “It was a totally fake story, and that was confirmed by many people who were actually there,” Trump told reporters. “I’ve done more for the military than almost anybody else.” Even First Lady Melania Trump got into the fray, tweeting: “[The Atlantic] story is not true. It has become a very dangerous time when anonymous sources are believed above all else, & no one knows their motivation. This is not journalism - It is activism. And it is a disservice to the people of our great nation.”

But one media outlet after another confirmed the story. When even the Fox News Channel vouched for it, Trump tweeted that the FNC reporter who covered the story ought to be fired.

The silence from his former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who declined to contradict the allegations, could not be missed, since one of the most damning stories in the article involved him. In a press conference this evening, Trump seemed rather to confirm the story than prove it wrong when he attacked Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps General who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff. “He… didn’t do a good job, had no temperament, and ultimately he was petered out,” Trump told reporters. “He got eaten alive. He was unable to handle the pressure of this job.”

The situation permitted Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to stand forth as the defender of soldiers and the military. Biden’s late son, Beau, served in Iraq. “When my son volunteered and joined the United States military as the attorney general and went to Iraq for a year, won the bronze star and other commendations, he wasn’t a sucker,” Biden said. “The servicemen and women he served with, particularly those who did not come home, were not ‘losers.’ If these statements are true, the president should humbly apologize to every gold star mother and father and every blue star family that he has denigrated and insulted,” he said. “Who the heck does he think he is?”

Since Ronald Reagan ran for office in 1980 on the argument that the Democratic President Jimmy Carter had cut funding for the military (this was not true), the modern Republican Party has wrapped itself in the flag. Republicans have celebrated the image of the U.S. soldier as a lone hero, standing against the faceless and nameless mass of humanity marshaled to defend communism. In this formulation, Americans were individuals, each of value to our country.

But Trump has turned this idea on its head. In a weird echo of the way Republicans used to describe communist leaders, the White House seems to see Americans not as individuals but as faceless statistics. Administration leaders shrug at the deaths of more than 185,000 Americans and urge the country simply to absorb more Covid-19 deaths for the good of the economy. “It is what it is,” Trump said of the pandemic losses earlier this week. That each death is the loss of a daughter, a mother, a father, a son, seems lost in the administration’s tendency to talk about them as percentages.

The story of Trump’s disdain for those who serve the nation and sometimes sacrifice their lives for it suggests that he sees even the soldiers, whom we traditionally celebrate, as “suckers” who are stupid to go into the military. He seems to see them, too, as an expendable mass. Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth (D), a combat veteran, told CNN that Trump “likes to use the military for his own personal ego as if we were some sort of toy soldiers you could pull out and line up on your desk to play with.”

A devastating ad from Bill Owens, whose son, Navy SEAL William Ryan Owens, died in Yemen, echoed Duckworth. Owens explains that Trump sent his son and his comrades to Yemen five days into his presidency, ordering them in not from the Situation Room surrounded by intelligence experts but “sitting across a dinner table from Steve Bannon.” “There was no vital interest at play,” Owens says. “Just Donald Trump playing big-man-going-to-war. And when it went horribly wrong… Donald Trump demeaned my son’s sacrifice to play to the crowd.”

Duckworth said something similar: “He really doesn’t understand the sacrifice…. He truly doesn’t understand what it means to put something above yourself too, serve this nation and be willing to lay down one’s life with this nation. Because he does nothing that does not benefit Donald Trump.”

Since at least 2018, Democrats, especially Democratic women, have advanced a vision of military service that departs from the Republican emphasis on heroic individualism. Instead, they emphasize teamwork, camaraderie, and community, and the recognition that that teamwork means every single soldier, not just a few visible heroes, matters. Today Duckworth, who lost both her legs and some of the use of her right arm in 2004 when her helicopter was shot down, told NBC’s Nicole Wallace: “When somebody goes into combat they need to know that their buddies to their left and to their right will not leave them behind no matter what. We will get you out of there even if it is just bringing your body home…. When I was wounded, my crew thought that I was dead… but they risked their lives to retrieve my body… and they carried my body through that field in Iraq, covered themselves in my blood and my flesh and got me to that rescue aircraft. And only then did they discover that I was still alive. It was because these men and women stand up for the values that they fight for."

The Democrats are taking over the mantle of patriotism. This shift showed in the poll earlier this week that showed enlisted military personnel prefer Biden to Trump. That shift worried Trump enough that he decided to get rid of the government-funded but independent Stars and Stripes newspaper that has served the troops since 1861. Pushback today was so great that he announced on Twitter he had reversed the decision, a welcome development marred slightly by the fact he called the famous newspaper a magazine.

The Democrats’ vision of military service is much more like that of the older army, the army of World War Two, than the one Republicans have championed since the 1980s. As Trump has revealed that his praise for heroic individuals is cover for the idea that most soldiers are an expendable mass of “suckers,” Democrats are standing up to define service as teamwork and loyalty, the belief that all soldiers matter, and the conviction that the military functions best when each soldier puts the group above self.

It is a revealing shift.

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This, like the reverence for your flag, is something very alien to me as a German.

It is not just that I wouldn’t like the emphasis put on it: I really am not able to understand it.

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the “respect our troops” thing is an outgrowth of vietnam i think.

when vets came home, they were often blamed for the war – when many were just kids, drafted. the us then did poorly by them, resulting in ( still ) a lot of untreated ptsd, drug addiction, and homelessness.

during the various more recent oil wars – i think americans tried to separate protest of the wars from protest against the troops. “i support the troops, and am against the war” became a thing.

keep in mind, the defense department is the world’s largest employer, something like 3.2 million people. without that welfare – paid entirely by taxes as they definitely dont make a profit – the american working class would be completely destitute instead of just mostly. ( the prison industry also helps bail out our faltering industrial economy. )

anyway, so that maybe explains part of the troops thing. the flag i cannot explain. there’s more flags than people here i think.

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Um well, not for the 99% I suppose. But the empire’s military is definitely making bank for an elite that’s ensconced in the empire’s penthouse.

Agreed, and let’s throw in nostalgia for the great war, WWII. We all pulled together, the enemies were so clearly baddies, our troops were so brave and noble, etc etc

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Admittedly before my time, but I’m fairly certain the US paid at least lip service to worshipping its troops well before Vietnam. Perhaps the nature of the veneration changed, but it was certainly there before.

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Well, other parts of the globe also had that for very long periods of time, and many also still do.

I still cannot understand it. I think it has something to do with me growing up between two blocks led by superpowers worshipping the bomb the military, with the constant reminder that nuclear overkill is a very real option, and images of the atrocities of WW II being very much part of my regular intake of media.

Also, I perceived most I learned about the military (especially in regard to the US!) as a series of fuckups. And looking back I have the feeling that this very much intensified with everything from the Korean war onwards.

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Right?

Which makes the obstinacy of US civilian respect for its military all the more ridiculous.

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September 6, 2020 (Sunday)

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo warned that American democracy is ending. He pointed to political violence on the streets, the pandemic, unemployment, racial polarization, and natural disasters, all of which are destabilizing the country, and noted that Republicans appear to have abandoned democracy in favor of a cult-like support for Donald Trump. They are wedded to a narrative based in lies, as the president dismantles our non-partisan civil service and replaces it with a gang of cronies loyal only to him.

He is right to be worried.

Just the past few days have demonstrated that key aspects of democracy are under attack.

Democracy depends on the rule of law. Today, we learned that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who rose to become a Cabinet official thanks to his prolific fundraising for the Republican Party, apparently managed to raise as much money as he did because he pressured employees at his business, New Breed Logistics, to make campaign contributions that he later reimbursed through bonuses. Such a scheme is illegal. A spokesman said that Dejoy “believes that he has always followed campaign fundraising laws and regulations,” but records show that many of DeJoy’s employees only contributed money to political campaigns when they worked for him.

Democracy depends on equality before the law. But Black and brown people seem to receive summary justice at the hands of certain law enforcement officers, rather than being accorded the right to a trial before a jury of their peers. In a democracy, voters elect representatives who make laws that express the will of the community. “Law enforcement officers” stop people who are breaking those laws, and deliver them to our court system, where they can tell their side of the story and either be convicted of breaking the law, or acquitted. When police can kill people without that process, justice becomes arbitrary, depending on who holds power.

Democracy depends on reality-based policy. Increasingly it is clear that the Trump administration is more concerned about creating a narrative to hold power than it is in facts. Today, Trump tweeted that “Our Economy and Jobs are doing really well,” when we are in a recession (defined as two quarters of negative growth) and unemployment remains at 8.4%.

This weekend, the drive to create a narrative led to a new low as the government launched an attempt to control how we understand our history. On Friday, the administration instructed federal agencies to end training on “critical race theory,” which is a scary-sounding term for the idea that, over time, our laws have discriminated against Black and brown people, and that we should work to get rid of that discriminatory pattern.

Today, Trump tweeted that the U.S. Department of Education will investigate whether California schools are using curriculum based on the 1619 Project from the New York Times, which argues that American history should center on the date of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Chesapeake shores. Anyone using such curriculum, he said, would lose funding. Government interference in teaching our history echoes the techniques of dictatorships. It is unprecedented in America.

Democracy depends on free and fair suffrage. The White House is trying to undermine our trust in the electoral system by claiming that mail-in ballots can be manipulated and will usher in fraud. While Trump has been arguing this for a while, last week Attorney General William Barr, a Trump loyalist, also chimed in, offering a false story that the Justice Department had indicted a Texas man for filling out 1700 absentee ballots. In fact, in 2017, one man was convicted of forging one woman’s signature on a mail-in ballot in a Dallas City Council race. Because mail-in ballots have security barcodes and require signatures to be matched to a registration form, the rate of ballot fraud is vanishingly small: there have been 491 prosecutions in all U.S. nationwide elections from 2000 to 2012, when billions of ballots were cast.

Interestingly, an intelligence briefing from the Department of Homeland Security released Friday says that Russia is spreading false statements identical to those Trump and Barr are spreading. The bulletin says that Russian actors “are likely to promote allegations of corruption, system failure, and foreign malign interference to sow distrust in Democratic institutions and election outcomes.” They are spreading these claims through state-controlled media, fake websites, and social media trolls.

(Continued in next comment)

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(Continued – her post today was a long one.)

At the same time, we know that the Republicans are launching attempts to suppress Democratic votes. Last Wednesday, we learned that Georgia has likely removed 200,000 voters from the rolls for no reason. In December 2019, the Georgia Secretary of State said officials had removed 313,243 names from the rolls in an act of routine maintenance because they were inactive and the voters had moved, but nonpartisan experts found that 63.3% of those voters had not, in fact, moved. They were purged from the rolls in error.

And, in what was perhaps an accident, in South Carolina, voters’ sample ballots did not include Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, although they did include the candidates for the Green, Alliance, and Libertarian parties. When The Post and Courier newspaper called their attention to the oversight, the State Election Commission, which is a Republican-majority body appointed by a staunch Trump supporter, updated the ballots.

Democracy depends on the legitimacy of (at least) two political parties. Opposition parties enable voters unhappy with whichever group of leaders is in power to articulate their positions without undermining the government itself. They also watch leaders carefully, forcing them to combat corruption within their ranks.

This administration has sought to delegitimize Democrats as “socialists” and “radicals” who are not legitimate political players. Just today, Trump tweeted: “The Democrats, together with the corrupt Fake News Media, have launched a massive Disinformation Campaign the likes of which has never been seen before.”

For its part, the Republican Party has essentially become the Trump Party, not only in ideology and loyalty but in finances. Yesterday we learned that Trump and the Republican National Committee have spent close to $60 million from campaign contributors on Trump’s legal bills. Matthew Sanderson, a campaign finance lawyer for Republican presidential candidates, told the New York Times, “Vindicating President Trump’s personal interests is now so intertwined with the interests of the Republican Party they are one and the same — and that includes the legal fights the party is paying for now.”

The administration has refused to answer to Democrats in Congress, ignoring subpoenas with the argument that Congress has no power to investigate the executive branch, despite precedent for such oversight going all the way back to George Washington’s administration. Just last week, a federal appeals court said that Congress has no power to enforce a subpoena because there is no law that gives it the authority to do so. This essentially voids a subpoena the House issued last year to former White House counsel Don McGahn, demanding he testify about his dealings with Trump over the investigation into the ties of the Trump campaign to Russia. (The decision will likely be challenged.)

On September 4, U.S. Postal Service police officers refused Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) entry to one USPS facility in Opa-Locka, Florida and another in Miami. Although she followed the procedures she had followed in the past, this time the local officials told her that the national USPS leadership had told them to bar her entry. “Ensuring only authorized parties enter nonpublic areas of USPS facilities is part of a Postal Police officer’s normal duties, said Postal Inspector Eric Manuel. Wasserman Schultz is a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

And finally, democracy depends on the peaceful transition of power. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not leave office because the Democrats are going to cheat.

So we should definitely worry.

But should we despair? Absolutely not.

Convincing people the game is over is one of the key ways dictators take power. Scholars warn never to consent in advance to what you anticipate an autocrat will demand. If democracy were already gone, there would be no need for Trump and his people to lie and cheat and try to steal this election.

And I would certainly not be writing this letter.

Americans are coming together from all different political positions to fight this attack on our democracy, and we have been in similar positions before. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln spoke under similar circumstances, and noted that Americans who disagreed on almost everything else could still agree to defend their country, just as we are now. Ordinary Americans “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork-- a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver,” he said. And “when the storm shall be past,” the world “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

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Strikes a hopeful tone. I felt this week was a tide change. The veterans thing needs to hang around and beat on him for the next 2 months. He should not be able to shake it off like he does everything else. (Wishful thinking, I know.)

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September 7, 2020 (Monday)

I have been holding off for a calm news day to examine exactly what the fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report on Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election said, and why it is important. The report came out on August 18 and, in the storm of other news, has gotten less attention than it should have.

While Special Counsel Robert Mueller marshaled a team to look into potential crimes committed by members of the Trump campaign and by Russian actors in the 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee also conducted an investigation. The Senate committee was not limited, as Mueller was, by a directive from the acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. It looked more widely at the contacts between members of the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Because Republicans control the Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committee is chaired by a Republican, first by Richard Burr (R-NC) and then, after Burr stepped down under allegations of insider trading, by Marco Rubio (R-FL).

The first volume of the committee’s report established that Russians successfully breached U.S. election systems in 2016. According to the Intelligence Community, “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards,” but the Department of Homeland Security “assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.” Interestingly, the section on Russian attacks on voting machines is almost entirely redacted.

The second volume explained that Russian operatives “sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.” It concluded that “in 2016, Russian operatives… used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to spread disinformation and societal division in the United States. Masquerading as Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social media users in the United States. This campaign sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial differences, provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government’s covert support of Russia’s favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election.”

The third volume examined how the U.S. government responded to the Russian attacks. The fourth reviewed and defended the methods and findings of the Intelligence Community.

And, on August 18, the committee released the fifth volume. The committee reviewed about a million documents and interviewed more than 200 witnesses. Its 966 pages establish extensive connections between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials in 2016.

They established that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked closely during the campaign with his longtime business associate in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

This means that, according to Republicans—as well as the Democrats on the committee—in 2016, Trump’s campaign manager was actively working with a Russian intelligence officer.

Paul Manafort’s backstory matters.

Manafort cut his political teeth in Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign, along with his friend Roger Stone, whom he had met in the Young Republicans organization, a social and political network of young professionals. Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. In 1980, he and Roger Stone were two of the three principals who formed a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., that brought under one roof lobbying and political consulting as well as public relations. Bundling these functions was groundbreaking: they would get their clients elected, and then help clients lobby them. One of their first clients was a friend of Stone’s: Donald J. Trump.

Quickly, Manafort began to look to foreign countries for his clients. He took advantage of the anti-communist focus of foreign policy after Reagan, cleaning up shady clients to look good enough to U.S. lawmakers that they could get U.S. dollars to shore up their political interests. Touting his connections to the Reagan and Bush administrations, Manafort racked up clients. He backed so many dictatorial governments—Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among others—that a 1992 report from the Center for Public Integrity called his firm “The Torturers’ Lobby.”

In 1995, Manafort started his own firm and, a decade later, he began working for a young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were rising to replace the region’s communist leaders and were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.

In 1991, Ukraine had declared its independence from the USSR, and threats of Ukrainian freedom soon worried Deripaska, who had business interests there. In 2004, it appeared at first that a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, was elected president of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on a political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media: Deripaska’s friend Paul Manafort.

For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Deripaska. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary, but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Manafort began as a campaign advisor in March 2016, and became the chairman in late June, after the June 9 meeting between Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort with a number of people, including a Russian lawyer associated with Putin’s intelligence services, in Trump Tower. (Remember that Trump tried to explain away that meeting as being about “adoptions,” because the Russian response to sanctions was to shut down American adoptions of Russian children.)

The fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Report establishes that Kilimnik is a “Russian intelligence officer,” and that he acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign. On several occasions, Manafort passed the campaign’s sensitive internal polling data to Kilimnik, although because their communications were encrypted, the committee could not determine what became of the information. (Such polling might well dovetail with the information in volume 2.)

The report says Kilimnik may have been directly involved in hacking Democratic National Committee emails and handing the stolen files to WikiLeaks. The committee found “significant evidence” that WikiLeaks was “knowingly collaborating with Russian government officials.” The report also establishes that Trump repeatedly discussed the WikiLeaks document dumps with operative Roger Stone, then lied about those discussions with investigators.

The report says Manafort lied consistently about his interactions with Kilimnik, and has chosen to go to jail rather than change his story. It also notes that it is Kilimnik who launched the story that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the U.S. election.

According to the report: “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

The report also established that the White House “significantly hampered” the investigation.

The Manafort story is only one of the issues covered in Volume 5.

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September 8, 2020 (Tuesday)

The fallout from the story of Trump calling soldiers “suckers” and “losers” continues. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that military leaders don’t like him because they want to funnel work to defense contractors. “The top people in the Pentagon… want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy,” he said. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows tried to spin this as Trump’s attempt to protect soldiers from “the military industrial complex,” a phrase Republican President Dwight Eisenhower used to warn against funneling tax dollars into military contracts. Trump then retweeted posts comparing himself to Eisenhower.

In fact, Trump has made military build-up and selling U.S. weapons abroad key to his foreign policy. His Defense Secretary, Mark T. Esper, is a former top lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, and last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared an emergency to push through $8.1 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after lawmakers of both parties objected to the sale.

Trump’s about-face from boasting how he has built up the military to saying he opposes military build-up seems most likely to be simply another angle of attack against a story that is not dying. Yesterday, in The Atlantic, conservative columnist David Frum published a story titled “Everyone Knows It’s True.” Frum noted that while the First Lady, Cabinet secretaries, and Fox News Channel personalities have all insisted the story is false, the people who worked closely with Trump on military matters have remained resolutely silent.

Frum wrote, “Where are the senior officers of the United States armed forces, serving and retired—the men and women who worked most closely on military affairs with President Trump? Has any one of them stepped forward to say, ‘That’s not the man I know’? How many wounded warriors have stepped forward to attest to Trump’s care and concern for them? How many Gold Star families have stepped forward on Trump’s behalf? How many service families? The silence is resounding.”

Today, Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen released his new book. It, too, spoke of a disconnect between Trump’s public words and his private attitudes. “The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swath of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being,” Cohen wrote. “The truth was that he couldn’t care less.” “Everyone other than the ruling class on earth was like an ant, to his way of thinking, their lives meaningless and always subject to the whims of the true rulers of the world,” he said.

Trump’s apparent tendency to treat women as subject to the whims of others was in the news today as his attempt to get rid of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit is threatening the rule of law. In 2019, Trump denied he had raped Carroll, a journalist, more than 20 years ago, saying he had never met her and suggesting she was making up the story for publicity to sell a forthcoming book “or carry out a political agenda.” In November 2019, she sued him in New York for defamation.

Trump tried to stall Carroll’s lawsuit, arguing that a president was immune from civil lawsuits in state court, but in August, a federal judge rejected his bid and allowed the case to proceed. Carroll’s lawyers have asked for a DNA sample to match against material on clothing she was wearing when she says he assaulted her.

Today, lawyers from the Department of Justice asked to take over the case, arguing that Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied knowing Carroll and thus should be defended by the DOJ, which is funded by taxpayer dollars. CNN legal analyst Elie Honig called this “a wild stretch by DOJ… I can’t remotely conceive how DOJ can argue with a straight face that it is somehow within the official duties of the President to deny a claim that he committed sexual assault years before he took office.” He continued: "This is very much consistent with Barr’s well-established pattern of distorting fact and law to protect Trump and his allies.”

According to University of Texas Law Professor Steve Vladeck, the argument that Trump was acting “within the scope of his employment” when he defamed E. Jean Carroll is an attempt to get the suit dismissed altogether, because the government itself cannot be sued for defamation. Slate’s legal writer Mark Joseph Stern called the move “shocking and profoundly disgusting… and appalling and irredeemable debasement of the Justice Department, a direct threat to the very legitimacy of an agency that is responsible for enforcing federal law.”

The corruption of the DOJ was in the news in another way today, too, as White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that he has seen “additional” documents from John Durham’s investigation that spell “trouble” for former FBI officials who began the inquiry into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to investigate the FBI after the agency’s independent inspector general reported that the Russia investigation was begun legitimately (the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee agreed). “Additional documents that I’ve been able to review say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzoks, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys, and even others in the administration previously are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act and I use the word unlawful at best, it broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail as I mentioned previously,” Meadows said.

But observers were quick to note that the White House chief of staff should not have seen any documents in a pending DOJ criminal investigation. Meadows might be making up the story that he has seen such documents. He has been in the news before for a loose relationship with facts: he represented that he earned a four-year college degree when, in fact, he earned a degree equivalent to two years at a community college. Or his comments might mean the DOJ is coordinating with the White House. Neither is good news.

Three drafts of a report from the Department of Homeland Security reviewed by Politico today give some insight into the upcoming election. They warn that Russia is trying to spread disinformation in the U.S., saying that “Moscow’s primary aim is to weaken the United States through discord, division, and distraction in hopes of making America less able to challenge Russia’s strategic objectives. Some influence activity might spill over into the physical world and motivate domestic actors to violence.” The report predicts foreign cyberattacks on the 2020 election, focusing on the personal information of voters, municipal and state networks, and state election officials. It notes that “Russia already is using online influence operations in an attempt to sway US voter perceptions” and to drive down minority participation in the election.

Even more striking, though, under “terrorism,” the first draft of the report says “Lone offenders and small cells of individuals motivated by a diverse array of social, ideological, and personal factors will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United States. Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists—who increasingly are networking with likeminded persons abroad—will post the most persistent and lethal threat” throughout 2021. They will use “simple tactics—such as vehicle ramming, small arms, edged weapons, arson, and rudimentary improvised explosive devices” to encourage violence within the United States.” The report warns that they might well target campaign activities and election events.

According to the first draft report, white supremacists are more dangerous than foreign terrorist groups, which are “constrained.” The next two drafts watered down the words “white supremacist extremists,” calling them “domestic violent extremists.” But all three drafts note that white supremacists have killed 39 of the 48 people judged to have died from terrorism in the U.S. between 2018 and 2019.

None of the three reports refers to any threat from “Antifa,” the loose group of anti-fascist activists the Trump administration often describes as the instigators of recent unrest. Instead, two of the drafts say that rightwing extremists are trying to escalate lawful protests into violence.

The documents were leaked to Ben Wittes, the editor in chief of the national security website Lawfare, a leak that suggests someone at DHS is concerned about the administration’s apparent encouragement of rightwing extremists. (The citation for the first draft of the report is in tonight’s notes. It’s worth reading.)

Finally, on Rachel Maddow’s television show tonight, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen confirmed something that many of us have suspected all along. “Trump never thought he was going to win this election, he actually did not want to win this election,” Cohen said. “This was a branding deal. That’s all that the presidential campaign started out as, this was a branding opportunity in order to expand worldwide.”

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I don’t really understand why, considering he did not want the job, appears to hate the job, and tries his best to avoid even the appearance of trying to do the job (eg, spends almost all his time either on the golf course or watching tv), why oh why is he even running for re-election? Is it because of the huge opportunities for graft? Or is it that Putin has him over a barrel and won’t let him quit (because Putin threatened to expose the proof of Trumps many years of money-laundering and working for the Russian mafia)?

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At this point, it’s the only thing keeping him out of jail.

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HCR is gonna have one hell of a letter for today.

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September 9, 2020 (Wednesday)

Back in April, when America had reached the unthinkable level of 50,000 dead from Covid-19, news broke that Trump had been briefed way back in January on how deadly the coronavirus was but had not acted on that information. Trump defended his lack of action by saying he had been misled by the CIA briefer, who had, he tweeted, “only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner….”

Trump lied. He knew.

On January 28, at a top secret intelligence briefing, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien told Trump that the coronavirus would be the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency. It registered. Trump’s head popped up as O’Brien’s deputy, Matt Pottinger, told Trump it could be as bad as the 1918 pandemic, and that it was spread fast by people who showed no symptoms.

On February 7, just two days after his acquittal in the Senate on the charges of impeachment, Trump picked up the phone and called journalist Bob Woodward, who was surprised to hear the president talk not about the acquittal, but about the new virus. Trump told Woodward: “This is deadly stuff.” He explained that the virus is transmitted by air, and that it was five times more dangerous than “even your strenuous flus.”

And yet, on February 2, Trump had said in a Fox News Channel interview before the Super Bowl that “we pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” Trump continued to hold large indoor rallies where he insisted the coronavirus was similar to the flu and that it would soon disappear. Twenty days after his call to Woodward, he was still telling Americans not to worry and he refused to prepare for the coming crisis. Trump told Woodward that he was not telling Americans the truth because he didn’t want “to create a panic.”

By March 19, Trump told Woodward that Covid-19 was killing young people as well as older folks, although throughout the summer he continued to insist that children should go back to school because they were “almost immune” from the virus. On April 3, Trump said at a briefing: “I said it was going away and it is going away.” On April 5, he told Woodward “It’s a horrible thing. It’s unbelievable.” On April 13, as he dismissed the need for masks, the president told Woodward “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”

Over the course of 18 interviews, Trump spoke for nine hours to journalist Bob Woodward. He had apparently been angry at his aides for shielding him from Woodward before the journalist published his book Fury in 2018, thinking he could charm Woodward into presenting him in a better light, as he had shaped coverage of himself in the tabloids in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. Trump also urged senior staff and officials to talk to Woodward, who ended up getting interviews with senior adviser Jared Kushner, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, and former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, among others.

Apparently, White House aides warned Trump against talking to Woodward, but not only did he do so, he permitted Woodward to record the conversations. So when White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany today tried to say that Trump had never tried to downplay the virus, a reporter retorted: “It’s on tape, Kayleigh.”

When this story broke, Trump immediately tried to reassure his base by releasing yet more names of people he would consider for any new Supreme Court seats (the list is now more than 40 people long), and told reporters that perhaps he had misled Americans because he is “a cheerleader for this country.” Trump defenders were left trying to find someone to blame for the recorded interviews. Apparently, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham helped to persuade Trump to talk to the famous journalist and tonight, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson blamed Graham for the debacle, implying he had deliberately undercut the president.

In his final interview with Woodward on July 21, Trump told him, “The virus has nothing to do with me…. It’s not my fault. It’s — China let the damn virus out."

The book has other stunning information as well. Among other things:

Trump’s former top national security officials do not support him. Former Defense Secretary James Mattis told Woodward that Trump is “dangerous” and “unfit” to be commander in chief. Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence, former Indiana Senator Dan Coates, who is a conservative Republican, told Woodward that he suspected Putin had something on Trump. According to Woodward, Coats “continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that Putin had something on Trump.” Woodward wrote: “How else to explain the president’s behavior? Coats could see no other explanation.”

Trump allegedly said “my fing generals are a bunch of p**s” because they prioritized alliances over trade deals.

Trump dropped the information that his administration has developed a “nuclear… weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody—what we have is incredible.” Other sources confirmed to Woodward that the American military has developed a new weapons system. They would not talk about it, and were surprised that Trump had told Woodward about it.

On CNN, Carl Bernstein said that Woodward’s Trump tapes were worse than the Nixon tapes. The last line of Woodward’s book reads: “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

Stunningly, there was a second story today at least as big as the information in the Woodward book. Trump told Woodward that he was not telling Americans the truth because he didn’t want “to create a panic.” But he has, of course, spent the last several months explicitly trying to do just that: create a panic by claiming that dangerous anarchists are attacking our cities. It turns out he and his staff are trying to manipulate our national intelligence assessments to justify his argument.

Representative Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, today released a whistleblower complaint alleging that senior Trump officials politicized, manipulated, and censored intelligence to benefit Trump. Brian Murphy was the Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis in the Department of Homeland Security. He claims that between March 2018 and August 2020, he repeatedly complained that security leaders were undercutting intelligence that showed Russia was working to undermine the United States.

That attempt to hide Russian attacks on America escalated this May. At the time, Chad Wolf was serving as the acting Secretary of Homeland Security, although the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s nonpartisan watchdog, says he was appointed to that office illegally. The complaint says that Wolf “instructed Mr. Murphy to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran. Mr. Wolf stated that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Wolf he would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger.”

The complaint also concerns the DHS Threat Assessment leaked yesterday to Politico. Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli—also appointed illegally, according to the GAO—prohibited the release of the threat assessment because it discussed both the threat of white supremacists and of Russian influence in the United States. This, they said, would reflect badly on the president. “Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups.” Wolf wanted to add information about the ongoing unrest in Portland, Oregon.

Murphy refused to sign off on their alteration of the intelligence report, warning that it was “an abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program. Wolf ordered it revised anyway. Murphy warned that the final version of the threat assessment would “more closely resemble a policy document with references to ANTIFA and ‘anarchist’ groups than an intelligence document.” This is the document leaked in draft form to Politico yesterday.

That document was representative of a systemic effort to change intelligence reports, swinging them away from information on white supremacists and toward the language of the president. Murphy claims that Wolf and Cuccinelli repeatedly told him “to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and ‘anarchist’ groups.”

Murphy also charges that administration officials, including then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, lied to Congress, when she knowingly provided “inaccurate and highly inflated claims of known or suspected terrorists entering the United States through the southwest border.”

Schiff has asked Murphy to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Monday, September 21, at 10:00 am.

Former Director of National Security Daniel Coats, who continues to insist that Russia is attacking the 2020 election process, also spoke up today to demand that the intelligence community resume its in-person briefings to Congress about election security. “[Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin ought to be very happy with the way this is turning out,” Coats said. “He can only view his efforts as successful.”

There is a third major story today. Wildfires driven by winds are burning across California, Oregon, and Washington. California alone has lost more than 2.5 million acres this year, and Washington has lost almost a half a million this week alone. Oregon has lost 300,000. At least 7 people have died. The region is blanketed with smoke and an eerie orange haze, and in places, ash falls like rain.

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I’ve been looking forward to this Letter and it does not disappoint. It’s one of HCR’s best, I think. She does a really excellent job of contextualizing Trump’s admissions to Woodward with his public statements from the White House and the policy positions of his administration.

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Surely her head exploded. Like a fembot from Austin Powers.

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September 10, 2020 (Thursday)

While there was continuing fallout today from the story that Trump lied to the American people about the seriousness of the coronavirus, the breaking stories were mostly about securing the election. Overwhelmingly, the stories today were about controlling the flow of information to voters.

We learned that a top aide at the Department of Health and Human Services has been trying to dictate what Dr. Anthony Fauci can say to the media. A senior advisor has warned Fauci to stick close to Trump’s official positions regardless of their distance from scientific facts. The aide objected to Fauci’s endorsement of masks for children in schools, for example, saying—incorrectly—“There is no data, none, zero, across the entire world, that shows children especially young children, spread this virus to other children, or to adults or to their teachers. None. And if it did occur, the risk is essentially zero.” Without evidence, he said that children transmitted the flu, but not coronavirus.

A stunning op-ed Tuesday in the Washington Post by election lawyer Benjamin L. Ginsberg took the president and the Republicans to task for their misrepresentations about the voter fraud. Ginsberg suggested that Republican rhetoric is not “sincere concern,” but rather “transactional hypocrisy designed to provide an electoral advantage.” Trump’s claims that the election is going to be “rigged,” and charges of “voter fraud,” he says, have “put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out.”

Ginsberg speaks with authority. He spent 38 years as part of the legal operations that gave Republicans structural advantages in the electoral system. He was part of the redistricting in the 1990s that tipped Congress and state legislatures to the Republicans, and he “played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount and several dozen Senate House and state contests.” He was the lawyer for four of the past six Republican presidential nominees.

Ginsberg says: “The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged. Absentee ballots use the same process as mail-in ballots — different states use different labels for the same process.”

This morning, we learned that the U.S. Treasury has added Ukrainian Andrii Derkach as well as several Russians to its Specially Designated Nationals list for interfering in the U.S. election, blocking his assets and imposing sanctions on him. The government has labeled Derkach an “active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services.” The Treasury Department charged that Derkach is working for Moscow to undermine the 2020 campaign.

Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has collaborated with Derkach to spread anti-Biden propaganda, which has been picked up by Republican lawmakers and rightwing news media. Derkach or his associates have also peddled anti-Biden material to Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson and Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA). When CNN asked Giuliani about Derkach’s new status, he texted “Who cares.” He claimed he had not used Derkach’s information in his attempt to smear Biden during and after the impeachment trial.

The Treasury Department also announced sanctions against three Russian nationals who work for the Russian troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency (the IRA). These trolls flood discussion boards with disinformation and inflammatory language, altering Americans’ perspectives on issues… and about each other.

Today, Microsoft warned that the Russian military intelligence unit that hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 recently tried to hack into campaign members, consultants, and think tanks associated with both the Democrats and the Republicans. Microsoft said the hacks were not successful. They warn that China is also getting in on the cyberattack game, although China appears to be targeting the Biden campaign alone.

And, finally, today, Twitter announced it is expanding its crackdown on election disinformation, saying it will add fact-check labels to tweets about the election, and hide altogether tweets that contain “false or misleading information that causes confusion” about the election. It will also hide posts with “unverified information about election rigging.”

This, of course, puts Twitter on a collision course with Trump.

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