I hadn’t thought about that plane crash that way. Fucking hell.
4 Likes
Yeah, it makes sense though, if they indeed did shoot it down accidentally. Yet, it will merely reinforce the narrative of Iranian bellicosity.
3 Likes
A wacky, crazy, nutballs conspiracy theory that has been running through my head, and I’ve only discussed with my family because it is so out there, but explains so many anomalies of the past week:
- The Trump administration and a faction within the Iranian government coordinated both the assassination of Soleimani and the missile attack response; then another faction within Iran shot down the Ukranian Airlines jet.
The idea struck me after listening to an interview on NPR of an Iraqi citizen in Baghdad after the rocket strikes there. He stated, matter-of-factly, that the whole thing was coordinated: the drone strike, the missile response, etc. He said it was clear that everyone involved knew what was happening and going to happen, and the whole thing was choreographed.
It would explain a lot, but the biggest thing is, how did the US military know when and where the missiles were going to strike before they even launched? Because the Iranians told them.
Who had the most to gain from the events of the last week? The Trump administration gained a distraction from impeachment, which was rapidly gaining momentum due to the released emails about Trump’s direct involvement in withholding aid to Ukraine, and his advisers warnings of its illegality. It also allowed them to “look tough” to their political base, while giving them an opportunity to paint the Dems as “soft on terrorists.” Meanwhile, in Iran, religious hardliners no longer have to deal with a relatively secular, very popular, and powerful rival. There were anti-government protesters in the streets of Tehran; now those protesters are unified with the government and pointed at the US. Without knowing the details of the Ukranian Airlines passengers or how the factions align within Iran, it’s hard to say how that fits in; but it feels like a counter-strike by Soleimani’s adherents. They certainly have the capability and no compunctions about collateral damage.
Why did the US strike against Soleimani now, when he wasn’t even on Trump’s radar and after decades of passing on targeting him? Why did Iran make their counter-strike so toothless by communicating the targets? Why did both countries stand down so quickly, despite hard rhetoric? Many people have been pointing out the idiosyncrasies of these events, but little explains them.
The line in HCR’s analysis above, about Roger Stone calling US politics “a war” prompted me to post this. I think it’s unlikely, but it becomes possible when you have a political party in the US that sees their fellow citizens as a more dire enemy than enemies of the state.
2 Likes
Possible, I suppose, like other explanations, so chaotic is all of this.
But, I think your scenario calls for more coordination and all around togetherness than makes sense on the Trumpian side. There’s been too much erratic behavior for me to believe things could suddenly be that planned out and well coordinated.
What makes more sense to me is that Trump chose to kill the general on pretty much a whim, as a really huuuge distraction from his impeachment, and Iran (which does seem well coordinated) chose a response that allowed them both them and Trump to save face. They’d want to do the latter, so he would feel he can both claim victory and de-escalate.
But then, the downed jet seems now like a mistake during the Iranian counterattack. But maybe not. If it was, why so much care and precision with the Green Zone attack, and so little with the incoming airliner?
So yeah, who knows? Anyway, I’m still on edge, because it seems like another nasty event from either side could result in massive escalation right quick.
5 Likes
For the most part, I agree. I think it falls into the trap of assuming too much competence on the part of the administration. The only way I see it working is through Pompeo and a very small cadre of “true believers” in US intelligence and State. All it would take is one asset in Iran and some placement within the Pentagon. The asset in Iran to either receive or send overtures about the deal and coordinate timing; one asset in the Pentagon to suggest slipping the Soleimani option into the options list. Pompeo to manage Trump. Heck, it wouldn’t even need Trump’s explicit buy-in to the plan; he could be easily led by the nose through the key aspects by Pompeo.
3 Likes
January 10, 2020 (Friday)
Let’s cut to the chase: all current evidence suggests that Trump ordered the killing of General Qassem Soleimani either to please his base or to curry favor with key senators before the Senate impeachment trial. It blew up in his face, and now he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are trying desperately to justify the action after the fact.
At stake is the issue that Trump acted without advising Congress. The Constitution provides that Congress alone shall declare war, but it also makes the president the commander-in-chief. During the Nixon administration, when congress members sometimes discovered that America was militarily engaged in entirely unexpected places, Congress pushed back to reassert its role in military actions.
The War Powers Act of 1973 declared that “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and after every such introduction shall consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities or have been removed from such situations.”
In the absence of a declaration of war, the president may involve U.S. armed forces “into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,” but then must notify Congress with “a report, in writing,” setting forth, among other things, “the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place.” Then Congress has 60 days either to declare war or to extend a specific authorization of military force.
Ah, and here’s a piece I missed yesterday: If US Armed Forces are engaged without a declaration of war or a specific authorization, “such forces shall be removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.” So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have been right yesterday about the significance of the House passing a War Powers Resolution. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who took Russian money from indicted political operative Lev Parnas), was wrong to say the concurrent resolution is meaningless. Further, the Senate must take it up, by law, so Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) cannot kill it instantly.
Most of the pressure to prove that an attack was “imminent” has fallen on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical Christian hardliner against Iran, who pushed hard for the decision to make the strike. But Pompeo has not provided any evidence that anything was going to happen so quickly that Trump had to act without consulting Congress.
Yesterday, during a press conference, Trump tried to justify the killing by saying that Soleimani was planning “to blow up our embassy.” But that was not mentioned in the congressional briefing by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and CIA Director Gina Haspel. Democrats immediately asked to be briefed “on the new intelligence surrounding the imminent attacks on U.S. embassies that the President referred to today, but somehow didn’t come up in the full Senate briefing on Wednesday,” as Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy put it. Trump then upped the ante, telling Fox News personality Laura Ingraham that Soleimani was targeting not one embassy, but four.
A senior administration official and a senior defense official told reporters there were only vague threats against the embassy in Baghdad, and those did not to be a fully formed plot. Neither it nor any other embassies were reinforced. One official added: Trump is “totally obsessed with not letting something like Benghazi happen to him.”
An article in the Wall Street Journal today said that the Soleimani strike was all about impeachment. “Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said.”
Political reporter Jonathan Chait notes that the sourcing for this article is vague, and points out something obvious but important: Trump could not possibly have “bought” 20 wavering Senators (if that many are wavering) with a strike on Iran. But his ego cannot bear to lose any Republican senators because he needs to see impeachment as an illegitimate “witch hunt,” as he calls it, by Democrats. So it is entirely possible he is handing out favors, with the expectation that those favors will buy political support. It’s always the same transactional politics.
It seems worth noting that former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has offered to testify before the Senate about the Ukraine scandal despite Trump’s demand that he remain silent, has been the nation’s premier advocate for an attack on Iran.
Three former national security professionals wrote an article in Washington Post today, saying the fact Trump received the plan for killing Soleimani as an option shows the system is broken. Rather than listening to long, careful, professional assessments of what would happen if Soleimani died at U.S. hands, Trump listened instead to a small group at Mar-a-Lago, guided primarily by Pompeo. “Any standard Defense Department and interagency process of vetting options would have seen the threats, counterthreats and missile launches coming and recommended against it — which we know because two very different administrations [the George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama administrations] rejected targeting the general. But many press accounts say no such process was followed under Trump.”
Trump supporters, including today Lara Trump, who is married to one of the sons, continue to insist that Democrats only oppose the killing of Soleimani because they “support terrorists.” Trump called Democrats “vicious, horrible people,” and demands absolutely loyalty from the GOP: Republican Matt Gaetz, a staunch Trump supporter who voted in favor of the War Powers Resolution yesterday because he says Congress should have a role in declaring war, as the Constitution requires, has found himself entirely shut out of Trump’s circle. One White House official said they would not answer Gaetz’s calls, texts, “smoke signals or his kneelings in the snow.”
The Lincoln Project, a superPAC announced on December 17 by never-Trump Republicans led by lawyer George Conway and former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, today released its first advertisement opposing Trump in the 2020 election. It picks up on how frightening it is to have such an unmoored president who demands utter allegiance. Slightly over a minute long, the ad is confusing, angry, loud, and disturbing as it lays out how evangelical leaders are all-in for Trump. It highlights the moments in which Trump undermined Christianity—suggesting he was the “chosen one,” for example— and hints that the leaders are in it for the cash, but the power of the film is in its style, which deliberately creates the same anxiety in the viewer as Trump’s behavior has done to the nation. It’s quite a smart document, actually. The Lincoln Project has money behind it, and that money has enabled them to buy very good marketers.
Meanwhile, Pelosi has said she will ask the chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to bring to the floor next week a resolution to appoint managers and transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Media is reporting this as “she will send the articles of impeachment to the Senate next week,” but I do not detect any great rush in her statement. It seems likely to me she wants the Senate trial to be happening when Trump gives his February 4 State of the Union address.
In other news, Trump also told Ingraham that we need to have a good relationship with Russia. Today a Russian ship challenged the USS Farragut, a US destroyer on a routine patrol in the North Arabian Sea, first approaching and then delaying a correction after the commander of the Farragut asked them to change course, bringing the two ships close enough for a collision. The footage, linked in the notes, is quite something.
That’s it for tonight, folks. Many thanks for all the good wishes-- it’s just a run-of-the-mill bug; I’ll live. Still dragging, so today’s letter, too, is unrevised.
H.
6 Likes
I guess they showed Lee the contents of the Ark of the Covenant.
If he lied about this, maybe they should add to the Articles of Impeachment?
3 Likes
Maybe they’re not adding because once they start, they’d never know when to stop.
5 Likes
Lindsay Graham did this as well. One wonders if they really do have some sort of magic trove.
3 Likes
3 Likes
January 11, 2020 (Saturday)
First off, today, a correction to last night’s letter. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s premier constitutional scholars and the one I trust to get it right, pointed out this morning that I didn’t get it right last night on the meaning of the concurrent resolution. I was reading the 1973 War Powers Act as I wrote, and quoted it as saying that a concurrent resolution required the president to remove troops.
Tribe wrote to call our attention to the importance of INS v. Chadha, a 1983 legal challenge to the ability of Congress to override the President. “After INS v. Chadha,” Tribe wrote, “no mere concurrent resolution can have binding legal force. Chadha is understood to require giving POTUS an opportunity to veto such a resolution.” He explained what this meant: “When Speaker Pelosi said that what the House did had legal effect, she meant only that it established the historical fact that Trump was acting without the congressional authorization that some believe is constitutionally essential — not that the House vote of disapproval, if accompanied by a Senate vote of disapproval, would have binding legal effect notwithstanding Trump’s veto.“
So I had it right on January 9, and my own correction on January 10 was wrong. Sorry about that, and huge thanks to Professor Tribe, and to all of you who keep me on the straight and narrow.
The biggest story today is a hold-over from yesterday. It appears that at the same time U.S. forces attacked and killed Soleimani, they also tried to kill a senior Iranian military official in Yemen, Abdul Reza Shahlai. Shahlai organized financing for militias in Yemen. The strike failed.
Why does a failed strike on Shahlai and the killing of Soleimani matter to our system of government? Bad guys, right? No American disputes that. And most Americans can’t even find Yemen on a map, so who cares?
Aside from the question of overseas intervention, which is long and complicated and beyond my reach here tonight, as I’m still dragging, what is at stake in these strikes, and in the Ukraine Scandal, and in so much of what Trump has done since taking office, is the rule of law.
Trump launched the Soleimani strike without informing Congress, which he was required to do under the 1973 War Power Act unless there was an “imminent” attack that meant he had to act more quickly than he could have if he were to inform the “Gang of Eight,” the top leaders of both parties in both the House and Senate, and on the intelligence committees of both houses.
But neither Trump nor Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been able to provide information that suggest there was such an imminent attack. Pompeo told Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham that Soleimani was planning an attack, but then said: “We don’t know precisely when and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.” Trump told Ingraham that Soleimani was about to attack four embassies, but his own people contradict that. The lack of information coming out of this administration except on the propagandistic Fox News Channel led 13 former press secretaries, foreign service and military officials yesterday to call for the White House to resume regular press briefings. “In any great democracy, an informed public strengthens the nation. The public has a right to know what its government is doing, and the government has a duty to explain what it is doing.”
If the attack on Soleimani was made in tandem with an attack on another Iranian official, but this time a man in Yemen, it weakens further the idea that there was an imminent threat to America.
And if there was not an imminent threat, Trump, by law, had to confer with Congress.
The same issue is at stake in the Ukraine Scandal, and in the impeachment trial. Does Trump have to obey our laws, or is he out of their reach so long as he is in office?
In the Ukraine scandal, Trump withheld congressionally-appropriated money from Ukraine that it desperately needed in its fight against Russian incursions. Trump’s people knew the hold was illegal, and tried to hide it. Before Trump would release the money, he wanted Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Bidens, with the hope of weakening Joe Biden, a Democratic frontrunner, before the 2020 election. This violated election laws, among other things.
To keep witnesses from testifying about the Ukraine scandal, Trump has asserted what his lawyers call “constitutional immunity,” saying that high-level officials have protection from testifying before Congress. He has stonewalled the production of documents, and his lawyers have tried to argue in other cases that not only can the president not be indicted while in office—as a Department of Justice memo asserts—but that he cannot even be investigated. Thus subpoenas for his financial records in criminal investigations are off-limits, he says. So far, judges aren’t buying this, noting, as Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson did, that “no one is above the law.”
The common thread in these three issues is that Trump claims the ability to break the law with impunity because he is president. And with that law-breaking comes what looks like a general unwillingness to abide by the terms of our democracy. He is leveraging the power of the presidency to try to skew the 2020 election. He tried to smear Joe Biden (remember, had it not been for the whistleblower, the entire Ukraine scandal would not have come to light, and Zelensky had already scheduled an interview on CNN in which Trump’s people expected him to announce an investigation into the Bidens. Can you imagine where we would be now if that had happened?). Trump believed that a strike on Soleimani would be popular, both with his base, and with congresspeople who are about to vote on his impeachment.
Make no mistake: a president who is above the law is a dictator. The reason people keep harping on the legality of the Soleimani killing is not because they like terrorists but because if we do not defend the rule of law, we will have permitted both its destruction, and the destruction of the democracy on which it depends.
7 Likes
January 12, 2020 (Sunday)
The upcoming week should bring the renewal of the fight over the Senate impeachment trial. There are a few key things to keep in mind.
First of all, all the different players have different interests, and there is also a wildcard. While those of us on the outside are freaking out about a president who seems completely out of control, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who are masters at parliamentary procedure, are likely much more tightly focused, eyeing the 2020 elections and control of the Senate.
The Senate is currently controlled by Republicans, but this is a bad cycle for them: they have 23 vulnerable seats while the Democrats have only 12. (Historical tidbit here: Senate terms are each six years but are staggered—one third of the Senate turns over every two years—and the original terms were determined by drawing straws. Because… the Founders were just regular people, and how else would they do it? And yes, some senators were accused of cheating to get the long straws.)
A standoff between a House and Senate controlled by different parties is not at all unique. But what’s unusual now about the struggle between the parties for control of the nation is that today’s Republican president is a wild card who cannot be trusted to help his own party. Indeed, the chances are good he will hurt it. That puts McConnell in a tight—and to this political historian, fascinating—spot.
Trump’s erratic behavior means that McConnell does not want Senators to be on record either for or against him if he can help it. If senators vote to convict him of the impeachment charges he certainly has committed, they will have to answer to angry base voters, who will turn to farther right Trump loyalists who will lose in a general election to virtually anyone who can fog a mirror. But if they vote to acquit Trump, they will be at the mercy of the news cycle, and it seems pretty clear that the next few months are going to bring bombshells.
Here’s what’s happening on that front. In the short term, Rudy Giuliani’s associate Lev Parnas, who spread around Russian money to GOP leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, has offered the contents of his cell phone to the House Intelligence Committee. We do not yet know what is on that cell phone, but if he is offering it up in hopes of cutting a cooperation deal, it should be something significant. There are rumors out there—still rumors—that what is on his phone is a game changer and that it involves Trump. We’ll see.
On February 4, Trump will address the House of Representatives for the annual State of the Union address. Although my own sense is that he will give a carefully scripted, monotone address, there is widespread speculation that he will not be able to contain himself, and will melt down on national television. In any case, it’s fair to say no one can predict what he will do. So no one would want to bank on him being a model of propriety for that.
Farther out is that the Supreme Court in March will review whether or not the president actually enjoys immunity from any sort of subpoenas at all. On the table are subpoenas for Trump’s financial affairs—investigators are looking at money laundering—and subpoenas for testimony by key witnesses. Precedent says the Supreme Court should decide against Trump, but we do not know what this court will do. Still, the pressure of that should worry Trump… and McConnell. It is my educated guess that the release of Trump’s financial records to investigators (it is not yet clear they will be made public) will be so devastating that he might well resign. If Senators have signed on to acquit Trump, and he becomes as overbearingly triumphant as he will upon acquittal, only to have it come out that he has committed obvious financial crimes, Republicans can expect to lose the Senate.
And that takes us only to March. There are eight more months between March and the election.
So, if you are McConnell, you want to steer as clear of Trump himself as you possibly can in order to keep control of the Senate. But McConnell himself has baggage that makes it hard for him to make a clean break from the president. With his shattering of norms to refuse to let President Barack H. Obama appoint a centrist Supreme Court Justice, McConnell showed us that nothing mattered to him but power. He is far too smart a man to support Trump on principle, and I suspect he got on board the Trump train simply to win. But that willingness to do anything to keep his party on top made him vulnerable.
My friend and colleague Michael Green, an expert on the machinations of Senate leadership, pointed out to me something really interesting. Back in September 2016, the Intelligence Community had identified Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the Obama administration wanted to make a joint statement with Republicans that it was happening, and voters should beware. But McConnell refused, making it “clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics,” according to a Washington Post report.
Mike points out that any normal partisan, operating on the normal level of cut-throat politics (politics is a blood sport, after all) would have signed on to the joint declaration, and then immediately gone in front of the cameras to say: “Barack Obama is so weak that the Russians are hacking our elections. Elect Republicans to take America back!” But McConnell did not. He refused to sign onto a joint declaration, and then kept quiet. His behavior suggests he was aware of the 2016 Russian assault on the election in favor of Republicans, and was okay with it. As heinous as that is, it now means he must stay with Trump or be exposed as part of the 2016 plot.
Meanwhile, Pelosi needs simply to keep the story in the news, with the expectation that Trump will continue to get worse, as all indications say he will. In the Washington Post, lawyers George Conway and Neal Katyal, smart men both, from different sides of the aisle, suggested that Pelosi should hand over just one article of impeachment to start: the one about obstruction of Congress. The evidence for that is all public, so it does not need witnesses, and it would mean that the second article would continue to hang over Trump’s head. Who knows if this is the angle she will choose, but she certainly continues to have options.
So, as the week starts, and pundits are tying themselves in knots about Pelosi and McConnell, I will be watching for news about Lev Parnas’s cell phone.
6 Likes
January 13, 2020 (Monday)
Very much in the weeds today, but they are interesting weeds for those of you who don’t mind a deep dive.
The administration’s rationale for the attack on Qassim Soleimani has now devolved into Trump today tweeting that although the attack was definitely “eminent,”—he withdrew the tweet and corrected the spelling—“it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past.” But it does really matter… because of our laws. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, the president must confer with Congress before launching an attack except in cases of an imminent threat.
Trump retweeted an image of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in a turban and a headscarf in front of an Iranian flag with the caption “Democrats 2020,” and the message “The corrupted Dem[ocrat]s trying their best to come to the Ayatollah’s rescue.” Trump then went on to accuse the media and Democrats of “trying to make terrorist Soleimani into a wonderful guy, only because I did what should have been done for 20 years.”
In response to the backlash over the images, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham went onto the Fox News Channel to defend the president, saying “I think the president is making clear that Democrats are parroting Iranian talking points and almost taking the side of terrorists and those who were out to kill Americans.”
I have written before about that fact that what is at stake over the question of whether or not an attack from General Soleimani was “imminent” is America’s rule of law, but I want to add here for people who are just now starting to pay attention to American politics: IT IS NOT NORMAL FOR THE PRESIDENT TO ACCUSE THE LEADERS OF THE OTHER PARTY OF BEING TERRORISTS.
The only other time we have seen this in America was from southern elite slaveholders in 1860, when they accused Lincoln and the Republican Party of backing a race war. They stifled all opposition and fell back on fear-mongering because they knew they were going to lose at the ballot box in a free and fair election.
Today’s GOP has gone a long way on voter suppression and disinformation, and Trump and some of his people are still trying to make that work. Trump’s unhinged tweets today are an example of such disinformation, and there was also follow-up news on voter suppression from the story I wrote about on December 16, the story of the purge of more than 200,000 voters in Wisconsin, a key state that Trump won in 2016 by less than 23,000 votes.
In December, Judge Paul Malloy ordered a purge of more than 234,000 voters from the rolls in Wisconsin. When the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is evenly split between the parties, asked Malloy to put the decision on hold until after the 2020 election, he declined. So, as expected, the commission appealed to the state court of appeals, and said it would wait 12 to 24 months before purging the voters who had failed to answer a state letter asking if they still lived at the address the state had on file for them. That made a conservative law firm ask the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which favors Republicans 5-2, to take up the case, and to file a motion with Malloy’s court to hold the Wisconsin Elections Commission in contempt of court, asking it to fine five of the six members of the commission up to $6000 a day until they purged the rolls, explicitly stating that they want it done before the next elections.
Today, Malloy found the commission in contempt, and said that if it does not immediately begin the voter purge, three of its six members will be fined $250 day. Those three are the Democrats on the commission.
But some Republican leaders seem to be facing the reality that doubling down on Trump, regardless of what he might have done, is politically dangerous. CBS News today reported that the White House is expecting that there will be Republican defections from the party line on refusing to call witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial. It is not clear to me that this article is anything other than a safeguard in case there are those defections, but it does indicate that not all GOP leaders are comfortable refusing to call witnesses in the Senate trial, especially in the face of polling that shows a strong majority of Americans, including almost 2 out of 3 Republicans, think the president’s top aides should testify.
And, as I wrote last night, there will be more news dropping the might well implicate Trump more deeply in the Ukraine scandal. There was big news today about political operative Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump friend (and sometime lawyer) Rudy Giuliani who has been charged with illegal campaign finance schemes as he spread Russian money around to various GOP candidates, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Since his arrest in October, Parnas has tried to buy good will by offering up his cellphones to the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Adam Schiff (D-CA), who was the one who broke on the Ukraine Scandal in the first place on September 13. (Sheesh. Just four months ago today. We’ve lived a lifetime in the past four months.)
Today, Parnas’s lawyers turned over the contents of his cellphones to the House Intelligence Committee, and it seems possible, at the very least, that those will shed more light on the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. But—and here’s the interesting part—remember that Parnas, his partner Igor Fruman, and Giuliani wanted Yovanovitch out of her position so they could maneuver a corrupt pro-Russian figure into the leadership of Ukraine’s state gas company, Naftogaz.
Parnas and Fruman, we now know, paid Giuliani $500,000. After Parnas and Fruman were arrested and the payment became known, Giuliani said he was confident the money came from “a domestic source,” and said in an interview, “I know beyond any doubt the source of the money is not any questionable source…. The money did not come from foreigners. I can rule that out 100%.” But that was not true. We now know that the money came from Dimitry Firtash, a Ukranian oligarch currently under federal indictment and fighting extradition from his location in Vienna, Austria.
So I wonder what might be on those cell phones about Russian money, and Naftogaz, and Giuliani… and maybe his chief client. And that is not the only place we might learn more about that arrangement: today, after a lawsuit by an ethics watchdog group, the Energy Department agreed to begin releasing Ukraine-related records, including then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s communications with high-level Ukranian officials. Perry was named one of the “Three Amigos” in charge of Ukraine affairs by acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
So more avenues for presidential exposure keep opening. It is no wonder that the White House is trying to get the Senate to keep open the option of dismissing the impeachment charges right off the bat in a Senate trial, what Trump called in a tweet this weekend “outright dismissal.” He tried to argue that even permitting a trial added credence to the Democrats’ “witch hunt,” but Senate Republicans are showing little interest in killing the trial so abruptly, aware that voters will see that as a cover-up.
And, finally, the economic historian in me cannot let it pass without noting that the Treasury Department announced today that the federal deficit-- not the debt, mind you, but the deficit, the gap between yearly spending and income—surpassed $1 trillion in 2019. That is, in 2019, the government spent a trillion more than it brought in. I hope to get enough space from breaking news to write more about the economy at some point, but this gap is part of what is fueling Trump’s economic boom, and it is of concern.
6 Likes
Yeah, that last paragraph…
I watched The Laundromat last night. Bad shit is surely coming on the Financial Shenanigans front too.
I try to be optimistic, but even if we do manage to get Trump out of the White House, all sorts of other kinds of instability seem pretty, um, “imminent.”
6 Likes
January 14, 2020 (Tuesday)
One of the reasons I refuse to make predictions about the future of the Trump administration, or even of the impeachment process, is that things are changing every. single. minute.
Tonight, just on the cusp of the House articles of impeachment going over to the Senate, the House Intelligence Committee, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Committee on Foreign Affairs transmitted to the House Judiciary Committee some of the material it has garnered from indicted political operative Lev Parnas’s phones. While there were two files—one is secret because it involves sensitive personal information—the other has provided material that is a game changer in three ways.
First of all, much of it is damning in its own right. Second, it will force Trump either to admit he was part of the Ukraine scheme all along or to call his friend (and sometime lawyer) Rudy Giuliani a liar. Third, it will add fuel to the fire that is making Trump so terribly angry and erratic these days, which will likely mean his behavior will only get worse. But with this new material in front of them, along with more that we have not seen, it is unlikely Republican leaders will be willing to continue to defend him except in the most general of ways.
The documents begin with a series of notes apparently written by Parnas on the stationery of the Ritz-Carleton in Vienna. They literally start with him writing: “get Zalensky to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated.” They note that Dimitry Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch we now know was funding the whole Ukrainian escapade, and who is living in Vienna, was “Toxic,” and noted “Rudy.” Indeed, skeptic that I am, these notes seem almost too perfect, and I would worry they were constructed after the fact for his defense except that these devices were confiscated upon Parnas’s arrest.
There is also a May 10, 2019 letter from Rudy Giuliani, representing himself as Trump’s personal lawyer, to the newly elected Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, asking Zelensky for a meeting. “In my capacity as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent,” he asked for a meeting to discuss a particular matter. This runs counter to Trump’s frequent insistence that whatever he did in Ukraine was for the American people: here Giuliani lays out that whatever is happening is for Trump himself. Also, remember that on November 26, Trump denied that he had directed Giuliani to ask Zelensky about the Bidens. But now it seems there is evidence Giuliani was acting with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.” Trump will have to distance himself from this… but can he? It seems likely Giuliani has dirt on Trump from the days when Giuliani was the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983-1989, the heyday of Trump’s rise in New York real estate, as Giuliani has previously hinted.
There are also texts from Giuliani to Parnas, saying that he can overrule the decision of the Ukraine embassy, then under the direction of Marie Yovanovitch, not to give Viktor Shokin, the corrupt former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, a visa. He texted: “It’s going to work I have no 1 in it”
There is sharing of stories from Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Don Bongino about attacks on US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich.
And, following these texts, in an exchange that has had Twitter on fire since the documents dropped, Connecticut congressional hopeful Robert F. Hyde and an unknown (to us) correspondent, although it seems likely to be Lev Parnas, appear to show that Hyde had Ambassador Yovanovitch under surveillance, and that he explored having her attacked or assassinated. It is worth, in this context, remembering that Trump told Zelensky that Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things,” suggesting that he knew about this plot.
“Fuck that bitch,” Hyde wrote on March 22, 2019. (Yovanovitch was highly regarded, and one of our very top diplomats.)
The next day he texted: “Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch. I’ll get right in that”
Then: “She under heavy protection outside Kiev”
Unidentified [probably Lev Parnas]: “I know crazy shit”
Hyde: “My guy thinks maybe FSB…?” [FSB is Russian security]
More exchanges of news stories about removing Yovanovitch.
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “What should I do with this?
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “They are moving her tomorrow
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “The guys over they asked me what I would like to do and what is in it for them”
Hyde: March 25, 2019: “Wake up Yankees man”
Hyde: March 25, 2019: “She’s talked to three people. Her phone is off. Computer is off.”
Hyde: March 25, 2019: “She’s next to the embassy”
Hyde: March 25, 2019: “Not in the embassy”
Hyde: March 25, 2019: “Private security. Been there since Thursday”
Likely Parnas: March 25, 2019 “Interesting”
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “They know she’s a political puppet”
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “They will let me know when she’s on the move”
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “And they’ll let me know when she’s on the move”
Unidentified [probably Lev Parnas]: March 25, 2019: “Perfect”
Hyde: March 25, 2019, “I mean where if they can find out.”
Hyde: March 25, 2019: “That address I sent you checks out”
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “It’s next to the embassy”
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price”
Hyde, March 25, 2019: “Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money… what I was told”
Unidentified [probably Lev Parnas]: “Lol”
Hyde: March 26, 2019: “Update she will not be moved special security unit upgraded force on the compound people are already aware of the situation my contacts are asking what is the next step because they cannot keep going to check people will start to ask questions”
Hyde: March 26, 2019: “If you want her out they need to make contact with security forces”
Hyde: March 26, 2019: “From Ukrainians”
Hyde: March 27, 2019: “What’s the word bro”
Hyde: March 27, 2019: “Any good stuff?
Unidentified [probably Lev Parnas]: March 27, 2019: “Call you soon in studio.”
… those texts go on, but that’s the gist.
You will remember that Yovanovitch was recalled from Ukraine abruptly out of concerns for her safety. Hyde, who is running for Congress from Connecticut, tweeted a picture of Yovanovitch while she was testifying before the House. It falsely accused her of a number of crimes and said: “Maria is a yuge pos. She has so much dirt on the Clinton’s and Bidens. Such a scumbag. #draintheswamp #mariaisatraitor #trump2020 #hyde2020.” When reached for comment after this story broke, Hyde wrote: “Bull Schiff is a giant b*tch.”
A couple of other points before I fall back into bed to try to break this bug. In the letter transmitting the material, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff wrote “Despite unprecedented obstruction by the President, the Committee continues to receive and review potentially relevant evidence and will make supplemental transmittals… as appropriate.”
Now, if you were someone trying desperately to protect the president, wouldn’t this give you pause? You have no idea what’s out there. Surely, the news that there are text messages contemplating an attack on an American ambassador will make you wonder what else these bozos felt it was okay to put in writing. Do you really want to be on record for these people?
When this story broke, a friend texted me to ask if Trump was really the Godfather. I answered no. The leaders of the Italian mafia at the turn of the last century had to be incredibly smart because the system was stacked against them. They had to be able to evade laws, and police forces, and community standards, or be arrested. Today’s criminals have the benefit of a generation of laws rigged in their favor, so they did not have to be clever. All they had to be was corrupt.
And, hoo, boy… were they corrupt.
(Another unedited night. I cannot seem to break this bug. Thanks for your patience.)
6 Likes
I’m just wishing that the US economy will fall over into recession before the 2020 election, to properly ruin Trump’s re-election chances and GOP’s hopes.
1 Like
In the real world, it already is. Just because the stock market is gaining 2% per year doesn’t mean that the economy is strong. What I’m seeing: companies aren’t hiring much, they aren’t buying much, and everyone is in a cautious, tentative posture. So while it might not be a huge recession, at the very least it’s a slowdown.
6 Likes
January 15, 2020 (Wednesday)
Tonight at 5:00, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi signed the articles of impeachment and the seven House impeachment managers Pelosi has selected formally walked over to the Senate to notify it that the articles were ready to be transmitted whenever the Senate was ready for them. (As I wrote before, the Republicans wrote a curiously specific and heavy-handed handbook for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and this little back and forth is part of that drama).
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed, and the handover will take place at noon tomorrow. Then, at 2:00, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts will be sworn in to preside over the trial, and then he will swear in the 100 Senators. Their oath—again, prescribed in 1989—has caused trouble. It reads: “I solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of _____ _____, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: So help me God.” That McConnell and most Republican Senators have already declared Trump not guilty suggests that they are not going to be as impartial as the oath they are about to take requires.
Interestingly, for all McConnell’s insistence that there is no precedent for calling witnesses (which is dead wrong: every impeachment case has had witnesses), there is a form in the Republicans’ own handbook for how to issue subpoenas. It includes the words “you are hereby commanded to appear before the Senate of the United States,” and “Fail not.” (OK, I read this stuff for a living, and this twentieth-century imitation of historical formal language is so ahistorical it’s just hokey. “Fail not?!?”)
The seven House impeachment managers reflect prosecutorial depth and a desire to balance the group by race and gender. House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) will lead the managers—no surprise, since he is deeply qualified, a strong and moderate voice, and drives Trump crazy. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary virtually had to be on there—his position places him at the top of lawmakers among those who understand the workings of the Constitution—but he’s not a scrapper and will likely stand behind Schiff.
Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) has more experience with impeachment than any other manager: she was a staffer for the Judiciary during Nixon’s impeachment, was on the Judiciary Committee for the Clinton impeachment, and now has been named a House manager for the Trump impeachment. Lofgren sits on the Judiciary Committee.
Also on the Judiciary Committee is Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). He is a key Pelosi ally.
Another Judiciary Committee member is Sylvia Garcia (D-TX). She’s in her first term, and it seems likely that Pelosi tapped her to give Texas Democrats some key media time.
A surprise, but a smart surprise, is Jason Crow (D-CO). He, too, is in his first term, but is a powerful voice for the Democrats because he is a former Army captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and who jumped early on the idea of an impeachment inquiry after the Ukraine scandal broke.
For my part, I’ll be watching Val Demings (D-FL), the former chief of police in Orlando. She sits on both the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, meaning she knows a lot. And she tends to be clear and to the point when she speaks.
So the managers have geographic, racial, and gender diversity, which will make a dramatic contrast to the Senate and to the president’s people, almost all of whom will be white men.
While all this happened as expected, there were, in fact, important fireworks today. Both had to do with transparency.
The Senate leadership has severely limited reporters’ access to Senators and to electronics during the trial. Reporters are being kept from their usual spots to enable them to ask senators questions, and the Senate has refused to let reporters use a laptop or cellphones in the Senate balcony during the trial (the House allows such devices; the Senate does not, and it has refused to relax that rule). This will, of course, mean that Senators will not be able to be challenged about their actions, as they were—many to their discomfort—during the nomination hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Democrats oppose these restrictions and so, surprisingly, do some Republicans.
This morning, the State Department abruptly canceled a scheduled (and required) classified briefing on the decision to kill Qassem Soleimani. While that briefing would have been problematic enough, considering the many reasons we’ve heard for the killing, last night’s revelations that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine was under surveillance by people with evidently nefarious purposes demanded the question of what Secretary of State Pompeo had done to protect her. You will remember that he refused to defend her, and that he, too, has been implicated in the Ukraine scheme.
There has also been more news from Lev Parnas, the indicted political operative who gave Russian money to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Last night, in the flurry of activity over the astounding exchanges about the surveillance of Yovanovitch, there were more voicemails and documents released that suggest high-level interest in Yovanovitch’s ouster.
And tonight, Parnas gave an exclusive interview to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. He stated categorically that he was acting with the full knowledge and blessing of Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump. This story was breaking as I finished writing this; I will focus on it tomorrow.
The Parnas news dovetails nicely with details released about a forthcoming book by two Washington Post reporters, Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker, about the president. Titled “A Very Stable Genius,” as Trump calls himself, the book outlines the many ways and times in which Trump explodes, lies, leaks to reporters and then complains about leakers, abuses, and proves himself “dangerously uninformed.”
“Are you an act?” Anthony Scaramucci, the eleven-day communications advisor, asked Trump.
“I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it,” Trump answered.
Perhaps we are starting to.
5 Likes
Ah yes, the impetus for one of Randy Rainbow’s best!
6 Likes
This quote, and the broader context of his public life, makes me wonder if he is the wealthy version of Imposter Syndrome.
That he feels like all the billionaires have their shit together and he is just winging it as best he can.
6 Likes
