Russian To Judgment, Con't

The revelations this week that Donald Trump Jr. met with Russian nationals who promised campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton in June 2016 marks "the end of the beginning" of the legal case against the Trump regime, and as Donald Trump Sr. hides out in Paris this week, NY Times reporter Peter Baker asks the now central question: What did Trump know, and when did he know it?

At 6:14 p.m. on June 7, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. clicked the send button on an email to confirm a meeting with a woman described as a “Russian government attorney” who would give him “information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.”

Three hours later, his father, Donald J. Trump, claimed victory in the final primary races propelling him to the Republican presidential nomination and a general election contest against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In his victory speech, Mr. Trump promised to deliver a major address detailing Mrs. Clinton’s “corrupt dealings” to give “favorable treatment” to foreign governments, including “the Russians.”

The White House said the timing was a coincidence. The younger Mr. Trump said this week that he never told his father about the meeting with the Russian lawyer, and the president said on Wednesday that he did not know about it until a few days ago. But the time frame raised questions that investigators will presumably examine as they try to piece together who knew what, and when, last year during what American intelligence agencies have called a Russian effort to influence the presidential election.

The meeting with the Russian lawyer came at a crucial stage in the elder Mr. Trump’s against-the-odds campaign as he pivoted toward taking on Mrs. Clinton, who was widely seen as the front-runner for the presidency. With Mr. Trump’s party still divided, his team was eager for information that could be used against his Democratic opponent, just as any nominee would be at that stage. The difference was that the Kremlin, according to intelligence reports, was eager to play a role in the campaign, and was in the midst of unleashing an operation to damage Mrs. Clinton.

The younger Mr. Trump said the meeting with the Russian lawyer yielded no useful information about Mrs. Clinton, and instead turned into a discussion about a Russian-American diplomatic dispute. By happenstance or not, in the days and weeks after the meeting with the Russian lawyer, emails purloined from Democratic computers were made public, which investigators tied to Russian hacking.

As a candidate, the elder Mr. Trump, who had expressed admiration of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, took positions that summer that caused head scratching. He expressed openness to lifting sanctions on Russia that were imposed after its annexation of Crimea, and suggested he might not defend NATO allies that did not spend enough money on their own security. The Republican platform at the party convention in July 2016 was crafted to keep out a call to provide arms to Ukraine to fight pro-Russian separatists.

The president’s legal team declined to comment about the close timing of some of these events. A White House official said the president’s threat to air allegations about Mrs. Clinton on June 7 was part of a long-planned speech and was not related to his son’s decision to meet with the Russian lawyer. At a briefing on Wednesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, dismissed the latest articles about the emails and meeting as “much ado about nothing.”

Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he was not aware of the June 2016 meeting with the Russian lawyer at the time. “No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this,” he told Reuters. He did not fault his son for sitting down with the lawyer. “I think many people would have held that meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

The notion that Trump the elder wasn't involved in his son's efforts to get dirt on the person he hated so much that he led chants of "Lock her up!" at his campaign rallies is ludicrous, but here we are, asked to believe yet another pile of Trump falsehoods.

The real issue remains the near-universal refusal by the GOP in Congress to do anything about this.  Yes, both the House and Senate intelligence committees want to question Junior, but the evidence is pretty clear that the Trumps' long-standing Russian relationships can no longer be dismissed as coincidental, as Shane Harris at the WSJ reminds us.

Investigators are re-examining conversations detected by U.S. intelligence agencies in spring 2015 that captured Russian government officials discussing associates of Donald Trump, according to current and former U.S. officials, a move prompted by revelations that the president’s eldest son met with a Russian lawyer last year.

In some cases, the Russians in the overheard conversations talked about meetings held outside the U.S. involving Russian government officials and Trump business associates or advisers, these people said.

Russian officials are routinely monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies, and it wouldn’t be unusual for them to discuss people who have business interests in Russia.

Mr. Trump held the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, was a globally recognized celebrity and sold properties to Russians. The intelligence gathering wasn’t aimed at Mr. Trump or people in his circle, and it isn’t clear which Trump advisers or associates the Russians referred to, or whether they had any connection to his presidential aspirations.

The 2015 conversations were detected several months before Mr. Trump declared his candidacy for the White House. The conversations have been in investigators’ possession for some time, but officials said the Donald Trump Jr. news this week prompted them to look at them again.

It's looking more and more like Junior's meeting last year was the key piece of the puzzle that makes a lot of other very coincidental evidence look far less like coincidence and more like conspiracy.  Oh, and top of all this, it looks like the Russian lawyer Junior met with was in the country illegally. 

The irony in that borscht is thick enough not to need sour cream.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is in Paris today at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron as France celebrates Bastille Day and the 100th anniversary of the US entering WW I.
• A new WHO/UNICEF report finds more than two billion people on Earth lack regular access to clean, safe drinking water, with 4.5 billion lacking proper sanitation.
• Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell is expected to announce a revised Republican health care bill today ahead of a vote next week, but it is still very unclear if the legislation has the votes.
• A Brazilian judge has sentenced former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to nearly ten years in prison for Lula's role in the "Carwash" corruption scandal.
• The Trump FDA has reversed its stance on requiring additional clinical trials for a drug to treat a rare disease after the company's CEO met with Donald Trump in February.

Last Call For King Of Bores

The mask slips, and Republicans no longer need to resort to dog whistle symbolism to couch their racism and misogyny in, they get to announce it straight up as policy planks in the Trump era.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is calling for using federal funding for Planned Parenthood and food stamps to help pay for President Trump’s border wall with Mexico, The Washington Examiner reported Wednesday. 

On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee introduced a spending bill that would allocate $1.6 billion towards building the wall separating the U.S. from Mexico. The funding is part of the total $13.8 billion for customs and border protection. 

King said he supports the spending measure, but he would prefer an additional $5 billion for the wall — and suggested taking the extra funding from Planned Parenthood and federal welfare programs.

“I would find half of a billion dollars of that right out of Planned Parenthood's budget," he told the Examiner. "And the rest of it could come out of food stamps and the entitlements that are being spread out for people that haven't worked in three generations." 

"We've got to put America back to work, this administration will do it," King said.

Screw women, screw Mexicans and screw poor people.  We'll take their money and build a goddamn wall with it.  Vote GOP in 2018!

And tens of millions of us will be perfectly okay with that and cast their vote for King and Republicans just like him across the country.  If you thought for a second that the Trump regime's current meltdown would have one iota of a moderating (or humanizing) effect on Republicans in Congress, you're fatally incorrect.

Meanwhile the larger issue besides massive GOP hatred of more than half of America is the fact that there's a very good chance funding Trump's wall may end up being the hill that Republicans choose to die on when it comes to another government shutdown.

House Republicans are ready to provide a down payment on President Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico, reigniting a fight that could lead to a government shutdown this fall. 

In a nod to Trump’s signature campaign promise, the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday unveiled a bill to fund Homeland Security that matches the administration’s request for $1.6 billion for the next fiscal year.

But the money might never get out the door. Senate Democrats are sure to object to any government funding bill with money for the wall, and they successfully pressured Republicans to keep out wall money from a funding bill earlier this year. With many Republicans skittish about being blamed for a shutdown, GOP insiders expect a replay.
Still, Trump and his budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, have said they won’t cave so readily this time — even if it means shutting down the government. And already conservatives in the House are urging the administration to embrace the hardball strategy. 

“I am willing to do whatever it takes in the Senate to ensure President Trump’s promise to the American people is kept,” said Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), a Freedom Caucus member who’s running for Senate — in part on a platform to build the wall. “I’ll aggressively oppose every single spending bill that doesn’t fund the border wall and expose every Republican establishment senator who sides with the Democrats against our president.” 

The thirst for a showdown to check off a campaign promise will only be even greater if Republicans fail to pass an Obamacare repeal bill. Trump was furious earlier this year when Beltway coverage of a spending deal portrayed him as a loser in the wall standoff with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

If Republicans like Steve King and Mo Brooks are ready to shut down the government over funding Trump's wall with cuts to SNAP and women's health care, the only thing that's going to get built in 2018 is a Democratic majority.

Method To The Meddling Madness

If you're still wondering what the deal is with the Trump regime refusing to actually do anything to protect the integrity of voting, and indeed all but offering to hand over voting security to Putin and the GRU, it's because Republicans want as few people to vote as possible since low turnout always favors the GOP. The destruction of America's trust in our government and societal institutions is being done on purpose, and that now includes a quarter of Americans who will no longer vote because they no longer trust our government to protect their identities.

One in four United States voters say they will not consider voting in upcoming elections due to concerns over cybersecurity, according to a new poll conducted by a cybersecurity firm. 

The 27 percent of voters who agreed with that statement mark a seven percent rise over a similar poll conducted in September. 

The poll, conducted by the firm Carbon Black, surveyed 5,000 respondents and has a margin of error of just under two percent.

“There is no question, none, that the U.S. voting process is vulnerable,” Carbon Black Chief Executive Patrick Morley told The Hill. 

Concerns over election cybersecurity could include hackers stealing personal information from voter rolls — something federal authorities believe Russia attempted and even accomplished during the 2016 elections. 

“We have evidence of election-related systems in 21 states that were targeted," Jeanette Manfra, acting deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity and communications at Homeland Security's National Protection and Programs Directorate, revealed last month at a Senate Intelligence Hearing. 

Before the election, it had been disclosed that hackers attributed to the Russian government had successfully breached election rolls in two states.

 Even if these numbers are off (and yes, I understand that a cybersecurity firm would definitely push a poll designed to scare up business like this) the fact remains that there was a concerted effort by the Russians to access voter registration information last year in multiple states, and that the Trump regime and the GOP running Congress right now doesn't seem to think it's a big deal at all.

If Americans are seriously considering not voting because they fear their personal info will be compromised, and they refuse to vote or worse, ask their current voter registration be removed (or allow it to lapse) then the GOP benefits directly from the chaos.  Russia definitely wants us to be in a position where Americans no longer trust even the most basic functions of a working government. But the Russians can't get very far without using the party in power to demonstrate exactly why Americans should no longer expect free and fair elections with voting registration information being protected.

This is the kind of long-term, generational damage the Russians wanted to inflict on us.  I say this shows that Putin's gambit may be one of the most successful operations of all time.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Mother Jones's David Corn reviews the last few days of Donald Trump Jr. shenanigans and points out that the evidence Junior has provided very neatly describes a good old fashioned conspiracy, which makes a lot of sense considering who was involved: Trump's eldest son, Putin oligarch and billionaire real estate developer Aras Agalarov, Agalarov's son Emin, a self-styled pop singer, and Emin's manager Rob Goldstone, all who knew and dealt with the Trump family.

According to emails released Tuesday by Trump Jr., on June 3, 2016—shortly after Trump had secured the Republican presidential nomination—Aras was in a meeting with Yury Chaika, the prosecutor general of Russia, who had been in the post since 2006. A few weeks earlier, Putin had recommended that Chaika serve another five-year term. Certainly, only a Putin-fancied official would be in this job. But this was a sign that Chaika remained in Putin’s good graces. (The previous year, a prominent Russian opposition activist had accused Chaika’s family of being involved in corruption and criminal activity.)

The Trump Jr. emails do not note how the meeting between Chaika and Aras Agalarov came about. But according to an email sent from Goldstone to Trump Jr., Chaika told Agalarov he could provide the Trump campaign “with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary” and that would be “very useful” for Donald Trump. This contact makes plenty of sense. If the Russian government wanted to help Trump win the presidency by passing his campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton, the natural go-between would be Aras Agalarov, who had been Trump’s business colleague. Agalarov could go straight to the source.

And apparently he did. According to the Trump Jr. emails, Aras Agalarov made the obvious play. He had Emin ask Goldstone to contact Trump Jr. Emin’s manager then emailed Donald Trump Jr. and told him about the Agalarov-Chaika meeting and added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but it is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin.”

Nothing complex here. A Putin official seems to be collaborating with Trump’s business partners to get Trump negative material on Clinton.

Whether or not the Agalarovs and Goldstone delivered Chaika's intelligence on Clinton or not, the conspiracy to violate US campaign law is pretty obvious, and on the Trump regime side, multiple people were involved.

Next, Trump Jr. seems to have a phone call with Emin, and a meeting is scheduled for a few days later in Trump tower where Trump Jr. will meet with what one email describes as a “Russian government attorney.”

Trump Jr. then widens the cabal by informing Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort about this operation, and they are added to the meeting. An email forwarded to them about the get-together has the subject heading: “Russia – Clinton – private and confidential.” On June 9, the meeting occurs.

It only took three days for this plot to zip from the discussion between Chaika and Aras Agalarov to the inner circle of Trump’s campaign. Trump Jr. says nothing came out of the conversation between the Trump advisers and the Russian lawyer, claiming she spoke only in vague and meaningless terms. But given that the president’s son has repeatedly dissembled about this episode, there is no telling if this description can be trusted. (The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, has denied working on behalf of the Russian government or conveying negative information about Clinton.)

This is what ought to register: The scheme appears to have been put into play by a Putin regime official and a Putin-friendly oligarch who was Trump’s business partner in Russia—and Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager all joined in. (A pop singer, a Russian lawyer, and a talent manager all had supporting roles.) Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort were looking to collude with a foreign power to gain an advantage in the election—an allegation the Trump team has repeatedly and passionately denied.

This is not Alex Jones stuff. This was straightforward conniving. Moreover, this is reality within the part of the universe where Trumpland overlaps with Putin’s world. It was a conspiracy, pure and simple. The obvious question now is: Are there any others to uncover?

That's the bottom line here.  Trump Jr, Manafort, and Kushner were all more than happy to meet with foreign nationals in order to try to obtain Russian intelligence on Clinton.  Junior's idiotic defense is that the Russians didn't deliver the goods, but of course just minutes after that June 9 meeting comes Trump Senior's Twitter attacks on Hillary Clinton over her emails and less than a week after that meeting comes the first of the Russian DNC email leaks.

At this point as I said last night on Twitter, we've seen the depths to which this regime would go to in order to gain power.  Now we will see the depths they will go to in order to maintain that power, and it's going to get far worse for America before it gets better.

StupidiNews!

• China has deployed a number of troops to the country of Djibouti in advance of Beijing's first overseas military base, Djibouti is home to several foreign military bases.
• House Republicans are bucking the White House by restoring funding to an early warning earthquake detection system cut in Trump's budget.
• Senate GOP leaders expect to hold a vote next week on Trumpcare as the Senate will forego two weeks of summer recess to deal with legislative issues and judicial nominations.
• Israeli police officials are investigating the cousin of PM Benjamin Netanyahu over involvement in a possible conflict of interest related to Israel's purchase of German submarines.
• Twitter users blocked by Donald Trump's official account are suing, claiming that Trump blocking US citizens on Twitter is a violation of free speech in a public forum.

Gotta Get 'Em Where They Live

If you think Trump regime propaganda is limited to FOX and Ruper Murdoch's papers, you have another thing coming to you as Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation's largest owner of local TV affiliates, is running pro-Trump commentary nine times a week on all its stations, which cover TV markets in more than 40 of the 50 US  states.

Sinclair Broadcasting is giving more exposure to political commentator and former Trump administration official Boris Epshteyn by increasing its number of "must run" segments at its 173 local affiliates across the country.

Sinclair will now require its stations to run nine Epshteyn commentaries per week, an increase from the three per week requirement since the 34-year-old Russian-born former investment banker and attorney joined in April.

Politico first reported the Sinclair plans for Epshteyn.

In addition to an increase in commentaries, Epshteyn is also expected to conduct interviews with Washington, D.C., political figures.

Many Sinclair stations exist in the Midwestern swing states key to President Trump's victory last November and in some cases reach more viewers than CNN, a network Trump has consistently attacked more than any other as "fake news."

Comedian John Oliver addressed Sinclair's corporate office requirement to run these segments on his HBO show "Last Week Tonight" on July 2, noting that Sinclair's alleged right-wing bias would inject conservative views into local news broadcasts.

“Sinclair content tilts noticeably conservative,” Oliver said, adding there wouldn't be an issue if “the opinions were confined to the commentary or the ad breaks.”

Epshteyn joined Sinclair three months ago, and his role as propagandist is pretty damn clear.

“We understand the frustration with government and traditional institutions,” Livingston said. “Mr. Epshteyn brings a unique perspective to the political conversation and will play a pivotal role in our mission to dissect the stories in the headlines and to better inform and empower our viewers.”

Epshteyn was most recently Special Assistant to The President and Assistant Communications Director for Surrogate Operations for the Executive Office of President Trump. Before that he was communications director for Trump’s inaugural committee and a senior advisor to the Trump campaign.

“I greatly admire Sinclair’s mission to provide thoughtful impactful reporting throughout the country. I look forward to contributing my voice to the ongoing dialogue with the American people,” Epshteyn said.

And remember, Sinclair is currently in merger talks with Tribune entertainment, which would give the combined company access to about 40% of the local TV market in America.  FOX isn't the "fake news" outlet we need to be worried about these days.  Remember, people still trust their local news stations, and in some cases Sinclair would reach more viewers than FOX News.

This is a battle we're losing, folks.  We're losing it badly, and we're going to suffer for it.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

And the third strike of the DOnald Trump Jr. story lands with a bang from the NY Times, because now we find out that not only was the offer of Russian assistance at the June meeting made with intent of the Trumps getting dirt on Clinton, the offer was part of a larger plan for the Russian government to directly assist the Trump campaign.

Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.

But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government attempted to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

Oops.

So we've gone from "We never met with the Russians" to "OK we lied, we met with the Russians but it was something we forgot about" to "OK we lied, we met multiple times with the Russians but it had nothing to do with the campaign" to "OK we lied, we met with the Russians about the campaign but hey they set us up" to "The Russians were offering us assistance with helping the campaign win".

Awesome.

”In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he said to The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been given to him by others.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government. He has deferred questions on the content of the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.

A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

But at the White House, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was adamant from the briefing room lectern that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”

Except of course now we know that isn't true.   The Trump campaign was happily working with the Russians through cutouts like Goldstone, and the last hedge of the scoundrels, namely "If the Russians really were colluding, why wouldn't they offer intel on Clinton directly" has now vanished.

The Russians of course are throwing Junior under the bobsled with the speed of Sputnik.

A Russian lawyer tells NBC’s “Today” show that she was summoned to Trump Tower during last year’s presidential campaign to meet with Donald Trump Jr. and asked if she had information on the Clinton campaign. The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told NBC she received a phone call from a man she didn’t know and was told to meet with the Trump campaign. She says she didn’t have information on the Clinton campaign and has never worked for the Russian government. 

NBC’s “Today” and MSNBC aired an interview of the lawyer on Tuesday. It’s her first public comment since Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that he made time for the meeting hoping to get information on Clinton, his father’s Democratic presidential opponent. 

Veselnitskaya says Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, attended the meeting but left after a few minutes. Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chairman, also attended but never participated and spent much of the meeting on his phone. It wasn’t clear from the NBC report who in the meeting asked her for information. 

On Clinton, she says through a translator: “It’s quite possible they were looking for information. They wanted it so badly.”

Anyway, it looks like the Russians were basically offering a pretty hefty package of tactics to help destroy Hillary's campaign in return for lifting sanctions, keeping Assad around, looking the other way on Ukraine, etc and Donny Jr. certainly wanted in on that.  And if you think this is the only meeting, well...I have a feeling this isn't going to just vanish as it looks like the latest round of leaks to the Washington Post and NY Times since Saturday have all come from the White House itself.

Somebody wants Donald Trump Jr.'s head on a pike.  My guess is that it's Jared Kushner and Ivanka. (and you thought she was the nice one.)

The caveat is that again, as people have mentioned and I have said earlier, something will only come from this if and only if Republicans are convinced keeping Trump around is more danger to them than impeachment. Since Republicans have yet to actually pay any major price for bad behavior so far, there's little to no reason to think that this will have much of an effect on the GOP now.

Whatever evidence Mueller and his team of prosecuting all-stars has at this point may not matter either.  There's no reason in my mind to think that Trump would go even if impeached, and things could get far bloodier if we get to that point.  Coward Republicans may simply wish to ignore that scenario and make sure Democrats never get a chance to even hold a vote on articles.

Still, this isn't quite The Big One, but it is the puzzle piece that makes all the other June 2016 Trumpie nonsense fit into place: Roger Stone's bragging that Clinton was going to be "destroyed", Julian Assange promising Clinton emails, and of course, the DNC email hack.  All this happened after the June 9 meeting with Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower, and we know that Big Don himself was in the building at the time.

And on we go.

StupidiNews!

• US Marine Corps officials say all 16 aboard a KC-130 plane that crashed Monday in central Mississippi are dead, the cause of the crash is still unknown.
• California Dem Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers are expected to announce legislative plans to re-institute the state's cap-and-trade carbon tax system. 
• The largest combined naval exercises ever involving the US, India, and Japan are under way this week as the USS Nimitz carrier group is in Pacific as a demonstration to China.
• Fewer Americans than ever are retiring as Boomers as nearly 20% of seniors 65 and older are still working, the highest rate of senior employment in 55 years.
• A new drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea has been found in at least three people, and WHO says the infection could easily be spread.

Last Call For Sticking With Don

The reasons Republicans will stay with Trump is simple: he has no problem hurting liberals, and he can appoint conservative federal judges who will shape the courts for decades.

Although he’s been thwarted so far on his legislative agenda before Congress, most notably on health care, President Donald Trump has a big opportunity to reshape another branch of government outside his control: the federal judiciary. He has already moved swiftly to fill an unusual, inherited vacancy on the Supreme Court, and now his aides are working their way through a large number of openings on the lower federal courts. Some of his first picks are up for a Senate committee vote this month.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, with only a few months on the high court under his belt, already embodies the kind of influence Trump seeks to have on the third branch. Gorsuch, who replaced the late Antonin Scalia, reestablished the 5-4 advantage conservatives long enjoyed when it came to most hot-button social issues. Gorsuch has cast consistently conservative votes on such topics as Trump’s travel ban, gun rights, and the separation of church and state. And he doesn’t even turn 50 until August.

It’s actually quite rare for a new president to find a Supreme Court vacancy already waiting. Trump, of course, encountered his good fortune courtesy of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented 10-month refusal to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, U.S. Circuit Judge Merrick Garland. The last time a new president had an inherited vacancy was back in 1881, when the beneficiary was President James Garfield.

But this congressional pocket veto of Garland, a 64-year-old moderate and chief of the influential U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, was simply the most public manifestation of a longer-term strategy. After gaining control of the Senate in 2015, Republicans made it their mission to slow-walk Obama’s nominations for the lower courts. This effort contributed to the relatively large backlog of 107 vacancies on trial and intermediate-appellate courts that Trump inherited. That’s more than what awaited four of Trump’s five immediate predecessors, according to the public-affairs website Ballotpedia. Only President Bill Clinton had more initial vacancies, with 111. By contrast, Obama found only 54 lower-court vacancies when he took office, while President George W. Bush had 84. Trump’s starting batch of 107 represents 12 percent of all 890 federal judicial positions.

Those vacancies, and the ones to come as more judges retire (the number has already jumped to 136 in the six months since inauguration) offer Trump the chance to sculpt the courts to his liking. During the campaign, he said he would “appoint judges very much in the mold of Justice Scalia,” a forceful conservative who unexpectedly died in February 2016. Perhaps more than some of his liberal detractors gave him credit for, Trump, 71, understood the importance of the judiciary to Republicans who were reluctant to support him. “If you really like Donald Trump, that’s great, but if you don’t, you have to vote for me anyway,” he said at a rally in Iowa last July. “You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges.”

Mitch McConnell winning back the Senate in 2014 after dismal Democratic turnout (along with Trump's win in 2016) will haunt Democrats for decades, and the fact Democratic voters simply did not give a damn if Mitch stole a Supreme Court nomination and hundreds of federal court nominations and "voted their conscience" for anybody but Hillary will harm us, our children, and our planet for years and years to come.

 

But you really showed that bitch, huh guys?

The Revenge Of The Know Nothings

The GOP plan to destroy trust in American institutions like higher education and the media so that they can in turn be destroyed is proceeding apace, as the latest Pew Research poll shows massive partisan dissonance between Democrats and Republicans on how the world of knowledge is viewed.

Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.

While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views.

A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.

The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults, finds that partisan differences in views of the national news media, already wide, have grown even wider. Democrats’ views of the effect of the national news media have grown more positive over the past year, while Republicans remain overwhelmingly negative.

About as many Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents think the news media has a positive (44%) as negative (46%) impact on the way things are going in the country. The share of Democrats holding a positive view of the news media’s impact has increased 11 percentage points since last August (33%).

Republicans, by about eight-to-one (85% to 10%), say the news media has a negative effect. These views have changed little in the past few years.

Aside from their growing differences over the impact of colleges and the news media, Republicans and Democrats remain far apart in their assessments of the effects of other institutions on the nation. Democrats continue to be more likely than Republicans to view labor unions positively (59% vs. 33%), while larger shares of Republicans have positive views of churches and religious institutions (73% of Republicans vs. 50% of Democrats) and banks and financial institutions (46% vs. 33%).

Yet even as partisan divides in views of some of these institutions have widened in recent years, the public’s overall evaluations are little changed. Majorities of Americans say churches and religious organizations (59%) and colleges and universities (55%) have a positive effect. Nearly half (47%) say labor unions have a positive impact; 32% see their impact negatively.

Views of the impact of banks and other financial institutions are more negative (46%) than positive (39%). And by roughly two-to-one (63% to 28%), more Americans say that the national news media has a negative than positive effect on the way things are going in the country.

The survey finds that Republicans’ attitudes about the effect of colleges and universities have changed dramatically over a relatively short period of time.

That's a nice way of putting it, when the reality is "Republican attitudes about traditionally liberal institutions in America is that those institutions are summarily at fault for creating a society where a black guy can become POTUS". 

But really the return of white nationalism to power has started with attacking the media and attacking the universities that made Obama possible.  They will have to go, and under Trump, there's a good chance that both will suffer catastrophic damage.

Meanwhile In Bevinstan...

While the Trump regime is waist-deep in saving Don Jr.'s ass and the Senate GOP is still trying to push Trumpcare over the finish line, there's still plenty of damage that GOP governors can do to Medicaid expansion and taking health care away from thousands, as our own Gov. Matt Bevin is trying to prove.

In a move the state says would save money but cut another 9,000 people from Medicaid, Gov. Matt Bevin's administration is seeking permission from the federal government for more changes to the state-federal health plan that serves 1.4 million Kentuckians.

The changes, filed this week, revise a sweeping plan to the state's Medicaid program Bevin proposed last year seeking federal permission, or a "waiver," to reshape the program in order to impose more costs and personal responsibility on consumers.

The Bevin administration said the changes, aimed largely at "able-bodied" adults, are part of an effort to "provide dignity to individuals" and help them toward "independence from public assistance."

The changes are not designed to cut anyone from Medicaid, according to Doug Hogan, a spokesman for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Rather, the administration expects Medicaid enrollment to drop as people transition to employer health plans or choose not to participate in requirements such as work or volunteering.

But health care advocates in Kentucky said the changes do nothing to improve the proposal Bevin introduced last year and worsen it in several ways, most significantly increasing from about 86,000 to 95,000 the number of people expected to lose health coverage over the five-year life of the plan.

They say many people will find the new requirements excessively complex and will lose coverage because they are unable to meet them.

"In my mind, this just takes a bad waiver and makes it worse," said Dustin Pugel, a research associate with the Kentucky Center on Economic Policy.

So even if the Senate GOP Trumpcare plan crashes and burns, nearly 100,000 Kentuckians are going to lose their Medicaid anyway as Bevin plans to add more hoops to jump through and make it too hard for thousands to get.  And remember should Trumpcare pass, these waiver plans are exactly what Republican governors will use to make Medicaid so difficult to qualify for again that tens of millions will lose their health care for good.

But even if existing Obamacare law doesn't change, Trump's HHS will approve all kinds of waivers for red states, and the number of uninsured will rise dramatically nationwide.  If "make it nearly impossible to get and then blame people who don't go through the hoops" sounds familiar, it's the GOP plan on abortion and voter ID access too.  Now it's coming to Medicaid.

And Bevin can't wait to toss tens of thousands to the wolves.

Last Call For Junior Senior

It turns out the other half of that Donald Trump Jr. meeting with the Russians story has a much, much bigger surprise ending than people thought, and it may be The Big One.

President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.

The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.

The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.

And while President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving members of his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to have included his eldest son. It came at an inflection point in the campaign, when Donald Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a surrogate, was ascendant and Mr. Manafort was consolidating power.

It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. But the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.

In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

So we've gone from "We never met with the Russians" to "OK we lied, we met with the Russians but it was something we forgot about" to "OK we lied, we met multiple times with the Russians but it had nothing to do with the campaign" to now "OK we lied, we met with the Russians about the campaign but hey they set us up."

It's amazing.  And this is again, Donald Trump Jr. himself making these statements, and White House people backing up his statements as true.  This is the story I think Trump has been dreading all week, he's been tweeting hard trying to distract us from something, and this is it.

We'll see where this goes.

Sunday Long Read: The Jobs Americans Won't Do

The one aspect of politics where the Trump regime has been wildly successful is spreading terror into immigrants, both documented and otherwise.  In rural blue state areas like upstate New York, where migrant farmers pick crops, Trump's ICE raids are threatening families, farms, and an entire sector of the agriculture industry.

Since Donald Trump took office in January, ICE has been newly empowered and encouraged to target undocumented immigrants with criminal records for deportation—a practice that winds up capturing a huge number of undocumented immigrants without criminal records, too. But, while the Trump administration may be more zealous about enforcement than previous administrations, they have not actually changed any laws. Existing immigration legislation has long been at odds with the U.S. economy and with farming communities across the country. Trump’s aggressive rhetoric is only having an impact because of the legal framework buttressing it. Which is why, after a string of ICE arrests cut through the local Hudson Valley farm community, word quickly spread among Hispanic farmworkers there that nobody is safe.

As in the rest of the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as much as half of the farm workforce in New York is undocumented. The fear of deportation looming over Hudson Valley farmworkers is also impacting farmers—what they’re willing to plant and what they think they’ll be able to harvest.

“My ancestors are Irish and they were called all sorts of names,” Pete, a 58-year-old farmer, told me. He said the country has swung back around to how it was a century ago. “Now people say Hispanics are taking their jobs,” Pete said. “Come on. You can’t get a kid who can flip a burger to come here and do this job for $15 an hour. If we had a workforce that was willing to do this work, I’d hire them, but we don’t.” A 2014 American Farm Bureau study backs that up: It shows that unemployed Americans regularly shun farm work, even preferring to stay unemployed.

Which is one reason why Pete told me he’s anticipating a rough year: He’s not sure he’ll have the hands to do the work on his berry, apple, and vegetable crops. “Word of mouth used to bring guys to the farm during the harvest, but now I don’t know,” he said. He wouldn’t agree to let me use his name because he said even talking to a reporter had him worried about repercussions from zealous ICE agents. (While we were talking, Pete’s wife yelled at him to hang up the phone. He didn’t.) Pete pointed to an ICE arrest of five farmworkers in western New York who did not have criminal records. He said it’s just that kind of unpredictability that adds another layer of uncertainty to a business already fraught with pressures farmers cannot control—like the weather or consumer appetites.

But besides the human aspect, the economic aspect is also causing harm to the same rural America Trump vowed to "make great again" in his campaign propaganda.

Pete points out that the undocumented community is a net contributor to taxes. It’s true: A recent report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants contribute billions of dollars to state and local taxes across the country. Deporting them, Pete added, will only hurt Americans. “If they just stopped contributing to the workforce, we’d have a major crisis,” he said. “Pretending [deportation] fixes the system that’s broken only means less food; it doesn’t fix how this works.”

The official, legal policy solution for farmers who need extra help has been in place in one form or another since World War II. The H2-A visa program asks farmers to apply to bring in foreign workers for the harvest season. Many farmers use the program, and some of the owners of the smaller farms I talked to use it exclusively. That knock on the door of Luis’s trailer at one in the morning? It was the arrival of an H2-A worker fresh off a flight from Jamaica. But the program was created in the 1950s, and it isn’t well suited to farm labor today—and for most farmers, it has become a bureaucratic nightmare.

The annual slog through red tape puts farms at risk. Every farmer I talked to about H2-A mentioned delays in getting workers—which imperils the harvest. In 2015, for instance, a computer glitch held up hundreds of workers from Mexico, partially ruining Washington state’s cherry crop that year. Yet, none of the Hudson Valley farmers I interviewed for this story who use H2-A would go on the record to criticize it. The farmers are scared they won’t get the workers they need if they do. Farmers told me that it seems like just about any pretext is used to prevent them from getting their labor supply legally. One farmer told me she’d critiqued the program in a blog post a few years back, and she was paranoid that’s why she didn’t get her workers that year. A vegetable producer told me: “One year I didn’t get an H2-A worker because I didn’t use the word drive, as in, ‘Must drivea tractor.’ I used operate on the application.” Apparently, the farmer’s wording was not precise enough. Add the recent deportations to the existing H2-A delays and application concerns, and you’ve got one nervous farming community. (When I asked the Department of Labor about these H2-A problems, a spokesman told me the Trump administration was still too new to have a policy position on the program or about the concerns farmers have voiced about the system.)

This year, the fear of not having enough undocumented labor or enough H2-A workers has farmers planting fewer crops across the Hudson Valley. “Farmers are afraid they won’t be able to harvest what they plant,” said Steve Ammerman of the New York Farm Bureau. Ammerman told me there’s a disconnect in Washington, D.C., between what the Trump administration thinks immigration enforcement means for America and what it really means. “It means food prices are going to go up, hurting national security,” he said. Ammerman pointed to a recent study that estimates the consequences if all undocumented New York agricultural workers are deported: There would be a 24 percent fall in farm production (amounting to $1.37 billion in commodity value lost) and a knock-on effect of nearly 45,000 lost jobs across the state.

Food prices go up, that hurts consumers and restaurants.  Those are hurt, people lose jobs or can't afford to buy other products because of food prices, that hurts even more sectors of the economy.  There's a reason why George W. Bush wanted immigration reform a decade ago, and his own party exploded in racist outrage when they realized what he was going to do: the same thing Reagan did 30 years ago.

It's complex stuff here, and the Trump regime has decided to let the racist zealots control things. The ICE squads are loose, the people are scared, and the farmers are going to suffer billions in losses.  Those steep price hikes are going to start coming to your grocery store very soon.

But this is what America voted for.

Especially out in rural farm communities.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Another day, another "previously unreported meeting" between Trump campaign personnel and Russian nationals, but this time we have a new player in the game: Trump's son, Donald Jr.

Two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.

The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.

While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.

Representatives of Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Kushner confirmed the meeting after The Times approached them with information about it. In a statement, Donald Jr. described the meeting as primarily about an adoption program. The statement did not address whether the presidential campaign was discussed.

Once again, if the subject of the meeting was as harmless as the Trump regime describes, why lie about it for nearly a year?  At this point with Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, and now Donald Trump Jr. all having "previously unreported meetings" with Russians, there's no longer any veneer of "accidentally forgot" here.   It's deliberate, and the Trump team knows it.  So what's the real reason Don Jr. was meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya?

The Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged Mr. Putin that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the Magnitsky Act. Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit its namesake, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison in 2009 after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.

Ms. Veselnitskaya is married to a former deputy transportation minister of the Moscow region, and her clients include state-owned businesses and a senior government official’s son, whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.

In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”

So she's a major player in getting rid of the chief US law being currently used against Russian oligarchs.  And she had this meeting with Trump's son just weeks after Trump won the GOP nomination. Such obvious corruption would be comical if it wasn't constant from the Trump regime, and it always, always seems to involve the Russians.

Just a massive coincidence, I'm sure.