Last Call For Water You Waiting For, Con't

Democrats were elected to power in Michigan, and finally, finally, it looks like the hammer is going to fall on former GOP Gov. Rick Snyder as the criminal investigation into the Flint water crisis is picking up serious steam.

Authorities investigating Flint’s water crisis have used search warrants to seize from storage the state-owned mobile devices of former Gov. Rick Snyder and 65 other current or former officials, The Associated Press has learned.

The warrants were sought two weeks ago by the attorney general’s office and signed by a Flint judge, according to documents the AP obtained through public records requests.

Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who is helping with the probe, confirmed they executed a series of search warrants related to the criminal investigation of Flint’s lead-contaminated water in 2014-15 and a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.

The water crisis in Flint was one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in U.S. history. Untreated water leached lead from pipes and into Flint’s homes and businesses while cost-cutting financial managers — appointed by Snyder — were running the city.

The investigation has led to charges against 15 current or former government officials, including two who served in the Cabinet of Snyder, a Republican who left office in December. But no one is behind bars, and some Flint residents believe key players who could have prevented the lead debacle are getting off easy.

“As stated in recent motions, the prosecution is aware of substantial potential evidence that was not provided to the original prosecution team from the onset of the investigation,” Hammoud said in a statement Monday following the AP’s reporting. “The team is currently in the process of obtaining this evidence through a variety of means, including search warrants. The team is also conducting a thorough review of existing and newly received evidence pertaining to the Flint water crisis.”

One warrant, signed May 19, lists all content from Snyder’s state-issued cellphone, iPad and computer hard drive. Similar information was sought from the devices of 33 employees who worked in his office, 11 in the Department of Environmental Quality and 22 in the Department of Health and Human Services.

The evidence was apparently initially obtained by former special prosecutor Todd Flood with investigative subpoenas. Because it has been kept in a division of the attorney general’s office, Hammoud took the unusual step of securing a warrant to search another part of the office. She has been managing the probe since January.

“We’re doing everything we can to comply,” said Dan Olsen, a spokesman for Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is not involved in the criminal investigation and is instead handling lawsuits against the state by Flint residents. After succeeding former Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette this year, she appointed Hammoud to lead the probe.

This is what happens when you rid the government of Republicans, you get a responsive government that actually works to put things right.  And the right thing here is for Rick Snyder to go to prison for the rest of his life for what he did to the people of Flint.

Republicans sat on evidence that would have put people in jail.  The new government of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is going to correct that injustice.

Checking The Tech Wreck Spec, Con't

Over the weekend I noted that the Trump Justice Department was gearing up to go after Google parent company Alphabet over antitrust action.  Now it seems that both Republicans and Democrats are going to be taking aim at several major tech companies with the goal of shattering them.

The U.S. government is gearing up to investigate whether Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google misuse their massive market power, sources told Reuters on Monday, setting up what could be an unprecedented, wide-ranging probe of some of the world’s largest companies.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, which enforce antitrust laws in the United States, have divided oversight over the four companies, two sources said, with Amazon and Facebook under the watch of the FTC, and Apple and Google under the Justice Department.

With jurisdiction established, the next step is for the two federal agencies to decide if they want to open formal investigations. Results are not likely to be quick. A previous FTC probe of Google took more than two years.

Technology companies face a backlash in the United States and across the world, fueled by concerns among competitors, lawmakers and consumer groups that the firms have too much power and are harming users and business rivals.

House Democrats will also be holding hearings on the tech giants and their misuse of power.

The House Judiciary Committee is launching an antitrust investigation into major tech companies like Google and Amazon, moving Congress closer to legislative action against the tech giants.

“This is really about ‘how do we get competition back in this space?’” Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who will lead the investigation as head of the antitrust subcommittee, told reporters on Monday.

The antitrust investigation represents a new headache for the tech giants, which have faced increased congressional pressure over the past two years. The investigation will include depositions, public hearings, and document requests, according to Cicilline. The investigation will also likely feature hearing with the CEOs of the major tech companies, while offering private interviews for witnesses worried that the tech giants would go after them.

“There can be economic retaliation and real costs for people that will come forward,” Cicicilline said.

The committee will likely produce a report and recommendations, according to Cicilline, who hopes to get some kind of legislative action finished before the congressional session ends in January 2021.

“People seem to have forgotten that there’s a reason that we have the antitrust statute,” Cicilline said.

We'll see what happens, but if both the Trump regime and House Dems are going after Big Tech, then it's win-win as far as I'm concerned. 

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Last night I recounted how House Democratic Majority Whip Jim Clyburn reversed himself as the House Democratic leadership continues to be for and against impeachment at the same time. This morning, it seems House Democratic committee chairs are finally moving forward with making the very loud, very public case for impeachment.

The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to call Watergate star witness and former Nixon White House counsel John Dean to testify on the Mueller report, an effort to draw public attention to special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings amid heated debate over the prospect of impeaching President Donald Trump.

Dean will be featured on a June 10 panel that also includes former U.S. attorneys and legal experts to discuss Mueller's evidence that Trump repeatedly attempted to obstruct or constrain his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to the committee.

The hearings are part of a broader strategy shift for the committee, reported last month by POLITICO, that comes with Democrats concerned that they've been mired in arcane procedural battles with the White House ever since Mueller finalized his report in March.

“These hearings will allow us to examine the findings laid out in Mueller’s report so that we can work to protect the rule of law and protect future elections through consideration of legislative and other remedies," said committee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.).

All I have to say is:

About damn time! 

The day after the Dean hearing, the House Democratic leadership will finally hold Attorney General William Barr and former WH lawyer Don McGahn in contempt for skipping out on their subpoenas.

The House will vote next week to hold Attorney General William Barr and former White House counsel Don McGahn in contempt of Congress for defying congressional subpoenas, according to multiple Democratic sources.

The resolution would clear the way for the House Judiciary Committee to take Barr and McGahn to court to enforce their subpoenas and are a crucial step for Democrats seeking to accelerate their obstruction of justice investigation against President Donald Trump.

"This Administration’s systematic refusal to provide Congress with answers and cooperate with Congressional subpoenas is the biggest cover-up in American history, and Congress has a responsibility to provide oversight on behalf of the American people,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a statement.

Barr has failed to comply with a subpoena for special counsel Robert Mueller's fully unredacted report and underlying evidence; McGahn balked at a subpoena to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

The vote, which will take place on June 11, will also include broad authority for congressional committees to take legal action against the Trump administration in future subpoena fights, the Democratic sources say.

The vote, supported by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hoyer and other top members of House leadership, will authorize the House to hold the two men in civil contempt. Democrats will forgo an effort to hold them in criminal contempt, which Democratic sources described as an empty gesture because Barr in particular would never face charges from his own Justice Department.

Now we're finally going to get somewhere, but beware the Trump regime's counterattack.  They know they have to get the Dean hearings and the contempt votes off the evening news.   There's only a couple of things that would do that, and Trump is capable of any of them.

Well, except for resignation.

StupidiNews!

• As the world marks the 30th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, China is blocking all media and internet mention of the event at home.
• Donald Trump is facing tens of thousands of protesters in London as he makes his first state visit to the United Kingdom.
• Republicans finally stopped blocking $19.1 billion in disaster aid for hurricane, wildfire, tornado and flood-stricken Americans, the bill goes to Donald Trump to be signed.
• Mueller probe witness George Nader is facing new child pornography charges as the Justice Department has handed down several indictments.
• Microsoft is quietly removing mandatory password changing requirements from its Windows customers, saying that forcing password changes are an "ancient and obsolete" practice.

Last Call For The Reach To Impeach, Con't

The House Democratic leadership continues to smash flat any real talk of impeachment and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, I would expect.  House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has totally reversed himself in less than 24 hours after Nancy Pelosi collared him this afternoon.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn on Monday walked back remarks suggesting that Democrats will impeach President Donald Trump, reversing course to say he’s “farther” from backing impeachment than most of his caucus.

Clyburn’s comments came after a private leadership meeting Monday evening in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterated that she didn’t support launching impeachment proceedings right now despite a growing push within the caucus.

“I’m probably farther away from impeachment than anybody in our caucus,” Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters Monday night. “We will not get out in front of our committees. We’ll see what the committees come up with. I’ve said that forever.”

Asked by POLITICO whether he thought impeachment proceedings were inevitable, Clyburn simply said no.

The No. 3 Democrat’s comments stand in contrast to what he said Sunday, suggesting it was only a matter of time before House Democrats began impeachment proceedings against Trump.

“That’s exactly what I feel, I think we’ve already begun it,” Clyburn told CNN’s Jake Tapper when asked whether House Democrats would try to remove the president from office.
Clyburn went on to say that his caucus was still pursuing a methodical series of steps — including several committee probes, a slew of subpoenas, upcoming contempt votes and multiple court cases — with no timeframe for when that might culminate in official impeachment proceedings.

How long can Nancy Pelosi keep up this Schrödinger's Impeachment Box routine?  Undercover Blue at Digby's place weighs in:

Clyburn says moving forward on impeachment is about timing. Pelosi first wants to make a case to the American people. But as Trumpism soils America's image worldwide, how much time have they and the country got? If Democrats in leadership feel any urgency to perform that educational service, they are not showing it. They appear to be waiting for opinion polls to turn in their favor before moving aggressively to rein in an increasingly monarchical administration. Somehow, opinion will move on its own and allow them that freedom. Chicken and egg?

"Democrats rely on polling to take the temperature; Republicans use polling to change it," messaging specialist Anat Shenker-Osorio wrote in 2017. Leaders shape public opinion. They don't wait for it.

As I keep saying, we're going to have to save ourselves from Trump.  Don't count on House Democrats to act.  Make sure you're registered to vote.  Make sure your friends and family are too.  All of this is for nothing if Trump (or Pence) is elected in November 2020.

Mail Mitch The Money

If you're wondering why GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been silent on Trump's trade war, it's because his wife is Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, and Chao's family is getting extremely rich off of trade politics and has been for years.  Chao's 2017 trip to Beijing was canceled over ethics questions, but the US-China trade war is raising an army of new matters.

Ms. Chao has no formal affiliation or stake in her family’s shipping business, Foremost Group. But she and her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have received millions of dollars in gifts from her father, James, who ran the company until last year. And Mr. McConnell’s re-election campaigns have received more than $1 million in contributions from Ms. Chao’s extended family, including from her father and her sister Angela, now Foremost’s chief executive, who were both subjects of the State Department’s ethics question.

Over the years, Ms. Chao has repeatedly used her connections and celebrity status in China to boost the profile of the company, which benefits handsomely from the expansive industrial policies in Beijing that are at the heart of diplomatic tensions with the United States, according to interviews, industry filings and government documents from both countries.

Now, Ms. Chao is the top Trump official overseeing the American shipping industry, which is in steep decline and overshadowed by its Chinese competitors.

Her efforts on behalf of the family business — appearing at promotional events, joining her father in interviews with Chinese-language media — have come as Foremost has interacted with the Chinese state to a remarkable degree for an American company.

Foremost has received hundreds of millions of dollars in loan commitments from a bank run by the Chinese government, whose policies have been labeled by the Trump administration as threats to American security. The company’s primary business — delivering China’s iron ore and coal — is intertwined with industries caught up in a trade war with the United States. That dispute stems in part from the White House’s complaints that China is flooding the world with subsidized steel, undermining American producers.

Foremost, though a relatively small company in its sector, is responsible for a large portion of orders at one of China’s biggest state-funded shipyards, and has secured long-term charters with a Chinese state-owned steel maker as well as global commodity companies that guarantee it steady revenues. 

In a rarity for foreigners, Angela and James Chao have served on the board of the holding company for China State Shipbuilding, a state-owned enterprise that makes ships for the Chinese military, along with Foremost and other customers. Angela Chao is also on the board at the Bank of China, a top lender to the shipbuilder, and a former vice chairman of the Council of China’s Foreign Trade, a promotional group created by the Chinese government.

Angela Chao, speaking in an interview in New York on Friday, said that her board positions were unremarkable, emphasizing that Foremost did business around the world. She denied that the company had a “China focus” beyond what most dry bulk carriers have in a world dominated by Chinese manufacturing. “We are an international shipping company, and I’m an American,” she said, adding, “I don’t think that, if I didn’t have a Chinese face, there would be any of this focus on China.”

James Chao was not made available for an interview; a representative of the company received written questions from The Times two weeks ago, and the company responded with a fact sheet on Friday.

Though Foremost worked in the late 1960s on American government contracts to ship rice to Vietnam, according to James Chao’s biography, it has almost no footprint left in the United States, save for a modest corporate headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. It registers its ships in Liberia and Hong Kong and owns them through companies in the Marshall Islands.

Since Elaine Chao became transportation secretary, records show, the agency budget has repeatedly called to cut programs intended to stabilize the financially troubled maritime industry in the United States, moving to cut new funding for federal grants to small commercial shipyards and federal loan guarantees to domestic shipbuilders.

Her agency’s budget has also tried to slash spending for a grant program that helps keep 60 American-flagged ships in service, and has tried to scale back plans to buy new ships that would train Americans as crew members. (In China, Ms. Chao’s family has paid for scholarships and a ship simulator to train Chinese seamen.)

In other words, Elaine Chao is making China's maritime shipping industry great again at the cost of the US.  Now Trump's trade war with China means that her family is getting rich, and it's coming at the expense of US taxpayers who are getting stuck with billions in new tariffs.

They're all in on the grift.  

Peace Plan In Pieces, Rest In Peace

In a meeting with Jewish leaders, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo apparently told the truth about just how much of a disaster Trump's "Mideast Peace Plan" is, the only real surprise is that it's taken this long for someone to leak just how worthless Jared Kushner is as a diplomat.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a sobering assessment of the prospects of the Trump administration’s long-awaited Middle East peace plan in a closed-door meeting with Jewish leaders, saying “one might argue” that the plan is “unexecutable” and it might not “gain traction.” He expressed his hope that the deal isn’t simply dismissed out of hand. 

“It may be rejected. Could be in the end, folks will say, ‘It’s not particularly original, it doesn’t particularly work for me,’ that is, ‘It’s got two good things and nine bad things, I’m out,’ ” Pompeo said in an audio recording of the private meeting obtained by The Washington Post. 

“The big question is can we get enough space that we can have a real conversation about how to build this out,” he said.

The remarks are the most unvarnished comments to date from a U.S. official about President Trump’s “deal of the century,” an effort to resolve the intractable Israeli-Palestinian dispute he has entrusted to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former lawyer Jason Greenblatt.

The unveiling of the plan has been repeatedly delayed, a point Pompeo noted. 

“This has taken us longer to roll out our plan than I had originally thought it might — to put it lightly,” he said at a meeting on Tuesday of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a New York-based group that addresses concerns of the Jewish community. 

The Trump regime is just like any other company where the boss's dipshit son-in-law gets put in charge of a major project that everyone knows he's going to screw up, only this project is America's Mideast Peace Plan and the smoking wreck is going to essentially finish off any hope of a two-state solution and doom the Palestinians to a slow genocide in an open-air concrete prison zoo.

And for Pompeo to essentially toss Kushner under the bus on this and then fill the bus with concrete and roll the whole mess into the Dead Sea, well.  It could be an uncomfortable trip to the UK this week for the Trump clan.

StupidiNews!

• Despite Donald Trump's insulting remarks about Duchess Meghan Markle, Queen Elizabeth II is expected to host the Trumps for an official state visit this week.
• Canada is temporarily closing its embassy in Venezuela after a diplomatic row with President Nicolas Maduro refusing to certify several diplomats critical of the Maduro regime.
• Mexico and the US are preparing for trade talks Monday as Donald Trump continues to threaten the Obrador government with tariffs if Mexico does not halt the flow of immigrants to America.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government has been dealt a major blow as the leader of her main coalition partner party has resigned after losing support.
• NASA plans to contract with three commercial space exploration companies to launch missions to the moon in 2020 and 2021.

Last Call For Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Politico 2.0 notes that if Trump goes through with those 5% Mexico tariffs he threatened on Friday, it will be a massive tax hike on American consumers at the checkout counter.

If Trump's 5% tariff on Mexican goods takes effect later this month, the president's trade policies would constitute a bigger tax hike than Bill Clinton’s in 1993.

By the numbers: Tariffs already in place against Mexico will increase revenues by $69 billion, the Tax Foundation estimates — or about 0.32% of GDP. Add in the threatened 5% tax on Mexican imports, and that rises to about 0.40% of GDP.

That’s more than Clinton’s tax bill in 1993, which brought in revenues of about 0.36% of GDP after the first year, and just shy of George H.W. Bush’s increase in 1990, which amounted to 0.41% of GDP after year 1.

What to watch: If Trump follows through on his threats — 25% on all Chinese and Mexican imports — those revenues would amount to 1.45% of GDP. You’d have to go back to the 1968 tax hike for a bigger revenue measure, per data compiled by the Treasury Department.

That means 1.45% of GDP would be about $300 billion in new taxes on American consumers, or $1000 bucks per American.  That's a recipe for a GOP wipeout at the polls.

It’s no coincidence that most of the Republican senators who spoke out against Trump’s move late last week are up for reelection next year. Even many reliable Trump allies came out with rare expressions of opposition, knowing their own political survival is on the line.

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, representing a state whose farming industry has already been hit by Trump’s trade policies, was one of the first Republicans to call foul on his latest tariffs. "While I support the need for comprehensive border security and a permanent fix to illegal immigration, this isn’t the right path forward," Ernst said in a statement. "The livelihoods of Iowa farmers and producers are at stake.”

Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, who stood with Trump throughout her ill-fated 2018 campaign before being appointed to the state’s other seat, finally had enough. “While I support the President's intention of stopping unchecked illegal immigration, I do not support these types of tariffs, which will harm our economy and be passed onto Arizona small businesses and families,” she said.

The move is especially awkward for McSally, coming just days after the administration’s petty request for the Navy to keep the USS John McCain warship out of the president’s sight during his recent trip to Japan. McSally, who holds McCain’s seat, has been trying to win back moderates alienated by Trump’s actions without losing support from his sizable base of supporters back home.

Even in Texas, where Sen. John Cornyn looks to be in solid shape, the senator isn’t taking any political chances. Mexico is Texas’s top foreign trading partner, and the state would face the equivalent of $27 billion in taxes if all the threatened tariffs were implemented. “Senator Cornyn supports the president’s commitment to securing our border, but he opposes this across-the-board tariff which will disproportionately hurt Texas," a spokesman for the senator told The Dallas Morning News.

What’s notable about these defections is that two of the senators hail from border states, where fighting illegal immigration is a top priority. When a bipartisan majority of senators rebuked Trump for overreaching his authority to declare an emergency at the border, McSally and Cornyn both stuck with the president.

This time, however, the economic pain threatens to be so significant that they’re no longer willing to stand pat. With their political careers at stake, there wasn’t enough benefit to blindly stick with the president.

Again, I predict Trump will fold on these tariffs when Mitch McConnell makes it clear that even if should Trump somehow survive, he'll face a Democratic House AND Senate in 2021, and that's the end for Donald.

Democrats should already be running commercials in swing states over this.

The Drums Of War, Con't

The major Middle Eastern leader pushing for US war with Iran isn't actually Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, but his counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed.  And MBZ, as he is known by, definitely wants Trump and the US to go to war with Tehran and is using his considerable political influence to move Trump towards the cliff.

Prince Mohammed is almost unknown to the American public and his tiny country has fewer citizens than Rhode Island. But he may be the richest man in the world. He controls sovereign wealth funds worth $1.3 trillion, more than any other country.
His influence operation in Washington is legendary (Mr. [Richard] Clarke got rich on his payroll). His military is the Arab world’s most potent, equipped through its work with the United States to conduct high-tech surveillance and combat operations far beyond its borders.

For decades, the prince has been a key American ally, following Washington’s lead, but now he is going his own way. His special forces are active in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Egypt’s North Sinai. He has worked to thwart democratic transitions in the Middle East, helped install a reliable autocrat in Egypt and boosted a protégé to power in Saudi Arabia.

At times, the prince has contradicted American policy and destabilized neighbors. Rights groups have criticized him for jailing dissidents at home, for his role in creating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and for backing the Saudi prince whose agents killed the dissident writer Jamal Khashoggi.

Yet under the Trump administration, his influence in Washington appears greater than ever. He has a rapport with President Trump, who has frequently adopted the prince’s views on Qatar, Libya and Saudi Arabia, even over the advice of cabinet officials or senior national security staff.

Western diplomats who know the prince — known as M.B.Z. — say he is obsessed with two enemies, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Trump has sought to move strongly against both and last week took steps to bypass congressional opposition to keep selling weapons to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“M.B.Z. has an extraordinary way of telling Americans his own interests but making it come across as good advice about the region,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, whose sympathy for the Arab Spring and negotiations with Iran brought blistering criticism from the Emirati prince. When it comes to influence in Washington, Mr. Rhodes added, “M.B.Z. is in a class by himself.”

Prince Mohammed worked assiduously before the presidential election to crack Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and secured a secret meeting during the transition period with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The prince also tried to broker talks between the Trump administration and Russia, a gambit that later entangled him in the special counsel’s investigation into foreign election interference.

Today, at least five people working for Prince Mohammed have been caught up in criminal investigations growing out of that inquiry. A regular visitor to the United States for three decades, Prince Mohammed has now stayed away for two years, in part because he fears prosecutors might seek to question him or his aides, according to two people familiar with his thinking. (His brother, the foreign minister, has visited.)

The United Arab Emirates’ Embassy in Washington declined to comment. The prince’s many American defenders say it is only prudent of him to try to shape United States policy, as many governments do, and that he sees his interventions as an attempt to compensate for an American pullback.

But Prince Mohammed’s critics say that his rise is a study in unintended consequences. The obscure young prince whom Washington adopted as a pliant ally is now fanning his volatile region’s flames.

Did you catch all that?  Non only is MBZ up to his neck in the Iran problem, but he tried to broker talks between Trump and Russia and the counter-intelligence investigation into the Emirati side of the Trump-Russia collusion train is still ongoing.

There's still a lot to work through, folks.  It's not over by a mile.

By arming the United Arab Emirates with such advanced surveillance technology, commandos and weaponry, argued Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former State Department official and fellow at the Brookings Institution. “We have created a little Frankenstein.”

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

The battle over impeaching Donald Trump continues for the Democrats with the focus shifting to the biggest blue state of them all, California.  This weekend marks the state's 2019 Democratic convention, and on Saturday it quickly turned into Nancy Pelosi versus everyone else.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was just moments into her speech Saturday when a man shouted out from the back of a convention hall stuffed with thousands of delegates to the state Democratic Party convention.

“Impeach Donald Trump!” he screamed, uttering a battle cry Pelosi has rebuffed, despite growing demands from her party’s activist wing.

“President Trump will be held accountable for his actions,” she said. The I-word never left her lips.

Less than an hour later, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) stepped to the same podium to deliver a very different message. “We need to begin impeachment proceedings!” the presidential candidate bellowed. The crowd roared.

The party’s deep divisions, refreshed when last week’s remarks by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III raised new questions about whether Trump had committed impeachable violations, played out time and again during the first full day of the weekend convention as they have across the nation.

Democrats’ dueling messages highlighted the dilemma confronting the party’s congressional leaders and presidential hopefuls: how to balance the demands of a fervently anti-Trump activist base without alienating the more moderate voters who helped hand them the House in 2018 and could deliver the presidency in 2020.

Saturday was the first of two days that in total will feature speeches by 14 Democratic presidential candidatesin the self-styled home of the Trump resistance. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) electrified the crowd with a fiery address that appeared to take a swipe at former vice president Joe Biden, who did not attend. Three of the candidates are scheduled to speak Sunday, rounding out the largest gathering of 2020 presidential contenders to date.

Among activists, fury with Trump reached the boiling point after Mueller reiterated Wednesday that he could not clear the president of obstructing justice in his probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s defiant attitude toward congressional oversight has stoked further anger.

“That’s adding salt to the wounds,” said Maria Elena Durazo, a Democratic National Committee vice chair and California state senator.

It has also opened a fissure between Democratic congressional leadership and the party’s White House hopefuls, who were once largely united in opposition to impeachment. After Mueller’s comments, the list of presidential candidates calling for impeachment grew, even as House Democratic leaders stood firm.

Pelosi and her top lieutenants are seeking to persuade Democrats that the best action is to stay the course they have charted — to continue to investigate Trump and rely on the courts to intervene when they are stonewalled by the administration.

“Our investigations are breaking through the Trump administration’s coverup to get the truth. We want the truth for the American people,” Pelosi said Saturday. She noted two recent court victories and Mueller’s public statement. 

I understand that activists and convention delegates hardly represent the rank and file of Democratic voters across the country.  Many of us just want Trump gone and we want the person most likely to beat him as the 2020 candidate.

I understand that betting against Nancy Pelosi is a sucker move.

But I also understand that Mitch McConnell is running the show now, and that Pelosi is losing the battle with him.  House Democrats have passed dozens of progressive bills, and McConnell has killed every single one in the Senate, refusing to vote on anything Pelosi has gotten through.

The case for impeachment is strong, and I still tend to side with Pelosi: unless there's an ironclad case, impeachment will go nowhere in the Senate.  Trump will only turn to increasingly bellicose actions in order to get hearings off the front pages.

I don't know what the answer is, and it's increasingly frustrating.

Sunday Long Read: Hate The Game, Not The Players

Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio takes a long look at the state of esports in 2019 and finds that increasingly, the multi-million dollar competitions and leagues popping up around competitive PC games looks more and more like the excesses of the dot-com bubble from 20 years ago.

The mainstream narrative of esports has been lovingly crafted by those who benefit from its success. There’s big money in esports, they say. You’ve heard the stories. Teenaged gamers flown overseas to sunny mansions with live-in chefs. The erection of $50 million arenas for Enders Game-esque sci-fi battles. League of Legends pros pulling down seven-figure salaries. Yet there’s a reason why these narratives are provocative enough to attract lip-licking headlines in business news and have accrued colossal amounts of venture capital. More and more, esports is looking like a bubble ready to pop.

“I feel like esports is almost running a Ponzi scheme at this point,” Frank Fields, Corsair’s sponsorship manager, told an audience at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference last March. He smirked. The crowd laughed uncomfortably. The smile dropped from Fields’ face as he continued. “Everyone I talk to in this industry kind of acknowledges the fact that there is value in esports, but it is not nearly the value that is getting hyped these days.” Later, Fields would clarify that this value, and future value, “as of now, is optimistic at best and fraudulent at worst.”

Fields is not the only longtime esports veteran who is worried the industry is a bubble, or more accurately, an industry comprised of several bubbles. Seventeen other experts on the North American esports industry shared similar concerns with Kotaku, some describing it merely as “inflated” and others as “completely unsustainable.” Several spoke on the controversial topic because they love esports and want to see it succeed organically, in a sustainable way. There is, of course, a genuine love shared by thousands of people for playing games competitively. Right now, many who spoke to us for this story said, the stuff that makes the esports industry seem like a tantalizing investment rests on unsubstantiated claims—or blunt-force lies.

As investors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the ballooning esports industry, many feel their way forward with statistics that indicate that paydirt is just around the corner. “League of Legends Gets More Viewers Than Super Bowl,” reads one 2019 headline from CNBC, glossing over the fact that they’re comparing apple viewership metrics to coconut viewership metrics. A 2017 Morgan Stanley report leaked to Kotaku claimed that, in its first year, the Overwatch League could conceivably generate $720 million in revenue, about the same as World Wrestling Entertainment. By 2022, says Goldman Sachs, viewership of pros playing competitive games like League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive may be on par with the National Football League’s viewership today. But according to many people Kotakuspoke to with knowledge of the industry, a lot of these statistics are at best rosy-eyed and, at worst, inflated, unverified, or misleading.

For 12 years, Twitter never posted a profit, and until it went public, Uber lost $4.5 billion in one year. One quirk of the world of startups is that investors love investing in unprofitable companies or industries. Yet longtime esports professionals don’t want to see their beloved livelihood go the way of the dotcom bubble. The esports industry is held together with wax and string, which, sources say, hasn’t stopped it from flying too close to the sun.
Frank Fields is, to put it lightly, skeptical of the numbers that supposedly show how big the esports industry is. With an increasing sense of unease, Fields has seen stranger and stranger numbers come across his desk at the hardware manufacturer Corsair, where he handles several million dollars’ worth of outbound sponsorships. As he watched investors dump tens or hundreds of millions at once into the esports organization du jour, Fields has become concerned they’re “jumping the gun.”

“It doesn’t make sense to put that much money into an industry that’s not making that much,” he said. “The sooner we recognize that we’re fooling a bunch of non-endemic people, the better off we’ll be long-term. We’ll be able to fix this bubble before it pops.”
He’s already seen an esports bubble inflate—and burst. At 32 years old, Fields has been in esports for over half of his life, which is most of the history of esports’ existence. Speaking over the phone after GDC, Fields recalled hauling his gaming rig on a 17-hour drive from Ohio to Dallas for a Dota side event at a 2006 Counter-Strike tournament. The prize pool was $1,000, a pittance compared to last year’s $25.5 million prize pool for Dota 2’s biggest tournament, The International. It was at that event, however, that Fields noticed that entire hotels had been rented out to house Counter-Strike pros. For the first time, he could fathom the growing infrastructure of the esports industry. Prior to that, esports events were empowering conferences of high-skill fans, but undoubtedly smaller in scope. Tournaments for PC games like Quake and Starcraft were held in computer cafes in North America and Asia, especially South Korea; fighting game tournaments for games like Street Fighterwere largely held in arcades.

It was also around the mid-2000s that the first bubble of esports began to bloat. David Hill, a former president of Fox Sports, had caught a whiff of competitive gaming fever after noticing his grandson’s fierce fandom for it, according to a Dot Esports feature. Two years after joining DirectTV in 2005, Hill launched the Championship Gaming Series. It was a worldwide sports league, but for video games—a pretty cutting-edge idea at the time. This level of organization for esports was unprecedented, as was its tremendous funding. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. injected it with a huge $50 million investment in 2007, Dot Esports reported.

As it turns out, it was a little too huge. According to Dot Esports, one commentator for the first-person shooter Quake received a $300,000 salary in exchange for live commentary that was poorly received. Counter-Strike players received a reported $2,500 a month plus housing in Marina Del Rey. That added up to about $1.8 million in salaries per year. “I know from firsthand experience running a team that a lot of these teams have never even made that much in revenue,” Fields said.

The Championship Gaming Series burned bright and fast, only lasting until 2008, around the financial crisis. “We invested wholeheartedly in the venture and presented viewers with a top-notch production, but the economics just didn’t add up for us at this time,” it said in an announcement posted to its website. Investor confidence in esports plummeted.

“This was the first bubble of esports,” Fields says. “Players couldn’t get jobs, because the companies supporting them went bankrupt.”

And it looks like we're headed that way again, only this time there's a few more zeroes at the end of the numbers, and when it blows, it's going to be ugly.  I'd like to see esports saved from itself, I enjoy playing PC games like Overwatch and League of Legends with my friends and watching really good players compete, but the level of money thrown around has me convinced that it's going to take a major meltdown to get people to be serious. 

I was just starting my IT career when the first dot-com bubble blew and I recognize the signs.  I hope Fields is right about fixing the industry.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Last month a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to turn over transcripts of former Trump National Security Adviser (and convicted felon) Michael Flynn's wiretaps involving his dealings with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

The Justice Department said no and directly refused a judge's order.

Federal prosecutors rebuffed a judge’s order to release by Friday highly classified transcripts of discussions that Michael T. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, had with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

The transcripts between Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, formerly Russia’s top diplomat in the United States, were expected to show that they talked in December 2016 about sanctions that the Obama administration had just imposed on Russia. Mr. Flynn initially denied those exchanges about sanctions both to Trump administration officials and the F.B.I. in the weeks after the discussions.

The conversations prompted concerns among senior Obama administration officials about whether the Trump transition team was flouting norms about holding off on making policy until after taking office. The phone calls were also at the center of the scandal that eventually prompted Mr. Flynn’s ouster just weeks into President Trump’s term.

The order this month from the judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, was unusual. The transcripts came from a secret F.B.I. wiretap of Mr. Kislyak, and their release would have provided an extraordinarily rare look at the fruits of the government’s eavesdropping. Agents routinely listen to wiretaps of foreign officials, but they remain among the government’s most closely held secrets.

The calls between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak were referenced repeatedly in court documents and the special counsel’s report on Russian election interference but never released, and prosecutors have not acknowledged the existence of the wiretap. Judge Sullivan, who is overseeing Mr. Flynn’s case, ordered that audio recordings of his conversations with Mr. Kislyak be made public along with a voice mail message made by the president’s lawyer.

The Justice Department’s refusal to comply with the judge’s ordermade clear that prosecutors had no interest in confirming the wiretap, which was approved by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“This would be a rare step to make public” such intelligence collection, said Joshua Geltzer, a former Justice Department official. “What you see in today’s filing is the government trying to avoid disclosing that material.”

Instead, prosecutors asserted that they did not need to provide the transcripts because they were, in the end, not vital to the prosecution of Mr. Flynn. He pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the F.B.I. after agents interviewed him about what was said on those calls.

“The government further represents that it is not relying on any other recordings, of any person, for purposes of establishing the defendant’s guilt or determining his sentence, nor are there any other recordings that are part of the sentencing record,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing responding to Judge Sullivan’s order.

Please spare me the "Obama administration defied federal judges too!" stuff as well.  Yes, the Obama administration was at best 50-50 when it came to losing federal cases before the courts, and it defied judicial orders (or dragged their feet on compliance for years) when it came to immigration and climate change.

But not when it came to obstructing justice in an investigation into itself.

Checking The Tech Wreck Spec

It's definitely one of those "the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, but is serving a purpose" things here, but the Trump regime is coming to break up Google.

The U.S. Justice Department is preparing an investigation of Alphabet Inc’s Google to determine whether the tech giant broke antitrust law in operating its sprawling online businesses, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Officials from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission, which both enforce antitrust law, met in recent weeks to give Justice jurisdiction over Google, said the sources, who sought anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The potential investigation represents the latest attack on a tech company by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has accused social media companies and Google of suppressing conservative voices on their platforms online.

One source said the potential investigation, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, focused on accusations that Google gave preference to its own businesses in searches.
A spokesman for the Justice Department said he could not confirm or deny that an investigation was being considered. Google declined comment.

Early in 2013, the FTC closed a long-running investigation of Google, giving it a slap on the wrist. Under FTC pressure, Google agreed to end the practice of “scraping” reviews and other data from rivals’ websites for its own products, and to let advertisers export data to independently assess campaigns.

Google’s search, YouTube, reviews, maps and other businesses, which are largely free to consumers but financed through advertising, have catapulted it from a start-up to one of the world’s richest companies in just two decades.

Along the way, it has made enemies in both the tech world, who have complained to law enforcers about its market dominance, and in Washington, where lawmakers have complained about issues from its alleged political bias to its plans for China.

Now let's be honest here, the Trump regime is coming for Google solely because they don't want to share the kind of data manipulation power that it has with a company that it doesn't control.  It's taking out a threat to Trump's autocratic rule of our crumbling republic.

Having said that, Google is far too powerful and is definitely violating antitrust rules on its search engines and ad business.  Google is far from being alone in a world with trillion-dollar tech giants like Amazon and Apple, but breaking it up is a nice start.

Last Call For The Grift Wall Games

The Trump regime is of course turning a blind eye towards efforts to build a private border land wall near Mexico, because in a couple of centuries they might even be done with it.  And of course, Kris Kobach is neck deep in the con job.

Down a bumpy dirt road, past a dozen “No Trespassing” signs, two amateur sentries in neon safety vests guarded the way to a giant symbol of Trump-era politics rising up from the Chihuahuan Desert.

After one of the guards Armando asked our business and radioed someone called Viper, telling him to “stand down,” we were waved through a makeshift checkpoint and onto the site where supporters of President Donald Trump have built hundreds of yards of border wall on private land overlooking the Rio Grande.

What began in December as a quixotic online crowdfunding effort to get Trump’s promised “big, beautiful wall” built has turned into a physical barrier constructed under the direction of influential right-wing immigration opponents. On Wednesday, its backers demonstrated the wall to a handful of reporters, showing off the structure in all its steel-and-concrete glory ahead of an official ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday.

Its organizers insist their version of the wall is a feasible model for securing hundreds of miles of southern border. Its critics call it a xenophobic scam. The fact that the effort has gotten to this point at all suggests a different and broader truth: That in the Trump era, the line between a surreal stunt and an important political development can be extremely blurry.

On Wednesday, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach offered a tour of the wall — at one point scrambling over crumbling hillside to demonstrate the difficulty of passing the terrain — while negotiating with local officials over a permitting issue that threatened to derail construction.

At the same time, Kobach has been overseeing legal aspects of the project, now housed under a nonprofit called We Build the Wall, he has been negotiating with the White House over a possible appointment as the nation’s actual “immigration czar,” a potential new post that could give him vast influence over the federal bureaucracy.

Last week, The New York Times reported a list of Kobach’s conditions for accepting the job, which included 24/7 access to a government plane and were reportedly viewed as presumptuous by some inside the administration. On Wednesday, Kobach defended those conditions. “If you're serious about solving this problem you've got to have a position that has the authority and the tools to solve the problem,” he told me.
He also said he is “99 percent” certain he knows who leaked the list, though he did not offer any names.

Kobach said he last spoke to Trump about the wall project in the Oval Office three weeks ago, and that the president drilled him on the technical specifications, expressing special interest in their model’s anti-climbing features, a set of horizontal steel plates covering the tops of the wall’s vertical slats. “Are you going to paint it?” Kobach recalled the president asking him.

The wall stands on the same stretch of border where an armed militia group, the United Constitutional Patriots, was recently detaining migrants as they enter the United States. Kobach and other leaders of the wall project said they are not associated with the militias and do not condone armed vigilante action. They argue that putting up walls will put such groups “out of business.”

But his disavowals have not been entirely embraced by the movement. “I don’t support that sort of activity—yet,” said conservative pundit David Clarke, a former sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, who works on public outreach for the project. “I’m real close,” said Clarke, who said that if there is not a more significant migration crackdown by the end of Trump’s first term, he would endorse vigilante action.

There also appears to be some intermingling of the militia group and the wall efforts. We Build the Wall has shared footage shot by the group online, and people associated with the group continue to make appearances at the site of the private wall project, despite intense scrutiny of the militia’s activities.

Everybody in the GOP wants in on the grift, and Kobach is leading the charge.  Never forget that the GOP is all about enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.