Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Apparently the US Border Patrol doesn't like being Trump's paid thugs to round up those people and slam them in for-profit detention camps, but hey, they're doing it anyway because they gotta make a buck somehow.

One Border Patrol agent in Tucson said he had been called a “sellout” and a “kid killer.” In El Paso, an agent said he and his colleagues in uniform had avoided eating lunch together except at certain “BP friendly” restaurants because “there’s always the possibility of them spitting in your food.” An agent in Arizona quit last year out of frustration. “Caging people for a nonviolent activity,” he said, “started to eat away at me.” 

For decades, the Border Patrol was a largely invisible security force. Along the southwestern border, its work was dusty and lonely. Between adrenaline-fueled chases, the shells of sunflower seeds piled up outside the windows of their idling pickup trucks. Agents called their slow-motion specialty “laying in” — hiding in the desert and brush for hours, to wait and watch, and watch and wait. 

Two years ago, when President Trump entered the White House with a pledge to close the door on illegal immigration, all that changed. The nearly 20,000 agents of the Border Patrol became the leading edge of one of the most aggressive immigration crackdowns ever imposed in the United States. 

No longer were they a quasi-military organization tasked primarily with intercepting drug runners and chasing smugglers. Their new focus was to block and detain hundreds of thousands of migrant families fleeing violence and extreme poverty — herding people into tents and cages, seizing children and sending their parents to jail, trying to spot those too sick to survive in the densely packed processing facilities along the border.

It's just heart-rending, isn't it.

Ten migrants have died since September in the custody of the Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection. 

In recent months, the extreme overcrowding on the border has begun to ease, with migrants turned away and made to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed. Last week, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to close the door further, at least for now, by requiring migrants from countries outside Mexico to show they have already been denied refuge in another country before applying for asylum.

The Border Patrol, whose agents have gone from having one of the most obscure jobs in law enforcement to one of the most hated, is suffering a crisis in both mission and morale. Earlier this year, the disclosure of a private Facebook group where agents posted sexist and callous references to migrants and the politicians who support them reinforced the perception that agents often view the vulnerable people in their care with frustration and contempt. 

Interviews with 25 current and former agents in Texas, California and Arizona — some conducted on the condition of anonymity so the agents could speak more candidly — paint a portrait of an agency in a political and operational quagmire. Overwhelmed through the spring and early summer by desperate migrants, many agents have grown defensive, insular and bitter. 

The president of the agents’ union said he had received death threats. An agent in South Texas said some colleagues he knew were looking for other federal law enforcement jobs. One agent in El Paso told a retired agent he was so disgusted by scandals in which the Border Patrol has been accused of neglecting or mistreating migrants that he wanted the motto emblazoned on its green-and-white vehicles — “Honor First” — scratched off.

Honor among jackbooted thugs and all.

I have zero sympathy for the folks actively working to be Donald Trump's white supremacist paramilitary police.  You have a choice, and that choice is helping the rest of us get rid of the bastard, or stay with him and face the consequences of that choice.

Rounding up kids and families for semi-permanent detention is repugnant.  You can stop at anytime and resign, you know.

Of course, the people working for Trump never will.

The Saudis And The Houthis, Con't

As I said yesterday, the drone attack that damaged the heart of Saudi Arabia's oilfields on Saturday is a massive issue, because despite Yemeni Houthi rebels claiming responsibility, the Trump regime says Iran is behind the attack.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pinned the blame on Iran for an attack at a Saudi oil field in a pair of tweets Saturday. 

Drone strikes on crucial Saudi Arabian oil facilities have disrupted about half of the kingdom's oil capacity, or 5% of the daily global oil supply, CNN Business reported earlier Saturday. Yemen's Houthi rebels took responsibility for the attacks but they are often backed by Iran. 

But preliminary indications are that the attacks did not originate from Yemen and likely originated from Iraq, according to a source with knowledge of the incident. The same official said the damage was caused by an armed drone attack. 

CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen said there have been more than 200 drone attacks launched by Houthi rebels from Yemen into Saudi Arabia, and none have been as effective as Saturday's attack, lending credence to the belief that the attack did not originate from Yemen. 

"Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy," Pompeo tweeted, referencing Iran's president Hassan Rouhani and foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. 

"Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen," Pompeo continued, providing no evidence that Iran was behind the attacks. 

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Seyyed Abbas Mousavi, rejected the accusation that Iran was behind the attack. 

"Such blind accusations and inappropriate comments in a diplomatic context are incomprehensible and meaningless," he said, adding: "even hostility needs a certain degree of credibility and reasonable frameworks, US officials have also violated these basic principles." 

John Bolton's mustache may be gone, but the Trump regime is still looking for any excuse for war with Tehran, and it finally may have found one.

Sunday Long Read: Knows The Land Like The Back Of His Hand

This week's long read comes as a reminder that while not every US farmer believes in climate change, they all deal with its effects whether they want to or not.

The sun wasn’t even up yet when Ethan Cox tugged his work boots on, along with his old barn coat, the lighter one. He knew he wouldn’t need the heavier one. He didn’t even have to check the local forecast. It was going to be warm that day, low to mid-80s as the day wore on, he guessed, pretty much the same as it had been for quite a while. He glanced out the bedroom window at the sky. It was gray and brittle. It was going to be dry, too. That was no surprise either. The first week of March 2012 had been unusually dry. So had the whole month of February. In fact, the whole winter had been warm and dry. The yuppies and the liberals across the river in St. Louis or up in Chicago or out in San Francisco and New York all talked about that as being evidence that the climate was changing, that the bill was coming due for a century’s worth of pouring all manner of poison into the atmosphere. 

Ethan’s neighbors thought that was kind of amusing. They saw the warm, dry weather as a godsend. After two years of record or near-record flooding, a deluge in 2011 so powerful that the Army Corps of Engineers decided to blow up the levees along the Mississippi River to keep Cairo, Illinois, from being washed off the map and such brutal rainstorms a year earlier that the region suffered $3 billion in losses and crop and infrastructure damage that forced many farmers in the region to the brink of bankruptcy, to them the unseasonably warm and dry spring of 2012 was a sign from above that the worst was over, at least for now. 

Ethan didn’t think much of the liberals’ point of view. They were always warning that something — the weather, the pesticides and fertilizers the farmers used, the very crops they grew, modified by biochemists in some corporate lab someplace — was going to tilt Earth on its axis and unleash all kinds of demonic forces. And it always seemed as if the only solution was to rein in farmers like Ethan, make them toe the line, regardless of what it cost in terms of productivity, regardless of what it cost the rest of the world in terms of slowing down the rate of food production even as the number of hungry mouths to feed skyrocketed around the globe. Not that he was entirely hostile to liberal ideas — he didn’t mind the farm subsidies that came his way. 

Ethan paused in the sleepy kitchen of the White Hall, Illinois, farm where he had been born sixty-five years earlier, poured himself a cup of coffee, and then trudged out the side door, across the yard toward the workshop, a kind of tractor shed and makeshift office that he had turned into the nerve center of the 3,000-acre corn and soy and cattle farm he had built the place into. He was moving a little slower these days. His knees weren’t what they used to be. Neither was his heart. Seemed as if his body was every bit as creaky as the old corrugated metal sliding door to the workshop that grumbled and screeched in protest every time he hauled it open.

No, Ethan didn’t think much of the liberals’ point of view. But he didn’t think much of his neighbors’ unbounded optimism either. Maybe the liberals’ warnings about global warming were overblown, but something was happening. Those two years of back-to-back storms were like nothing he had ever seen, and despite his best efforts to gird his land against nature’s ravages — adopting no-till or strip-till farming to leave a protective cover on the ground and reduce the worst effects of erosion, for example — those storms had taken a toll, even on a farsighted farmer like him. His 2011 crop was a fraction of what it should have been. So was his 2010 harvest. Another year like that, and instead of getting paid, he’d owe money to the corporation that took his corn. 

The thing was, there had been an ever-increasing number of years like that. In the fifty years since Ethan was a teenager, the number of extreme rain events — storms dumping more than three inches of rain on the sprawling farm fields of Illinois — had increased by 83 percent. There were years like 1993 and 2008, years that saw the worst flooding in the Mississippi basin since the 1930s, and years like 2010 and 2011, when one after another, storms of amazing fury threatened to drown the young corn and soy before they got their heads up. 

The good years were getting to be fewer and fewer. Ethan understood that. And as far forward as he could peer into the future, he saw that continuing. 

He also understood in a way that most of his neighbors and even many scientists didn’t yet that the volatility in the weather, those forces that were driving the rains, could—and no doubt would — just as easily shut off the tap altogether, leaving the same fields that only a year earlier had been inundated baking under a relentless, desiccating drought. 

Those clear, warm blue skies that had raised his neighbors’ hopes were, for Ethan, a bit more ominous. All winter long, it had been gnawing at him. Every time he’d head out on his ATV across snowless fields, he’d think back to those days six decades ago when he had been out here with his own father, plowing through axle-deep drifts in the first of several old Jeeps his father had bought — he had fallen in love with the things after a visit to Ethan’s uncle in the mountains of New Mexico in the years after the Second World War, one of the few times Ethan had ever been that far from southern Illinois. That was back in 1954. The old man had figured that a Jeep like that would come in handy; they could use it to chase cattle or to haul back a deer after hunting, and it could even help them earn a couple of extra bucks if he fitted a blade to the front of it and hired himself out to clear his neighbors’ lanes and driveways of snow. His father had been right. He usually was, Ethan thought. Maybe that was part of the reason why Ethan still kept an old Jeep around the place, as a kind of rolling monument to his father’s foresight. 

Of course, Ethan hadn’t really needed the Jeep much lately. The snows just weren’t falling the way they used to. The cold didn’t settle long enough or deep enough to freeze the water lines that snaked from the house his family had lived in for six generations to the livestock pens anymore. It seemed to Ethan that the deep cold and snows of his childhood were now as unusual as January thaws used to be. 

Maybe it wasn’t climate change, at least not the way the liberals talked about it. But something was changing — call it the weather if you like — and it had been changing for a long time. And there was no reason to believe that it wasn’t going to continue. For how long? He didn’t know for sure. 

Ethan was a guy who measured time by the sort of work he did and when he did it, and by that reckoning, they hadn’t experienced the kind of winters that were common when he was a kid, not in any of the years since he had sold a chunk of land to a corporate hog operation and leased it back, with the proviso that he not only would plant 800 acres of hay and 600 of corn on the land, but would also handle snowplowing operations for them for $75 an hour. There hadn’t much snow to speak of since then. That was about fifteen years now. 

That previous winter had been an especially mild one, and all winter long Ethan had been thinking about the lessons his father had taught him — how in those years when the real deep freezes and the snows didn’t come, those years when the water lines never froze and they never had to haul water by hand to the hogs and cows, how those winters were, as often as not, followed by drought. Ethan’s father didn’t know the first thing about interdecadal variations in ocean temperatures, about how El Niño/La Niña cycles in the Pacific Ocean could cause flooding one year in the Mississippi River basin and drought the next. Hell, the old man didn’t even believe that glaciers really existed. But he knew how to read the signs on his own land. And he taught his son how to do the same thing. 

And all winter long, the signs were pointing toward drought.

Of course, 2012 was one of the worst drought years in US history, especially in Texas.  And more years like that are coming.  They're coming fast, along with brutal storms, powerful hurricanes, deadly wildfires, and all with devastating consequences.

Science doesn't require your belief any more than your scorn.

Fighting The Klep-Trump-Cracy

A lawsuit against Donald Trump over the Emoluments clause of the Constitution, previously left for dead, has been revived by an appellate court.

One of three major cases accusing President Donald Trump of violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause has been brought back from the dead. A panel of federal appellate judges ruled Friday that a group of restaurants in New York City can move forward with their claim that Trump is unfairly using his position as president to convince foreign governments to spend money at his own properties. The news comes amid a new flurry of questions about how Trump may be profiting from his presidency, with details emerging about the Air Force’s use of a Trump-owned Scottish resort to house service members and Vice President Mike Pence’s taxpayer-funded stay at Trump’s Irish resort—apparently at the suggestion of Trump himself.

When Trump took office, he refused to give up ownership or control of his business empire—which includes restaurants and hotels in New York City and Washington, D.C.—though he said he would no longer maintain day-to-day oversight. It’s an unprecedented situation: No other presidents, at least in recent history, have come to office with such an extensive business operation. Critics claimed that Trump was violating the emoluments clause—a section of the Constitution that prohibits the president from accepting payments from foreign governments—because foreign officials almost immediately began spending at the president’s hotels in New York and Washington.

In December 2017, in one of the first big court cases dealing with the issue, a federal judge in New York threw out a suit brought by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a group of restauranteurs in New York. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs’ argument—that their businesses had suffered because foreign governments were instead patronizing Trump-owned establishments in hopes of currying favor with the president—was too speculative. But in a 2-1 decision Friday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the trial judge, stating that the plaintiffs had a right to attempt to prove their argument. The court noted that numerous foreign officials have said in the press that they booked events at Trump properties to make a good impression. 

Notably, the 2nd Circuit panel also took aim at a ruling made by a different appellate court. In that case, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a separate emoluments cases, arguing that there was little the judicial branch could do to fix the problem. As long as the Trump name remained on his properties and foreign governments knew the president’s family would benefit, issuing an injunction against the president’s involvement wouldn’t help, the 4th Circuit judges reasoned. On Friday, the 2nd Circuit countered that even if the courts couldn’t completely solve the problem, they could still can take steps intended to eliminate any unfair advantage the president might have in encouraging foreign governments to patronize his businesses.

In addition to possibilities such as barring Trump businesses from offering services to foreign governments or requiring the president to set up a blind trust, the new ruling suggested another alternative: sunlight. “A court could require public disclosure of the President’s private business dealings with government officials through the Trump establishments, which may discourage Presidential action that appears to improperly reward such patronage,” the 2nd Circuit panel wrote.

Sunlight and shame is an option, but it won't work. If Trump is openly flouting the Constitution, there's only two remedies, voting him out, or impeachment and removal.

Neither one is anywhere near to being a close thing, either.

The Saudis And The Houthis

The four-year conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen was already awful, but things just got entirely serious with a successful Yemeni Houthi attack on the heart of the Kingdom's oil fields.

Saudi Arabia’s oil production was cut by half after a swarm of explosive drones struck at the heart of the kingdom’s oil industry and set the world’s biggest crude-processing plant ablaze.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have launched several drone attacks on Saudi targets, claimed responsibility.

Saudi Aramco had to cut production by as much as 5 million barrels a day as a precautionary measure after the attack on the Abqaiq plant, according to a person familiar with the matter. Most output will be restored within 48 hours, they said, asking not to be identified before an official announcement.

The biggest attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure since Iraq’s Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles into the kingdom during the first Gulf war, the drone strike highlights the vulnerability of the network of fields, pipeline and ports that supply 10% of the world’s crude oil. A prolonged outage at Abqaiq, where crude from several of the country’s largest oil fields is processed before being shipped to export terminals, would jolt global energy markets.

“Abqaiq is the heart of the system and they just had a heart attack,” said Roger Diwan, a veteran OPEC watcher at consultant IHS Markit. “We just don’t know the severity.”

Facilities at Abqaiq and the nearby Khurais oil field were attacked at 4 a.m. local time, state-run Saudi Press Agency reported, citing an unidentified interior ministry spokesman. It didn’t give further details and no further updates have been released.

“For the oil market if not global economy, Abqaiq is the single most valuable piece of real estate on planet earth,” Bob McNally, head of Rapid Energy Group in Washington.

Aramco, which pumped about 9.8 million barrels a day in August, will be able to keep customers supplied for several weeks by drawing on a global storage network. The Saudis hold millions of barrels in tanks in the kingdom itself, plus three strategic locations around the world: Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Okinawa in Japan, and Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt.

The International Energy Agency, responsible for managing the oil reserves of the world’s industrialized economies, said they were monitoring the situation, but the world was well-supplied with commercial stockpiles.

A satellite picture from a NASA near real-time imaging system published early on Saturday showed a huge smoke plume extending more than 50 miles over Abqaiq. Four additional plumes to the south-west appear close to the Ghawar oilfield, the world’s largest. While that field wasn’t attacked, its crude is sent to Abqaiq and the smoke could indicate flaring. When a facility stops suddenly, excess oil and natural gas is safely burned in large flaring stacks.​

For the Yemeni Houthis to hit the Saudis this hard is a major, major problem.  It guarantees that Riyadh will now go all out to wipe them off the face of the Earth.  That means going to the Trump regime to get more weapons, which we'll gladly sell to them.

On the other hand, raising the price of oil is exactly what the upcoming stock IPO of Saudi Aramco would need, and this attack is more than capable of putting oil over $100 a barrel for an extended period of time, especially if Aramco has difficulties getting production back on line.

Oh, and American consumers get screwed again.  We'll see where oil goes on Sunday and Monday.

Orange J. Looney, Will You Please Leave Now!

I've seen a lot of people ask questions along the line of "What if Trump isn't kidding about this dynasty/third term thing" and the general idea of Trump refusing to leave office if defeated.  I remember people bringing it up during the Bush years as a possibility, but not even Dubya or the Nameless One were willing to ever go that far.  

Donald Trump on the other hand, well, he keeps floating these trial balloons to his cult followers, and they don't seem to be worried at all.  If anything, they all seem to think that the only way Trump could ever lose is "massive voter fraud" anyway, in which case, they'd still believe he's the legitimate leader of the country.  Slate's legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick follows up on this theory with Georgetown Law professor Josh Geltzer, and the scenarios are pretty gruesome.

In February, Georgetown Law professor Josh Geltzer began to ponder aloud what would happen if President Donald Trump refused to leave office were he to be defeated in 2020. It sounded far-fetched, but Geltzer isn’t a conspiracy theorist. Actually, he served as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council and, prior to that, as deputy legal adviser to the NSC and counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security. When he wrote his essay suggesting that perhaps it was time to start preparing for if Trump, who has repeatedly shown a willingness to overstep his constitutional authority, simply refused to leave the Oval Office, he was met with silence. When Michael Cohen warned in his March testimony before Congress, “given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” he too was met with awkward silence. But the anxieties gradually began to grow. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fretted about this possibility in a May interview in the New York Times. When Politico probed the question this summer, it noted: “Constitutional experts and top Republican lawmakers dismiss the fears as nonsense, noting there are too many forces working against a sitting president simply clinging to power—including history, law and political pressure.” But commentators now seem less confident in those forces.

On Thursday, Edward Luce at the Financial Times noted how often Trump jokes about having a third term, observing that, because of Trump’s belief that he could face prosecution after he leaves office, “no other US president has faced the prospect of being re-elected or going to jail.” He added that for Trump, losing the 2020 election is an existential threat, and he has openly invited foreign interference, while Mitch McConnell refuses to even consider legislation to secure the vote. And even if Trump is truly joking when he tweets that he deserves to be credited two extra years in his existing term, years he believes were lost to the Mueller probe, or riffs on staying on the job long after he’d been term-limited out, the tweets send a dangerous message to his loyalists.

Lithwick and Geltzer have a pretty good conversation about where America is on this, and it's clear nobody's taking it seriously.  It's easy to dismiss this all as theater to feed Trump's endless ego and the unquenchable bloodlust of his base, but there's more to that.  I don't think Geltzer is a crank, either.  There's legitimate questions about Trump openly, consistently, and repeatedly seeing what he can get away with.

There's no check or balance on his power right now, according to Trump.  The mechanisms supposedly in place to stop Trump aren't being used.

It's far past time to think about the unthinkable.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

The mystery of the grand jury tasked with returning an indictment against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe continues.  We know the grand jury met Thursday and didn't return an indictment.  There's no record that the grand jury met again Friday, either.  I speculated that something was causing a delay, but I couldn't guess what it was.  The much more experienced crew at Lawfare takes a look at what's going on and offers up their own explanation.

The possibility of a criminal case against McCabe has smelled bad for a while. As one of us has spelled out in detail, this is not the kind of case that normally ends up as a criminal matter. While the Justice Department inspector general report that led to McCabe’s dismissal from the bureau is sharply critical of his conduct, indictments for false statements in internal Justice Department investigations, without some exacerbating factor, are exceedingly rare. This sort of misconduct is normally handled in internal disciplinary proceedings—and McCabe was already fired. Indeed, there’s nothing about the inspector general’s findings about McCabe that seem to make his case a likely candidate for a criminal disposition. What makes McCabe’s situation distinctive, rather, is the public campaign against him by the president of the United States, who has tweeted and spoken repeatedly about McCabe and publicly called for his prosecution.

Without saying a word in defense of McCabe’s conduct—which, if accurately described by the inspector general, is condemnable—there are good reasons to be anxious about a case that both seems far from the sort normally prosecuted and involves someone the president has singled out for persecution. There have also long been reasons to doubt the strength of the case, not the least of which is that two of the prosecutors who supervised it have dropped off the matter.

All of this is the background to whatever happened yesterday, when the grand jury met after McCabe’s lawyers had been informed that an indictment would be sought—and yet no indictment emerged.

It is hard to express what an incredibly rare occurrence a grand jury refusal to return what is called a “true bill” would be, if that is indeed what took place. It may not be quite accurate that, as the saying goes, a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, but the sentiment gets at something real. The Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that between October 2013 and September 2014—the last year these data were publicly available—the department investigated almost 200,000 cases and declined to prosecute roughly 31,500. Of the latter category, just five of those cases were declined because a grand jury returned no true bill—a percentage so small that the Bureau of Justice Statistics declines to actually write it out. Between October 2010 and September 2011, and October 2011 and September 2012, the proportion of declined cases explained by grand juries returning no true bills is a momentous 0.1 percent.

Again, we don’t know yet if that is what happened in McCabe’s case. There are possibilities other than the grand jury balking. It’s conceivable, for example, that prosecutors for some reason simply did not ask the grand jury to return an indictment on Thursday. This would be unusual: According to the Post, the grand jury panel originally investigating McCabe was reconvened on Thursday after an absence of months. One possibility is that this detail in the Post’s reporting may be incorrect and that the grand jury convened is a new one, not the one that already heard all the evidence—and that it thus needs to be read the transcripts of the earlier grand jury testimony. That could take time, and it would mean that the new grand jury might not be ready to reach a decision right away. But we have no reason to doubt the Post’s reporting on this point and can think of no obvious reason why, if the grand jury was recalled, the question of an indictment would not have been put to it.

The other possibility is that the grand jury did return an indictment but did so under seal. This would explain why McCabe’s defense team is not aware of any charges. But this possibility seems unlikely for a different reason: It’s far from clear why the government would want to keep the indictment off the public record, or why the court would permit it. Law enforcement typically may keep an indictment sealed only if it has a legitimate prosecutorial interest in doing so. It’s hard to imagine what legitimate prosecutorial interest could justify sealing an indictment of McCabe once major news organizations have already reported that charges against him are on the way and the Justice Department has informed his counsel that it is proceeding against him. McCabe is hardly likely to skip town.

Then there is a third possibility: that the grand jury actually declined to indict McCabe, instead returning no true bill.

This would be a very big deal—a huge rebuke to the Justice Department’s conduct of this case. Grand juries do not need to be unanimous. They need to have a quorum of their 23 members, and they require only a majority to return an indictment. They also don’t proceed by proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard at trial. Instead, an indictment issues on the lower standard of probable cause. In other words, if this is really what happened, it would mean that the Justice Department couldn’t even persuade a majority of people who have heard from all of the witnesses that there is even probable cause to proceed against McCabe.

Somebody knows, but whatever the result, it hasn't been leaked to the press.  We'll find out sooner or later.

Last Call For The Mustache Gets Back To Work

Don't feel bad for now former National Security Adviser John Bolton, as always with the people Trump stabs in the front, there's plenty of wingnut welfare waiting for them upon their return to the private sector, and Bolton landed on his feet almost immediately.

John Bolton, ousted this week as White House national security adviser, wasted no time in resuming his political activity and opening up his checkbook to support Republican candidates.

Bolton, who has a regular political action committee and a super PAC, announced Friday that he was donating $10,000 each to the reelection campaigns of five lawmakers: Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.).

“The experience that these incumbent members of Congress have provides them with a remarkable understanding and knowledge of the threats we face from international terrorism and rogue regimes such as Iran and North Korea,” Bolton said in a statement.

Bolton, who is known to support military intervention, reportedly clashed with President Trump over how to deal with international conflicts, particularly with the Iranian and North Korean governments. He resigned from his White House post Monday.

During his nearly year and a half at the White House, Bolton’s political account was sitting on $2.4 million cash on hand, mostly raised from a handful of wealthy GOP mega-donors, such as Robert Mercer, who gave him six-figure checks in 2017 and 2018.

Not only is Bolton personally fine, he's back in charge of his own super PAC, giving out cash to Republican campaigns.  He's already been folded back into the right-wing noise machine in under a work week.

Say what you will about Trump and Bolton, but that permanent ATM for guys in the club like Bolton is open 24/7, and I'm convinced it's that efficiency that keeps Trump's former employees from going full whistleblower when they leave.

Hotel, Motel, Trumpaday Inn, Con't

So it turns out it wasn't just one US Air National Guard crew in Scotland that went to stay at Donald Trump's Turnberry resort on the taxpayer dime.  It was 40 separate times this happened since 2015, as somebody at WIN THE MORNING actually decided to do some investigative journalism.

The tally represents the preliminary results of an Air Force review launched after POLITICO reported last week that an Air National Guard crew stayed at Turnberry in March. Congressional Democrats have also been investigating military stays at the property, but have yet to receive any information from the Pentagon.

The figure does not indicate how many of the stays have occurred since Trump became president. But the Air Force has significantly ramped up its overnight stops in Scotland under Trump after signing a contract with the Prestwick Airport — situated 20-plus miles from Turnberry — in the waning months of the Obama administration. Since 2015, the service has lodged crews in the area 659 times, meaning up to 6 percent of those stays were at Turnberry.

The figure also does not account for the total number of people the Air Force has put up at Trump Turnberry during those roughly 40 stays. POLITICO previously reported that Air Force crews of five to nearly 40 people have lodged at Trump's waterside property over at least four stays since September 2018.

The Air Force has said the refueling stops at Prestwick — and all related overnight stays — are well within Pentagon guidelines. Prestwick frequently books the Air Force crews’ lodging at Turnberry, the airport acknowledged in a statement, and often arranges for their transportation to and from the resort. Officials have also said the Turnberry bookings fall within acceptable rates for military travel, as military members are charged a government rate as low as $130 per night.

But the Air Force did concede that the appearance of staying at the president’s posh property might create a negative perception, and it has launched an internal review that will assess the “guidance associated with the use of civil airports and lodging selection for aircrew at en route locations,” according to a memo issued Monday.

Still, the issue is the latest example of the intersection of Trump’s business interests and what used to be unremarkable government policies.

Air Force crews have been lodging at Turnberry because of the increasing importance of Prestwick Airport for refueling military aircraft. In 2015, the Air Force made 95 stops there, lodging in the area 40 times. But through August of this year, the Air Force had made 259 stops at Prestwick, staying overnight nearby 220 times.

The roughly 40 stays at Turnberry are likely to raise eyebrows among congressional Democrats, who have said the practice raises conflict-of-interest concerns and might violate the Constitution's domestic emoluments clause, which prohibits the president from receiving money from the federal government other than his salary.

So this was happening as candidate Donald Trump was running for office in 2015, GOP nominee Trump was on the campaign trail in 2016, and after he won and took office in 2017 and since.

It's amazing how nobody bothered to look into this until now.

Spies Like Us, Con't

Remember those mobile phone call-intercepting "Stingray" devices found around Washington DC near the White House just after Trump took office? We first heard about them in June of last year.

The Department of Homeland Security last year found evidence of devices that can secretly catch cell phone communications around the White House and other “potentially sensitive” areas of Washington, D.C., a letter made public Friday reveals.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said that the letter, written to him by Homeland Security official Christopher Krebs, is “more evidence” that Americans are “being spied on, tracked, or scammed,” possibly by foreign spy agencies in some cases.

Wyden said phone companies and the Federal Communications Commission should be taking action to strengthen cell phone security on the heels of the letter.

Homeland Security said sensors it deployed from January 2017 through November spotted activity that appeared consistent with the devices, which can monitor individual cellphone calls and texts. Known formally as International Mobile Security Identity devices, they are commonly known as StingRays.

Such devices are known to be used by foreign spies.

And then the mystery went away, disappeared into the memory hole.  Until now, it seems. Just a reminder this morning that Russia isn't the only intelligence friend or foe that the United States has, not by a long shot.  Our good friends in Tel Aviv are also very fond of the modern Reaganism, "Trust, but spy on them anyway."

The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.

The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as “StingRays,” mimic regular cell towers to fool cellphones into giving them their locations and identity information. Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.

The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates — though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.

Trump is reputed to be lax in observing White House security protocols. POLITICO reported in May 2018 that the president often used an insufficiently secured cellphone to communicate with friends and confidants. The New York Times subsequently reported in October 2018 that “Chinese spies are often listening” to Trump’s cellphone calls, prompting the president to slam the story as “so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it.” (A former official said Trump has had his cellphone hardened against intrusion.)

By then, as part of tests by the federal government, officials at the Department of Homeland Security had already discovered evidence of the surveillance devices around the nation’s capital, but weren’t able to attribute the devices to specific entities. The officials shared their findings with relevant federal agencies, according to a letter a top Department of Homeland Security official, Christopher Krebs, wrote in May 2018 to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

Based on a detailed forensic analysis, the FBI and other agencies working on the case felt confident that Israeli agents had placed the devices, according to the former officials, several of whom served in top intelligence and national security posts.
That analysis, one of the former officials said, is typically led by the FBI’s counterintelligence division and involves examining the devices so that they “tell you a little about their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them, and that will help get you to what the origins are.” For these types of investigations, the bureau often leans on the National Security Agency and sometimes the CIA (DHS and the Secret Service played a supporting role in this specific investigation).

“It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible,” said a former senior intelligence official.

An Israeli Embassy spokesperson, Elad Strohmayer, denied that Israel placed the devices and said: “These allegations are absolute nonsense. Israel doesn’t conduct espionage operations in the United States, period.”

Sure.  And Israel doesn't have a nuclear weapons, either.

If any other country on Earth had been caught doing this, it would have been a massive international incident.  But the Israelis got busted and it didn't matter.  Now, I'm sure whatever intelligence Netanyahu wanted, he got by asking.  But at least in January 2017, the plan was tapping Trump's unsecured cell phone.

Here's the question though.  Why are we finding out about this now?  Maybe this has something to do with it.

ICE wants to hack more phones. A lot more.

The contentious immigration enforcement agency has expanded its work with Cellebrite, an Israeli data extraction company best known for offering to crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone at the behest of the FBI in 2016. Cellebrite reportedly broke into the device for the Bureau, though the FBI disputed that story. The company’s technology can bypass most smartphones’ locks and download data from all their apps for law enforcement.

According to a recent federal filing, ICE will pay Cellebrite between $30 and $35 million for “universal forensic extraction devices” (UFED) and “accessories licenses, training and support services.” The contract, worth more than ten times the value of the $2.2 million agreement between the two agencies signed in 2017, will last between one and five years. The request originated from ICE’s Dallas office, according to a notice of intent posted June 24th. The synopsis of the contract also states that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and its Cyber Crimes Center (C3) plan to use Cellebrite’s technology. Within ICE, HSI leads investigations into child trafficking, drug smuggling, and fraud.

A single UFED retails for $5,000 to $15,000, according to Forbes, meaning ICE could be buying as many as 6,000 the devices from Cellebrite.
It’s unclear what use ICE will put Cellebrite’s technology to and where it will do so. When The Daily Beast contacted ICE Contracting Officer Tracy Riley for details, Riley said she would “absolutely” not provide more details about the contract. Cellebrite did not respond to a request for comment. ICE’s office of public affairs responded to The Daily Beast but did not yet provide a comment.

CBP officers searched the devices of more than 30,000 international travelers in 2017—10,000 more than the year prior, according to the most recently available data (ICE does not make such data available). In response to a lawsuit filed against the two agencies last year, CBP and ICE said their searches were “a crucial tool for detecting evidence relating to terrorism and other national security matters” and “can also reveal information about financial and commercial crimes.”

Privacy advocates have decried warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border for allegedly violating constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizures.

Trump looks the other way on the spying, and the US gets cellphone cracking tech from Israel in return...or maybe Israel threatened to kill the contract if the White House made a fuss.

But again, somebody leaked the Stingray story.  Three "former US officials".  Within 24 hours of news that Andrew McCabe is probably facing federal indictments.

This is far from over, folks.

StupidiNews!

• With a month left in the fiscal year, the federal deficit topped $1 trillion dollars on top of last year's $900 billion as the GOP tax cut continues to sink the economy.
• A new Moody's report finds Trump's China tariffs have already cost the country 300,000 jobs this year as White House officials are looking to delay additional tariffs set to go into effect in October.
• The Trump regime is set to revoke California's automotive emissions waiver under the Clean Air Act as the White House continues to roll back as many Obama-era environmental protections as it can.
• Donald Trump claims former National Security Adviser John Bolton, fired this week by tweet, was holding Trump back on dealing with additional measures against Venezuela and Cuba.
• Although distant planet K2-18b is a Neptune-like world without a solid surface, astronomers say the planet's atmosphere appears to have water vapor and even clouds.

Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

As I said last month, the Barr "Justice" Department is coming for Andrew McCabe and it's 100% happening at Donald Trump's order.  The decks have been cleared and the charges are most likely coming.

Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe’s legal team has been notified that the Justice Department authorized prosecutors to seek an indictment against him for lying to investigators, according to two people familiar with the matter, though it remains unclear whether McCabe will be charged.

McCabe’s team was notified of Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen’s decision in a message Wednesday, which said, “The Department rejected your appeal of the United States Attorney’s Office’s decision in this matter. Any further inquiries should be directed to the United States Attorney’s Office,” one person familiar with the matter said.

McCabe’s team was told last month that line prosecutors had recommended charges, and later, that D.C. U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu had endorsed that decision, a person familiar with the matter said. Last month, McCabe’s team had appealed to Rosen in what was considered one of the final efforts to persuade officials not to move forward and seek an indictment from a grand jury. The legal team had been waiting to hear back.

The notification comes as a federal grand jury investigating McCabe was suddenly recalled this week after a months-long hiatus — an indication its members would likely be asked soon to consider bringing charges. But the panel was let go Thursday with no immediate signs of an indictment — a sign they might have balked, been asked to return later or filed a determination under seal.
To bring an indictment, prosecutors would have to convince 12 of the 23 grand jurors to sign onto the decision. If grand jurors turn them down, it is possible for prosecutors to call in a new group, though they would then have to start the process over.

The decision, whenever it is made clear, is likely to inflame partisan divisions and once again thrust the Justice Department to the center of a political combat zone.

It's possible that the grand jury refused to return any indictments, but more likely the grand jury has a lot of work to do, and it will take a few days for the full slate of charges to be worked through.  Certainly the Trump regime wants to go through with charges as McCabe's appeal was rejected.

They'll get their charges eventually, maybe as soon as tomorrow or Monday.

Again, McCabe will not be the last Obama holdover involved in the Mueller investigation to be charged.

Gunmerica, Corporate Citizen Edition

Republicans constantly blocking gun safety and background check laws are starting to get the attention of corporate America, with 145 CEOs signing on to a letter demanding GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell act on pending House legislation passed by Nancy Pelosi and House Dems.

Signatories to a letter sent Thursday include the heads of such major retailers, tech firms and financial institutions as Levi Strauss, Twitter, Uber, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Yelp, Bain Capital and Reddit. The letter pointed to mass shootings in recent weeks — including those in El Paso; Dayton, Ohio, and Gilroy, Calif. — but also called out a broader epidemic of gun violence that kills 100 Americans each day and wounds hundreds more.

“As leaders of some of America’s most respected companies and those with significant business interests in the United States, we are writing to you because we have a responsibility and obligation to stand up for the safety of our employees, customers and all Americans in the communities we serve across the country,” the executives wrote.

“Doing nothing about America’s gun violence crisis is simply unacceptable and it is time to stand with the American public on gun safety."

[Read the letter here]

Corporate America has increasingly weighed in on — or been forced to reckon with — pressing social and political issues such as immigration and abortion. With regard to gun violence, companies in the retail and banking sectors have considered whether to overhaul their policies or distance themselves from the vast firearms industry. Gun sellers have come under acute pressure to limit the weapons sales, especially since 24 people were killed at two separate shootings in Walmart stores this summer.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found Americans across party and demographic lines overwhelmingly support expanded background checks for gun buyers and allowing law enforcement to temporarily seize weapons from troubled individuals. The poll found 86 percent of Americans support implementing “red flag” provisions that allow guns to be taken from people judged to be a danger to themselves or others. In addition, 89 percent support expanding federal background checks to cover private sales and gun-show transactions.

Still, some companies have faced backlash after changing their gun policies or speaking out on the issue. Sales at Dick’s Sporting Goods declined after the company overhauled its sales rules following the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., last year, with some customers calling for a boycott and dozens of employees walking off the job. More recently, as Walmart came under scrutiny after two of its stores became crime scenes, the National Rifle Association and gun rights groups encouraged members to stop shopping at retailers that tightened their open carry policies.

Specifically, Thursday’s letter urged the Senate to pass a bill requiring background checks on all gun sales plus a strong red-flag law that would allow courts to issue extreme-risk protection orders. Earlier this year, the Democratic House passed legislation that would require background checks on all gun sales, including unlicensed sales arranged at gun shows or online. But similar efforts have stalled in the Senate.

Walmart didn't sign this particular letter, but this is still a pretty big array of CEOs across multiple sectors of the economy.  I don't know how much this will affect the Senate, probably zero, but it would have far more effect if any of these companies stopped giving money to Republican Senate candidates.

Nothing will come of this, of course, but it remains notable.

Deportation Nation, Con't

As I've been warning for years now, as soon as the Trump regime had the logistics in place for mass detentions and deportations like it has been building for the last 18 months, with camps, ICE recruits, and the private for-profit prison industry leading the way to run the show, the Trump regime was always going to eventually use that machinery on US citizens it felt were undesirable. 

Now the regime is signaling the time to turn that dark power against the US people has arrived, and the purge will start with America's homeless population.

A team of Trump administration officials toured a California facility once used by the Federal Aviation Administration this week as they searched for a potential site to relocate homeless people, according to three government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private tour.

President Trump has directed aides to launch a major crackdown on homelessness in California, spurring an effort across multiple government agencies to determine how to deal with sprawling tent camps on the streets of Los Angeles and other cities, officials said.

Trump is expected to visit California on Tuesday and Wednesday. One administration official with knowledge of Trump’s visit to California said there were discussions about an announcement related to California’s growing homeless problem next week, but a second official said that any decision could be premature and that it was not on the current schedule for the trip.

Trump has asked aides to figure out “how the hell we can get these people off the streets,” one senior administration official said.

The FAA facility toured by administration officials is located in or near Los Angeles, but its precise name or whereabouts — or whether it is a current or former government facility — were not immediately known.

It also remains unclear how the federal government could accomplish getting homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles, or what legal authority officials would use to do so.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the administration is considering razing tent camps, creating new temporary facilities or refurbishing government facilities as part of Trump’s directive on homelessness. The changes would attempt to give the federal government a larger role in supervising housing and health care for residents.

Pay attention.  This is the part where people disappear off the streets and get put in facilities run by ICE, citizenship be damned.  We'll get rid of homelessness by rounding up the homeless and putting them in camps.

And then maybe they go away.

Some administration officials expressed skepticism that the federal government wanted to get in the business of operating a large homeless shelter in Los Angeles. There were also questions about the feasibility of turning the FAA facility into a shelter and how it could legally be done.

One administration official with knowledge of Trump’s visit to California said there were discussions about a homelessness announcement next week.

Senior administration officials said that forcing people into new facilities was not under consideration, with one official telling The Washington Post: “We’re not rounding people up or anything yet. You guys in the media get too ahead of yourselves.”

We're not rounding people up or anything yet.

It's like a bad sci-fi cable movie, only it's real.

Los Angeles officials were blindsided by news of the sweeping plans being considered by the administration for the city’s homeless population. Some had thought White House officials were arriving this week to simply learn more about the issues.

The administration’s delegation divulged little information to city officials about what they were doing in Los Angeles when they were not with city representatives.

“They were very cagey with us about what they were doing,” said a Los Angeles city official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “Our only understanding from them coming into this was they wanted to poke around and learn more about what we were doing out here. All this stuff about cracking down and sweeping people out of skid row was a total surprise to us.”

The Trump administration team also met for an open-ended discussion about homelessness with the Los Angeles police union, according to an official with direct knowledge of the meeting, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Gotta get the cops in on the fun.  If you ever entertained the thought that this was going to stop with undocumented immigrants, have I got hundreds of years of authoritarian history for you.

StupidiNews!

• The last missing victim of last weekend's deadly dive boat fire in California has been located by officials, the death toll from the flames and the boat sinking reached 34.
• As expected, the US Supreme Court lifted a federal judge's injunction on the Trump regime's new asylum rules blocking nearly all Central American entrants into the country.
• Palestinian demonstrators vowed to fight Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's re-election pledge to annex all of the West Bank, saying Israel cannot win.
• The Trump regime is looking at banning flavored e-cigarette products entirely after FDA reports showing teenagers suffering from lung cancer after vaping.
• Video game retailer GameStop says it will close around 190 of its 5,700 stores in the next six months, coming on top of almost 200 closures in 2019 and a "much larger" number over the next two years.