Last Call For Pardon The Corruption

Donald Trump expertly trolling America today with a series of pardons and commutations for some of the country's most infamous white collar criminals and political crooks, and of course they just happen to be white guys.

President Donald Trump announced a host of pardons and commutations on Tuesday, ranging from Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor jailed on corruption charges, to Bernie Kerik, the former New York police commissioner.

"Yes, we have commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich. He served eight years in jail, a long time," Trump told reporters before boarding Air Force One en route to Los Angeles.

The commutation was one of a flurry of legal actions Trump took Tuesday, including pardons for Kerik, financier Michael Milken and former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo, Jr. And they came days before the scheduled sentencing of Roger Stone in federal court in D.C., amid widespread speculation about whether the president will pardon his former longtime aide.

Stone was at the center of last week's drama inside the Justice Department, with four career prosecutors quitting his case after Attorney General William Barr overruled their sentencing recommendation.

Stone's looming fate has drawn Trump's condemnation in recent weeks, with the president calling it a "miscarriage of justice!" on Twitter and excoriating the prosecutors and judge for their handling of the case. On Tuesday, he appeared to echo a Fox News contributor’s call for a new trial.

Trump's clemency moves furthered a pattern in which those seeking pardons have aggressively lobbied the president's allies and associates, jumping ahead of the formal process by which the White House usually reviews pardon requests. And Tuesday's announcement by the White House offered a few tantalizing hints as to who might be the next on the president's list.

Now Trump also pardoned or commuted the sentences of some less infamous people who have been pressing for one in the media through criminal justice reform:

Ariel Friedler hacked into his competitors’ computers. Paul Pogue filed false income tax statements. David Safavian is a Republican lawyer who was convicted of perjury in connection with the Abramoff corruption scandal. Angela Stanton “spent time in Georgia prisons for things like felony embezzlement, theft and fraud” but since her release in 2005 has become a best-selling author and the creator of Reclaim It Albany.

Tynice Nicole Hall was convicted of conspiracy and drug offenses involving powder and crack cocaine because her boyfriend sold drugs out of her house. Crystal Munoz was convicted of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 1000 kilograms of marijuana. Judith Negron received a 35-year sentence as part of a Medicare fraud racket.

Hey, but he got all these names from FOX News State TV anyway.

Unsurprisingly, a key influence that led to Trump’s decision, particularly as it related to Blagojevich, was Fox News. The same could partly be said of the decision on Kerik, a frequent Fox News guest whose pardon was backed by several of the network’s stars; Milken, whose pardon was supported by Fox Business Network host and Trump loyalist Maria Bartiromo; and Angela Stanton, an occasional pro-Trump TV pundit whose pardon was pushed by frequent Fox News guest and evangelical leader Alveda King.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Trump made the Fox News connection abundantly clear, telling reporters that he decided to commute the rest of Blagojevich’s sentence because he’d seen the ex-governor’s wife Patti Blagojevich pleading her husband’s case on Fox.

“I watched his wife on television,” Trump declared, adding that he didn’t know the ex-governor “very well” despite Blagojevich’s appearances on The Celebrity Apprentice years ago.

In mid-2018, the president repeatedly asked close advisers to explore a Blagojevich pardon and, while doing so, emphatically referenced clips he’d seen on Fox, including a segment on informal Trump adviser Jeanine Pirro’s weekend show, according to two sources who independently discussed the matter with the president at the time.

According to liberal media-watchdog Media Matters for America, Patti Blagojevich took to Fox programming in April 2018 to push for her husband’s sentence to be reduced, making at least seven appearances on some of Trump’s favorite primetime shows such as Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle.

The hosts, meanwhile, didn’t even bother with subtlety during the interviews. For instance, Tucker Carlson asked Mrs. Blagojevich what she would say “if you could speak to the president.”

Of course, money talks too.

For those who didn’t receive the Fox News treatment, it appears that in at least one case, cold hard cash did the talking. Paul Pogue, a construction company owner who pleaded guilty to underpaying his taxes by $473,000 and received three years probation, was issued a full pardon and clemency by the president.

According to FEC filings, Pogue’s family has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct contributions and in-kind air travel to the Trump Victory Committee. Beginning in August 2019, Ben Pogue—CEO of Pogue Construction and son of Paul Pogue—and his wife Ashleigh made over $200,000 in contributions to the campaign.
In August alone, Ben Pogue donated $85,000 to Trump Victory while Ashleigh Pogue contributed $50,000 that month. The following month, Ben Pogue made an in-kind air travel contribution of $75,404.40. The couple also made several large donations to the Republican National Committee and each donated $5,600 to Donald Trump for President Inc.

On the day of their first donation to the Trump campaign, Ashleigh posted an Instagram photo of her and her husband posing with Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at the Hamptons.

But the real message is a clear as a Nordic spring lake: pardons for those who Mueller put behind bars are now coming, and for everyone else, justice is for sale if the price is right.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump regime continue to purge everyone involved in the House Democratic impeachment investigation.  Some are leaving out of concern for the Justice Department under Bill Barr, most are being forced out. I'm not sure which category he latest departure falls into just yet, but the lawyer who handled the Ukraine whistleblower complaint against Trump is now leaving the DNI's office.

The top lawyer for the intelligence community, whose decision to block a whistleblower's complaint about President Donald Trump and Ukraine from reaching Congress helped jumpstart the impeachment inquiry, is resigning from his post, officials confirmed.

Jason Klitenic, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will depart early next month, according to an agency spokeswoman. His exit comes as the acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, nears a March 11 deadline to depart as well. Federal law prevents Maguire from serving in an acting capacity beyond that date, meaning a new director must be nominated and confirmed by then, or Trump must pick a new acting official.
No official reason for Klitenic's departure has been provided. But he became the subject of scrutiny in September when he consulted with the Justice Department and determined that a whistleblower complaint deemed "urgent" by an internal watchdog would not be provided to Congress. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) demanded access to the complaint after learning it had been blocked — and that it likely pertained to Trump or his senior advisers — and the furor that ensued led to a cascade of support for impeachment in the House.

The Trump administration's initial refusal to provide the complaint, as well as a string of media reports suggesting the complaint described wrongdoing by Trump in his posture toward Ukraine, ultimately led Speaker Nancy Pelosi to open an impeachment inquiry in late September. Within days of her decision, Maguire testified to Congress and the whistleblower complaint was released publicly. Trump also decided to release the readout of a July 25 call with Ukraine's president that became a central piece of evidence in the impeachment inquiry.

Schiff first asked the DNI for the whistleblower complaint after the agency's inspected general characterized it as an "urgent" and credible matter. Typically federal laws trigger a requirement that such complaints are forwarded to Congress. But in a Sept. 13 letter, Klitenic replied that rather than honor the inspector general's assessment, DNI consulted with the Justice Department, which overruled the inspector general and determined the complaint did not meet the threshold required to share it with lawmakers.

"Based on those consultations, we determined that the allegations did not fall within the statutory definition of an 'urgent concern' and that the statute did not require the complaint to be transmitted to the intelligence committees," Klitenic wrote on Sept. 13.

He also argued that the whistleblower had no legal right to approach Congress directly with his concerns. "We believe that it is important to apply the statute as it was written, because reading it to give a complainant a unilateral right to forward a complaint to the congressional intelligence committees would raise serious constitutional questions," Klitenic argued.

Klitenic's letter also hinted at Trump's role in the complaint, noting that it involved "confidential and potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community." Schiff said at the time that such a description could only apply to Trump or his top aides.

So is Klitenic leaving because he failed to kill the whistleblower complaint that led to the impeachment of Trump, or is he leaving because he sees who Trump truly is?

Maybe both.  We don't know.

That should scare everyone.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

The nation's largest voluntary group of federal judges has called an emergency meeting for today on how to handle Attorney General Bill Barr stepping in last week to take control of federal cases involving Donald Trump.

A national association of federal judges has called an emergency meeting Tuesday to address growing concerns about the intervention of Justice Department officials and President Donald Trump in politically sensitive cases, the group’s president said Monday. 

Philadelphia U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who heads the independent Federal Judges Association, said the group “could not wait” until its spring conference to weigh in on a deepening crisis that has enveloped the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr. 

“There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about,” Rufe told USA TODAY. “We’ll talk all of this through.” 

Rufe, nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, said the group of more than 1,000 federal jurists called for the meeting last week after Trump criticized prosecutors' initial sentencing recommendation for his friend Roger Stone and the Department of Justice overruled them. 

Trump also took a swipe at the federal judge who is set to preside at Stone’s sentencing hearing Thursday. 

"Is this the judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something not even mobster Al Capone had to endure?” Trump tweeted last week, referring to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson. “How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!" 

Jackson jailed Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, prior to his convictions in two separate financial fraud cases after he sought to tamper with potential witnesses.

Rufe said the judges' association is “not inclined to get involved with an ongoing case,” but she voiced strong support for Jackson. 

“I am not concerned with how a particular judge will rule,” Rufe said, praising Jackson's reputation. “We are supportive of any federal judge who does what is required.” 

The unusual concern voiced by the judges’ group comes in the wake of an equally unusual protest. More than 2,000 former Justice Department officials called on Barr to resign Sunday, claiming his handling of the Stone case "openly and repeatedly flouted" the principle of equal justice.

If the FJA decides to call for Barr's resignation, things could potentially get ugly, but I don't think they will.  Remember, Mitch McConnell's assembly line of scores of judicial confirmations mean Trump has appointed nearly a quarter of all currently-serving federal judges in just 3 years, and that has to include a healthy percentage of the FJA's membership.

Frankly, I don't expect a single Trump-appointed judge to raise a finger, either so best-case scenario out of this is a mealy-mouthed position of "deep concern" (heaven forfend!) voiced in a heavily watered down statement that Barr will wipe Trump's ass with before chucking it in a gold-plated toilet.

I'd like to think this would lead to Barr's imminent resignation, but even if that somehow miraculously happens, McConnell will make sure Trump has an even worse AG confirmed within weeks, and the new AG won't be shy about locking Democrats up, either.

Most likey, Barr will respond defiantly and nothing will happen.

StupidiNews!

• Denny Hamlin took his third Daytona 500 win Monday as the NASCAR race was rained out on Sunday, driver and 2008 Daytona winner Ryan Newman was hospitalized after a final lap crash.
• A new study finds that while overall the number of US atheists is on the rise, Generation Z isn't any more or less religious than their Millennial counterparts.
• The Trump regime's war on Chinese tech giant Huawei continues as Washington is considering new trade barriers that would cut the networking company off from Taiwan's largest chipmaker, TSMC.
• Former National Security adviser John Bolton is warning that the Trump regime may censor or block his forthcoming book completely over "national security concerns".
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says he'll donate $10 billion to help stop climate change, Bezos has already pledged that his company will be net emissions-free by 2030.

Last Call For Elephant Wrenches In The Works

Republican dark money is trying to wreck NC Democrats and their chances of beating GOP Sen. Thom Tillis in November by backing a long-shot Dem in order to hurt primary frontrunner Cal Cunningham.

Democrats are growing alarmed about Republican attempts to prop up an insurgent liberal candidate in North Carolina — fearful that GOP meddling will undercut the party’s prospects in a key Senate contest.

What seems like a generic campaign ad pitching Erica Smith, a North Carolina state senator, as “the only proven progressive” in the state’s high-profile Senate race is actually part of a multimillion dollar investment from a mysterious super PAC — the innocuously named "Faith and Power PAC" — with apparent ties to Republicans.
The ad campaign, which began last week ahead of the March 3 primary, immediately disrupted the bid from frontrunner and Democratic leadership favorite Cal Cunningham to emerge from his primary and face incumbent GOP Sen. Thom Tillis in November.

The North Carolina race is critical: Without beating Tillis, Democrats' path back to the Senate majority is nearly impossible. Cunningham, a former state lawmaker and military veteran, lost a Senate primary in 2010, and Democrats are eager to avoid the same result this year. But things are getting messy — and expensive.

Smith, whose low-budget campaign has otherwise posed little threat to Cunningham, has denounced the intervention. But the episode threatens Democrats’ hopes of getting the better-funded, more moderate Cunningham through the primary unscathed.

“It’s so brazen and obvious. … They recognize that Cunningham is a strong candidate, and they’re worried about holding onto that seat,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “When Republicans are weighing in for somebody, they’ve made the judgment that they’re worried about Cal, and they’re not worried about her.”

Privately, Senate Democrats have been discussing the matter internally, with one fretting that Smith is “unelectable” in a general election and will be painted as a Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) acolyte. Few in the party want to criticize Smith publicly since no matter who emerges as Democrats’ nominee, North Carolina is a must-win to take back the Senate.

But the GOP infusion of money is increasing worries about disarray.

“You want your strongest candidate. And if she’s not the strongest candidate, yes, it makes it much tougher,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who supports Cunningham. “There’s just too much money in politics, and they spend it on trying to get the weakest candidate to run against” Tillis.

Sorry folks, NC is nearly as conservative as Kentucky.  I grew up there and lived in the state for 25 years.  I'd love to see Erica Smith beat Tillis and be the first black woman in the US Senate from my home state, just to see everyone's head explode.

But it's not going to happen.  Smith herself is the first to point out this is Republican douchebaggery.  This is still the state where Jesse Helms beat Harvey Gantt with one of the most racist campaign ads in history and not much has changed in 30 years since.

Cunningham is the best shot we have, and we have to beat Tillis to get the Senate away from Mitch McConnell, period.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Armed white supremacist terrorists showing up at state capitols is a tactic that apparently works well, because Virginia lawmakers are now balking at new firearms legislation.

A Virginia Senate committee killed a bill on Monday that would have banned the sale of assault-style weapons and possession of high-capacity magazines, handing gun rights activists a rare win in a Capitol that Democrats won last year on the promise of sweeping gun control.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) backed the legislation, part of a package of eight gun-control measures he advanced after a shooter killed 12 people at a Virginia Beach municipal building on May 31. Republicans’ refusal to act on those bills last summer, in a special session that they gaveled out in 90 minutes, became a rallying cry for Democrats in November elections. They flipped the state House and Senate blue for the first time in a generation.

The House has passed all eight of Northam's bills. But four Democrats — Sens. R. Creigh Deeds (Bath), John S. Edwards (Roanoke), Chap Petersen (Fairfax) and Scott A. Surovell (Fairfax) — sided with Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject the assault weapons bill for the year. On a 10-to-5 vote, the committee sent the measure to the state's Crime Commission for study.

“Bunch of wimps,” Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) said from the dais, referring to the four.

Philip Van Cleave, the Virginia Citizens Defense League president who organized a huge gun rights rally in Richmond last month and encouraged “Second Amendment sanctuary” declarations across the state, celebrated on Twitter.

"VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Van Cleave tweeted. "Everybody's hard work, Lobby Day, and sanctuary movement paid off!"
Northam was "disappointed" with the vote but "fully expects the Crime Commission to give this measure the detailed review that Senators called for. We will be back next year," spokeswoman Alena Yarmosky said in an email.

House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) — who had challenged the Senate to pass all eight bills in a speech over the weekend — reacted more sharply.

"The Democratic platform last fall was very clear," she said in a statement. "Limiting access to weapons of war used in mass murder was a key part of that platform. The House of Delegates delivered on our promise to take action to keep those weapons off our streets. To call today's vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee a disappointment would be an understatement."

It's not all bad news though.  Of the other seven gun safety bills that passed Virginia's general assembly, five passed in the state Senate, including universal background checks, a "red flag" law, allowing the government to ban weapons in public buildings and events, limiting handgun purchases to one per month (something that actually was in effect until Republicans overturned it in 2012), and a law to strengthen prohibiting firearms access to a person under a protective order.

In addition to the assault weapon and magazine ban, a measure requiring a gun owner to report a missing firearm to police within 24 hours and a felony measure that would raise the age of "child access prevention" when leaving a gun unattended with a minor being able to access it from 14 to 18 both failed.  Those three bills were easily the most controversial, and they all were blocked by state Senate Democrats who wimped out.

And if the name Creigh Deeds sounds familiar, he's the Democratic candidate for Governor who lost to Bob McDonnell in 2009 in a landslide, who went on to become a precursor to Trump corruption.

 

The Dems' Big Gamble On Nevada

I'm not sure how bad things are actually going to be on Saturday in Nevada for the Democratic caucuses, but all the information points towards an Iowa-level disaster. Again.

Anxiety is rising over the possibility of another tech-induced meltdown at the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Saturday.

In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 election, including insufficient training for a newly-adopted electronic vote-tally system and confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses. There are also unanswered questions about the security of Internet connections at some 2,000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central “war room” set up by the Nevada Democratic Party.
Some volunteers who will help run caucuses at precinct locations said they have not been trained on iPads that the party purchased to enter and transmit vote counts. Party officials scrambled to streamline their vote reporting system — settling on Google forms accessible through a saved link on the iPads — after scrapping a pair of apps they’d been planning to use until a similar app caused the fiasco in Iowa two weeks ago.

The volunteers also said the party has not provided sufficient training on how to use the Google form that will compile vote totals, a complicated process in a caucus.

The concerns, which were described on condition of anonymity because the volunteers are not authorized to speak to reporters, come at a perilous moment for the Democratic Party. As the third state on the primary calendar and the first with a significant minority population, Nevada holds huge importance in the nomination contest. The debacle in Iowa cost one state party chairman his job and threatened the standing of the national party chairman, while casting doubts about whether the results from party-run caucuses can be trusted.

Nevada Democratic officials insist they have everything under control. But a repeat of Iowa — or any kind of breakdown — would be disastrous.

One volunteer who has worked on past caucuses in Nevada said the Google form that will be used to input vote totals wasn’t even mentioned during a training session for precinct chairs late last week.

“We weren’t told at all about it,” the person said.

The iPads weren’t discussed until more than halfway through the presentation, the volunteer said, when someone asked how early vote totals would be added to the totals compiled live at each precinct. The person leading the training said not to worry because the iPads would do the math for them.
“There were old ladies looking at me like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have iPads,’” the volunteer told POLITICO.

After sitting through the two-hour training session, the person predicted the caucus would be a “complete disaster.”

Another volunteer, who will be in a senior position at a caucus site, said that as of Feb. 11 the party had failed to provide updated training sessions for caucus day to many people who’d been preparing to use the now-scrapped apps. Recently, the volunteer did take a refresher course for early voting, but it “diverged significantly” from the initial training. “We were practically starting from scratch,” the volunteer said.

The volunteer received no hands-on training with the iPads before handling one physically for the first time at an early-voting site on Saturday. As a result, the first two hours of early voting were “disastrous,” the person said, as volunteers struggled to get iPads to function properly and connect to the Internet.

Moreover, “There are [Democratic voters] that don't even know that early voting is happening,” the volunteer said, blaming the party for failing to spread the word adequately. Early voting in Nevada started on Saturday and will continue through the end of the day Tuesday.

The combination of states being starved of election funds by the Trump regime and in turn the states choosing to go cheap with technology replacing rigorous paper ballot matching, plus technophobia from older voters and volunteers doesn't bode well.

Caucuses are bad anyway.  Nevada needs to be forced to ditch theirs too, and if it does go belly-up as I think it will, it'll be the best evidence yet that caucuses need to be abandoned.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• The death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus is now over 1,800 with some 71,000 cases globally as American passengers on a quarantined Japanese cruise ship are being flown home.
• Israel bombed Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip over the weekend as Israeli forces have canceled easing of the blockade on Palestinian neighborhoods after rocket fire from Gaza.
• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is canceling a trip to Barbados as anti-pipeline disruptions by First Nations activists have now shut down Canada's largest railroad across the eastern provinces.
• French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is warning the UK that post-Brexit trade talks with the EU will be "brutal" and that the two sides would likely "rip each other apart".
• The US government says it will take all available steps to combat North Korean malware as a massive hacking operation by Pyongyang against US companies was exposed last week.

Last Call For Lowering The Barr, Con't

The calls are getting louder for Attorney General Bill Barr to resign, but it's all meaningless before the Trump regime's growing autocracy.

More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William P. Barr on Sunday to step down after he intervened last week to lower the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr.

They also urged current government employees to report any signs of unethical behavior at the Justice Department to the agency’s inspector general and to Congress.

“Each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice,” the former Justice Department lawyers, who came from across the political spectrum, wrote in an open letter on Sunday. Those actions, they said, “require Mr. Barr to resign.”

The sharp denunciation of Mr. Barr underlined the extent of the fallout over the case of Mr. Stone, capping a week that strained the attorney general’s relationship with his rank and file, and with the president himself.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

After prosecutors on Monday recommended a prison sentence of up to nine years for Mr. Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a congressional inquiry, Mr. Trump lashed out at federal law enforcement. Senior officials at the department, including Mr. Barr, overrode the recommendation the next day with a more lenient one, immediately prompting accusations of political interference, and the four lawyers on the Stone case abruptly withdrew in protest.

The Justice Department said the case had not been discussed with anyone at the White House, but that Mr. Trump congratulated Mr. Barr on his decision did little to dispel the perception of political influence. And as the president widened his attacks on law enforcement, Mr. Barr publicly reproached the president, saying that Mr. Trump’s statements undermined him, as well the department.

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” Mr. Barr said during a televised interview on Thursday with ABC News.

In the days after the interview, Mr. Trump has been relatively muted. He said on Twitter that he had not asked Mr. Barr to “do anything in a criminal case.” As president, he added, he had “the legal right to do so” but had “so far chosen not to!”

But lawyers across the Justice Department continue to worry about political interference from the president despite public pushback by Mr. Barr, long considered a close ally of Mr. Trump’s.

Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal group, gathered the signatures from Justice Department alumni and said it would collect more.

In May, Protect Democracy gathered signatures for a letter that said the Mueller report presented enough evidence to charge Mr. Trump with obstruction of justice were that an option. At the close of his investigation, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III declined to indicate whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice, citing a decades-old department opinion that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. That letter was also critical of Mr. Barr.

Even as the lawyers condemned Mr. Barr on Sunday, they said they welcomed his rebuke of Mr. Trump and his assertions that law enforcement must be independent of politics.

But Mr. Barr’s “actions in doing the president’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words,” they said.

The letter comes days after some Democratic senators pressed for Mr. Barr to resign, and after the New York City Bar Association said that it had formally reported the attorney general’s behavior to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Strikingly, the lawyers called upon current department employees to be on the lookout for future abuses and to be willing to bring oversight to the department.

“Be prepared to report future abuses to the inspector general, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and Congress,” they wrote, and “to refuse to carry out directives that are inconsistent with their oaths of office.”

In any other administration, Barr would not make it over the weekend.  In the Trump regime, the call by 1,100 former DoJ employees for current employees to report their corrupt boss's activities is simply more evidence of the "nefarious deep state" that has compromised Dear Leader's divine right to rule.

Sadly though, absolutely nothing will come of this.  Barr certainly won't resign, and Dems aren't about to open any new avenues of investigation anytime soon.

Sunday Long Read: There's Always A Back Door

The news has been full of accusations lately against Chinese cellular networking giant Huawei that the 5G networks their equipment is being used for has back door capabilities that will allow data to be gathered unencrypted by the Chinese government.  If use of a global company as a cover for intelligence gold mines seems odd to you, as Greg Miller explains in this week's Sunday Long Read, the CIA has literally been doing it since WW II.

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project.

The account identifies the CIA officers who ran the program and the company executives entrusted to execute it. It traces the origin of the venture as well as the internal conflicts that nearly derailed it. It describes how the United States and its allies exploited other nations’ gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets.

The operation, known first by the code name “Thesaurus” and later “Rubicon,” ranks among the most audacious in CIA history.

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concludes. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

From 1970 on, the CIA and its code-breaking sibling, the National Security Agency, controlled nearly every aspect of Crypto’s operations — presiding with their German partners over hiring decisions, designing its technology, sabotaging its algorithms and directing its sales targets.

Then, the U.S. and West German spies sat back and listened.

They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco.

The program had limits. America’s main adversaries, including the Soviet Union and China, were never Crypto customers. Their well-founded suspicions of the company’s ties to the West shielded them from exposure, although the CIA history suggests that U.S. spies learned a great deal by monitoring other countries’ interactions with Moscow and Beijing.

There were also security breaches that put Crypto under clouds of suspicion. Documents released in the 1970s showed extensive — and incriminating — correspondence between an NSA pioneer and Crypto’s founder. Foreign targets were tipped off by the careless statements of public officials including President Ronald Reagan. And the 1992 arrest of a Crypto salesman in Iran, who did not realize he was selling rigged equipment, triggered a devastating “storm of publicity,” according to the CIA history.

But the true extent of the company’s relationship with the CIA and its German counterpart was until now never revealed.

The story of Crypto AG is a good yarn, and it makes you remember that yeah, US intelligence has done some really terrible stuff.

And now Trump is in charge of all of it...

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Iowa Democrats have quickly elected a new state party chair after the resignation of Troy Price, who absolutely had to fall on his sword after the disastrous caucuses two weeks ago.  Hopefully Iowa Dems can get things together with state House minority leader Mark Smith.

Iowa Democrats have a new state party chair: State Rep. Mark Smith of Marshalltown.

The party’s state central committee members gathered today in Des Moines and over the phone to elect Smith as the interim chair following Troy Price’s resignation over the fallout from the reporting breakdowns in the Iowa Caucus. Price announced on Wednesday that he was stepping down as state party chair, effective today once the new chair was determined.
“I know how to work. I know how to recruit. I know how to fundraise. I know how to organize. I know how to win,” Smith said. “The steps are to travel across the state, to listen to everyday Iowans and to excite volunteers.”

Smith served as the minority leader for the House Democrats for five years. During that time, he led the party’s efforts on House races, hiring and managing a full staff, heading up fundraising for the caucus, and planning strategy for swing seats. Under his leadership, Democrats picked up a net gain of five House seats in 2018, though they came short of winning the majority.

“I will lead Democrats to victory,” Smith told the committee.

Smith won handily over Joe Henry, Bob Krause and Gabriel de la Cerda, the three other candidates. All of them got started a day or two later than Smith for the hurry-up election. Henry serves on the national board of LULAC and has headed up many Latino voter registration/engagement efforts in Iowa in recent years.

Krause, a former candidate for Senate in 2016 who served in the Legislature in the 1970s, had unsuccessfully run for the party chair position before. De la Cerda, who has also organized Latino voters, had run before for the 3rd Congressional District.

Smith is the fourth Iowa Democratic Party chair in as many years. Andy McGuire led the party for the 2016 Iowa Caucus; Derek Eadon was elected afterward but resigned for health reasons; Price took over in the summer of 2017.

The election of Smith, of Marshalltown, marks the first time Iowa Democrats have had a chair who lived outside of Polk, Linn or Johnson counties since the early 2000s. Smith had strong backing from the labor community, which won a large number of SCC seats in 2018.

While many of the party activists and SCC members were pleased with the state party up until the reporting mess, Smith now has the challenge of rebuilding trust in the IDP to donors and national Democrats.

They’ll also have to quickly transition past the caucus situation to begin focusing on the U.S. Senate race with Joni Ernst, which will be one of the top Senate races in the country, and the four competitive congressional districts and state legislative races. While the future of the Iowa Caucus and the state’s place in the nominating calendar will eventually get discussed within the DNC, that likely won’t play out fully until after 2020 election.

We'll see what happens with the Iowa caucuses, hopefully they will be finally buried along with all state caucus nonsense.  Smith is right however, at this point the top priority for Iowa Dems is taking down vulnerable GOP Sen. Joni Ernst, who has dug herself even more deeply into the hole she's in with audio surfacing of her saying major cuts to "out of control" Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security will be needed.

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa told donors at a fundraiser in Washington, D.C. last March that federal spending on non-discretionary programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is "out of control" and will require "changes" in the future.

That's according to a 55-second audio clip published Wednesday by Iowa Starting Line. In the recording, Ernst is asked by an attendee whether she is on board with Sen. David Perdue's (R-Ga.) call for cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

"I think we all are because we understand that our non-discretionary spending is growing like this," replied Ernst, who is up for reelection in 2020. "Everyone focuses on discretionary spending because that is what we can control in Congress. The rest is on autopilot and is out of control. We have to figure out ways to honor the commitments that have been made, but make changes for the future. How we do that, I don't know."

Progressive advocacy group Social Security Works tweeted that "changes" is "code for massive cuts."

Ernst is already one of the least popular Senators in the US, and that was before this audio came out.

Iowa can be a great place for Midwest Dems to rebound against Trump and put him away in November, but getting rid of his enablers in the Senate is just as important.  Hopefully Mark Smith is the person to help Iowa Dems do just that.

Last Call For Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Con't

The cost for "moderate" Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski's vote to acquit Trump?  A cool $20 million from Mitch McConnell's wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.

Thank you to @USDOT & @SecElaineChao for allocating a $20M Port Infrastructure Development Program grant to the Port of Alaska to help offset the 1st phase costs of the Port’s desperately-needed modernization program, enabling safe, cost-effective, & reliable Port operations.

— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (@lisamurkowski) February 12, 2020

Gosh, you mean Murkowski's "principled stand" was all a front to extort millions from taxpayers and she's a crooked Republican just like the rest?

Shocked, I tell you!

Drive Fast, Turn...Right

Everything in America is about Trump, because Trump wants everything to revolve around him, and that now apparently includes literal victory laps in his armored limo at the Daytona 500.

President Donald Trump is out to rev up his appeal with a key voting demographic — NASCAR fans — as he takes in the Daytona 500 on Sunday.

NASCAR drivers may veer to the left during their trip around the oval racetrack, but their fans lean right, which helps explain the regularity with which GOP presidents have made their way to the track.

Trump will be the second sitting president to attend the Daytona 500, after George W. Bush in 2004. Like Trump, he also attended the race during a presidential election year. Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush also visited the track at Daytona but during races other than the 500.

This year, Trump will serve as grand marshal and give the command for drivers to start their engines.

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman under George W. Bush, said the visit should appeal to Trump on two fronts.

“There’s a real sense of positive, overwhelming affirmation to hear the roar of the crowd. What politician doesn’t want that?” Fleischer said. “Secondly, there’s what I call the reverberation effect. People watching at home, who hear the roar of the crowd for a president, that can drive them toward some sense of approval or fondness or liking for the president.”

Just in case anyone misses the point, Trump’s reelection campaign will run a TV ad during the Fox broadcast of the race and fly an aerial banner near the speedway.

Your tax dollars are paying for this, as they are for everything Trump does, including the $133 million for his nearly 30 trips to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.  We serve him as subjects.  He is a king. A country that formed from opposition to a king now chokes beneath the reins of a virtual monarch.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Munich on Friday, and if the Russians hadn't said anything, we never would have known it happened.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday in an encounter the American side apparently wanted to keep under wraps.

The State Department made no announcement of the meeting, which took place in Lavrov's own dedicated meeting room at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the major annual conference of politicians, policymakers and security experts is held. Pompeo's aides also did not provide any readout after the meeting ended.

Russian journalists traveling with Lavrov were aware of the meeting in advance, and wrote about it afterward.
Lavrov's spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, confirmed the meeting in a Facebook post, which included a photo of Pompeo in a hallway of the hotel, and Lavrov standing in a doorway a few steps behind him.

In the post, Zakharova wrote that Pompeo had said "good luck" to those gathered in the hallway, and cheekily added that those who heard it "gasped."

"There are few to whom Americans now wish something good," she wrote.
Asked about the meeting by POLITICO, a State Department official confirmed that there had been a “pull aside” with Lavrov but gave no further details. The official denied that the State Department asked Russia not to publicize the meeting and said it did not normally issue readouts of "pull asides."

There was no mention of the meeting in a briefing by a senior administration official about U.S. efforts at the security conference. The official said Pompeo met with Masrour Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and that U.S. officials met with Israeli counterparts as well as with a senior EU foreign affairs official, Helga Schmid.
It was not immediately clear why the State Department did not disclose the meeting between Pompeo and his Russian counterpart in advance.

It's been immediately clear why the Trump regime doesn't want to disclose any Russian contacts for four years now, and that immediately clear reason is that the Trump regime is hopelessly compromised by Vladimir Putin.  Literally any other country, the Trump regime trumpets their interactions as "presidential" and "running the ship of state" and "the leader of the free world meets with X"

But Putin?  Lavrov?  Any Russian dignitary?  No readout, no press, the meeting never happened, and always we learn about it later from the Russians.  Every damn time.

When we learn the full truth of how much leverage Putin has over Trump, it'll be a day of national reckoning, one of many we'll face in the coming months.

Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime is now upping the stakes considerably in the fight over mass deportations, sending in ICE heavy SWAT units to "help" law enforcement in major sanctuary cities.

The Trump administration is deploying law enforcement tactical units from the southern border as part of a supercharged arrest operation in sanctuary cities across the country, an escalation in the president’s battle against localities that refuse to participate in immigration enforcement.

The specially trained officers are being sent to cities including Chicago and New York to boost the enforcement power of local Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, according to two officials who are familiar with the secret operation. Additional agents are expected to be sent to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit and Newark, N.J.

The move reflects President Trump’s persistence in cracking down on so-called sanctuary cities, localities that have refused to cooperate in handing over immigrants targeted for deportation to federal authorities. It comes soon after the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security announced a series of measures that will affect both American citizens and immigrants living in those places.

Lawrence Payne, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, confirmed that the agency was deploying 100 officers to work with ICE, which conducts arrests in the interior of the country, “in order to enhance the integrity of the immigration system, protect public safety, and strengthen our national security.”

The deployment of the teams will run from February through May, according to an email sent to C.B.P. personnel, which was read to The New York Times by one official familiar with the planning.

Among the agents being deployed to sanctuary cities are members of the elite tactical unit known as BORTAC, which acts essentially as the SWAT team of the Border Patrol. With additional gear such as stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification, the officers typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.
The unit’s work often takes place in the most rugged and swelteringly hot areas of the border. It can involve breaking into stash houses maintained by smuggling operations that are known to be filled with drugs and weapons.

In sanctuary cities, the BORTAC agents will be asked to support interior officers in run-of-the-mill immigration arrests, the officials said. Their presence could spark new fear in immigrant communities that have been on high alert under the stepped-up deportation and detention policies adopted after Mr. Trump took office.

In a statement, ICE’s acting director, Matthew T. Albence, said the deployment comes in response to policies adopted by sanctuary cities, which have made it harder for immigration agents to do their jobs.

“As we have noted for years, in jurisdictions where we are not allowed to assume custody of aliens from jails, our officers are forced to make at-large arrests of criminal aliens who have been released into communities,” he said. “When sanctuary cities release these criminals back to the street, it increases the occurrence of preventable crimes, and more importantly, preventable victims.”
But Gil Kerlikowske, the former commissioner of C.B.P., which oversees tactical units along the border, said sending the officers to conduct immigration enforcement within cities, where they are not trained to work, could escalate situations that are already volatile. He called the move a “significant mistake.”

“If you were a police chief and you were going to make an apprehension for a relatively minor offense, you don’t send the SWAT team. And BORTAC is the SWAT team,” said Mr. Kerlikowske, who is a former chief of police in Seattle. “They’re trained for much more hazardous missions than this.”

Understand that this is straight-up terrorism on the part of the Trump regime.

This is sending SWAT units, complete with snipers and military training, to handle local law enforcement duties.  There's a reason why this is against the Constitution if Trump used the military for this, but he doesn't have to.  He has ICE.

The whole point is to terrorize both undocumented and their families and residents of these cities. This is use of deadly force in order to affect political policy change, which last time I checked is the post-9/11 definition of terrorism.

Most of all, if there's a little police brutality, if there's a little collateral damage that happens to make national headlines, of these BORTAC teams maybe causing mass bloodshed?  Well, Trump will sadly blame the local governments of these sanctuary cities.  We wouldn't have needed to put in these heavily armed units if you would just turn over your undocumented for mass processing, right? Such a shame something like this happened.

And hey, remember those mass ICE raids that got called off at the last minute back in July?

Guess what's coming later this spring?

It's fear backed up by lethal force.  Something authoritarians do.

It's happening now.  Here.