Last Call For The Year Of Mueller

The one-year anniversary of the Mueller probe rolls around on Thursday and according to the Village, the investigation is running out of time before Trump is able to turn the people against the special counsel.

The sprawling investigations amount to a political anchor as Trump leads the Republican Party into the fall midterm elections. Though few candidates see it as a decisive issue, the probe still sows doubt among some voters about the credibility of Trump’s election and about his conduct in office.

Public opinion surveys have found wide support for the Mueller investigation. An April Washington Post-ABC News poll found 69 percent of Americans backing the probe and 25 percent opposing it, though other surveys this spring have shown a modest decline from earlier polls in support of continuing the investigation.

Among the political class, there is a guessing game about whether the special counsel completes its work this summer — sufficiently in advance of the November elections — or presses well past it. The longer Mueller’s work continues, legal analysts said, the more difficult it may be for the special counsel to maintain public confidence, especially with Trump, Vice President Pence and other administration officials calling for the probe to wrap up.

“You don’t have much longer than 18 months to 24 months to get to the heart of the matter and resolve the things that need to be resolved,” said Robert W. Ray, who served as independent counsel toward the end of the Whitewater investigation during the Clinton presidency. “That’s about the length of time that public sentiment is with the investigation.”

The Mueller probe has also brought about a national reckoning on the boundaries of presidential power. Trump is at war with the leadership of his own Justice Department and FBI, has threatened to defy a subpoena to testify and even toyed with ordering the firing of Mueller.

“We want to get the investigation over, done with,” Trump said last month. “Put it behind us.”

The notion that the investigation has to end soon or it will amount to undue interference in the 2018 elections is exactly what the Republicans want to press, and at least with the Washington Post, it's starting to work.  The piece is an outright warning to Mueller to wrap things up by this summer, by Labor Day at the latest.

Expect more pieces like this to start raining down as Mueller gets closer to the truth and the clock gets closer to the GOP.'s reckoning with angry voters.

Sunday Long Read: Orange To Blue

If Democrats have any chance of flipping the House in 2018, the road will have to go through California's last true bastion of Republicanism, the suburbs of Orange County.  It's here, the New Republic's Vauhini Vara argues, that Democrats will have to decide the path between left and center-left in order to win the districts here, and try to win the country back from Trump.

What, in the age of Donald J. Trump, should a Democrat be? It didn’t take long, after Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, for Democratic officials to descend into a desperate and often acrimonious argument about the future of the party. Did it still rest with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt—those factory workers and retail employees who used to form the core of the Democratic Party but have watched the American dream fall victim to globalization and automation? Would it be comprised of a diverse, urban coalition clustered around cosmopolitan, white-collar cities? And might it be possible—doubtful, perhaps, but possible—that both could be true?

With this fall’s midterm elections fast approaching, the Democratic Party has yet to resolve its internal conflicts or develop a coherent long-term vision. But it has identified a potential path back to power in the immediate term. In order to regain control of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party must flip 23 Republican-held seats. To do so, it has identified 104 GOP-held districts as targets, the biggest number in more than a decade. It is zeroing in, especially, on Republican-held districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump: suburban areas near Miami, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and, especially, Los Angeles, where affluent, well-educated white populations have been joined in recent decades by an influx of immigrants. If Trump’s success in Rust Belt states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania symbolized the Democratic Party’s growing rift with white, working-class Americans, his poor showing in the suburbs has presented an opportunity for Democrats to make inroads in places that, for decades, have been thought of as inexorably conservative. “The battleground is not urban America or rural America, it’s suburban America,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Politico last year. Brian Fallon, a Democratic consultant who worked as a top Clinton aide, said that the path to a Democrat-led House “runs through the Panera Breads of America.”

The question that no one seems quite able to answer, however, is what kind of Democrat can win the Panera demographic. Last June, when Jon Ossoff failed to capture the suburban Atlanta district vacated by Republican Tom Price—in what became the most expensive House race in U.S. history—some in the party argued that Ossoff, with his lack of interest in single-payer health care and taxing the rich, had alienated potential Democratic voters by being too moderate. To win, they asserted, Democratic candidates should tack further to the left, in the mode of Bernie Sanders. In March, however, following Conor Lamb’s narrow victory in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points, pundits argued that Lamb’s careful, centrist positions helped win him the race—and that Democrats shouldn’t write off more conservative Americans as a lost cause just yet.

Going forward, there is no better place to witness the Democratic Party’s strategies play out—and no place where the stakes are higher—than Orange County, California. Wedged along the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, Orange County is home to more than three million people, living in a maze of communities ranging from surfer towns to exurbs. Orange County doesn’t offer a sense of place so much as a sense of placelessness, and if it weren’t for the consistently balmy weather, much of it, with its six-lane freeways and big-box stores and strip malls and, yes, Panera Breads, could just as soon be in Illinois or Texas. The county’s orange groves are long gone; if you are in Anaheim, say, and find yourself craving an orange, you drive to Ralphs and buy one. When, on a recent visit, I asked a lifelong resident to take me on a tour, he brought me past his childhood home in a quiet neighborhood of low-slung ranch houses, a 7-Eleven, and a large shopping center.

For decades, Orange County—the birthplace of Richard Nixon, the Crystal Cathedral, and the “Real Housewives” reality-TV franchise—was one of the country’s proudest Republican strongholds. In 2016, though, Clinton beat Trump there by a nine-point margin, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the county since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term.

It was a striking upset, but, to those who knew the county well, not an entirely surprising one. Republican sentiment has been eroding in Orange County for years. By 2016, fewer than 38 percent of Orange County residents were registered Republicans, down from 56 percent in 1990. Latinos and Asians now make up more than half the population, slowly replacing the white conservatives who flocked to Orange County in the middle of the twentieth century. “The generation of people who came here from the Midwest, attracted to the agriculture and defense industries, is really just dying out,” said Fred Smoller, a professor of political science at Chapman University.

It is here, in these suburbs, that the Democratic Party hopes to return to power nationally. Anti-Trump sentiment in Orange County runs high. The morning after Trump’s inauguration, more than 20,000 people turned out for the Women’s March in Santa Ana, one of the biggest protest marches in the entire state. And the county’s four congressional districts currently held by Republicans—Darrell Issa, Dana Rohrabacher, Mimi Walters, and Ed Royce—are among the 23 districts represented by Republicans that Clinton won nationally. The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report lists Royce’s and Issa’s districts as leaning Democratic (Issa won by only 1,621 votes in the last election), and Rohrabacher’s is a toss-up. While Walters’s district leans Republican, Clinton nonetheless beat Trump there by a five-point margin, putting it on the Democrats’ map. The party’s hopes soared in January when Royce announced that he would not seek reelection. Just two days later, Issa said he would be retiring as well.

Democrats have made Orange County a particular focus of their organizing and fund-raising efforts. Democratic enthusiasm has swept across Orange County, with more than a dozen candidates signing up to compete for its four Republican-held congressional seats. Last spring, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee made the unprecedented decision to open an office in Irvine, in the center of Orange County, to oversee races in the western states, something it had traditionally handled from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. “It’s very important to us to win Orange County for the purposes of taking back the House,” Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, California, who is the vice chairman of the DCCC for the western region, told me. Tom Steyer, one of the Democratic Party’s largest donors, is pouring millions of dollars into get-out-the-vote efforts in Orange County and told me he considers the region “critical” to regaining control of Congress. According to the Democrats’ arithmetic—which assumes that the districts where Clinton won are the ripest for flipping—the four Republican-held Orange County districts should be among the 23 easiest targets in the nation. If Democrats can’t win those seats, the path to retaking Congress becomes much narrower. But their investment in Orange County represents much more than a math problem. At a time when the Democratic Party seems lacking in direction, its approach in Orange County, and whether it is successful, could provide more precise answers about the party’s future than its leaders have been willing or able to provide.

The Republican Party has tried to downplay the threat that increased Democratic engagement in Orange County signifies. “It’s a Hail Mary play. It’s desperation,” Fred Whitaker, the chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, told Politico earlier this year. “Let the Democrats spend tens of millions of dollars here. Let them die on the hill in Orange County.” Still, in response to the DCCC’s efforts, the National Republican Campaign Committee has opened its own local campaign office in Orange County. And even Whitaker has admitted that retaining control of the county’s congressional seats will be difficult. “We understand what money can do,” Whitaker told me. “Certainly, if the Democrats are going to put money here, there are going to be challenging races.”

Yet even as political headwinds seem to be blowing in their favor, the chances of a Democratic sweep of Orange County are increasingly in question. Given its internal divisions, it has been unclear from the start whether the Democratic Party can harness the energy of its grassroots while also drawing in centrists and Republicans. On top of that, a quirk of California politics—a primary system in which the top two vote-getters, regardless of their party affiliation, advance to the general election—has raised the possibility that some of the Orange County districts will end up with two Republicans, and not a single Democrat, on the congressional ballot in November. What began as a murmur of self-doubt in Orange County political circles has intensified into one of the Democratic Party’s biggest nightmares: Even with all this momentum on their side, are Democrats about to blow their chance at retaking Congress?

That's the question we're about to find out the answer to.  Failure is always an option, but failure here means that GOP control of the House will survive, California jungle primary or not.  I don't buy into the doom and the gloom that the GOP has been pushing after barely surviving in Nevada last month, and I don't subscribe to the "blue wave is dead/special elections don't matter in November" idiocy from the press.  You shouldn't either.

But there are tens of millions of voters out there for whom the Democrats being the anti-Trump party just isn't enough, tens of millions of people who figure life will be fine for them with Trump and the GOP in charge.  They're still not convinced that the Democrats will make their lives better on a daily basis.

Cutting through the noise to make that case needs to be priority number one of the Dems, and so far, I'm just not seeing it. Ultimately the choice is up to us as voters.  But no two voters are the same.

Red State Dems Walk The Knife

I know that it's tough being a red state Democrat, living in Kentucky for over a decade has made it painfully clear just how wide the gulf between "Democrat" and "liberal" can be.  But I can only surmise that the move by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and now Joe Donnelly to support Trump's torture-happy pick for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, is a way to give Republicans like Rand Paul cover for voting no without actually doing so, something I'm sure the GOP will reward both Joes for come November, right?

Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) announced Saturday his support for Gina Haspel’s nomination to be CIA director, providing a crucial second Democratic vote that should provide enough margin for confirmation to overcome questions about her role in last decade’s controversial interrogation program.

Donnelly, who met with Haspel on Thursday, said in a statement that he had “a tough, frank, and extensive discussion” with her both about her vision for the agency and its past use of “enhanced” interrogations against terrorist captives, including methods such as waterboarding that are widely considered torture.

During her confirmation hearing, Haspel pledged to abide by current law that forbids those methods and that she would reject an order from President Trump to use those techniques against a terrorist now.

“I believe that she has learned from the past, and that the CIA under her leadership can help our country confront serious international threats and challenges,” Donnelly said in the statement released Saturday morning.

Of course, Haspel's efforts to cover up Bush-era torture should have ended her career anyway.

Haspel, whom under Pompeo became the agency’s deputy director, briefly ran the off-the-books prison in Thailand used as a torture laboratory for the earliest detained terrorism suspects. There, in 2002—including while Haspel oversaw the so-called black site—the man known as Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times; stuffed into a wooden box barely bigger than a coffin; had his body shackled in painful contorted positions; and had his head slammed into walls.
“If Ms. Haspel seeks to serve at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence, the government can no longer cover up disturbing facts from the past,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the intelligence committee who opposes her nomination, told The Daily Beast in a statement Tuesday.

“Ms. Haspel’s background makes her unsuitable to serve as CIA director. Her nomination must include total transparency about this background,” Wyden added.

Subsequently declassified CIA medical files assessed that Abu Zubaydah was likely willing to cooperate with his interrogators before his waterboarding, as he had with his FBI interrogators, who did not torture him.

Years later, Haspel drafted an instruction to CIA officers in the field to destroy videotapes of torturous interrogations at the site. Though the Justice Department later declined to bring charges, the destruction of the tapes was widely considered in human-rights circles to be a key moment in covering up the torture—and it prompted the Senate intelligence committee’s landmark 2014 investigation, which occurred amid the backdrop of the agency spying on the work product of the Senate investigators.

I would hope that we could get Dems who wouldn't compromise on torture, but it's not as if Obama made any effort to cashier in Haspel either.

This all sucks, and I hate it. And Manchin is in for the fight of his political life.

 

That Economic Anxiety Again

The Russians not only knew where to hit us when it came to maximum damage to our election process (voter registration and Facebook) but they knew us better than we knew ourselves when it came to getting those "economically anxious" voters to the polls for Trump.

The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race.

The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.

While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election.

USA TODAY Network reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post.

Among the findings: 

Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions — a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device. 

At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups. 

Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related spots rose to 400. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017. 

Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

Thousands of ads, targeted with pinpoint accuracy, seen tens of millions of times, designed to make white voters angry enough to go to the polls and back Trump and the GOP, and to make black voters angry enough to abandon Clinton and the Democrats.

And it worked.  All it took for Trump to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was a swing of a few hundred thousand votes, a fraction of a percent of total votes cast.

That's how we lost this country.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The FBI has known about Putin pal Viktor Vekselberg for years, and even made the rare move of publicly warning US investors to stay away from his Skolkovo Foundation as it was a Russia front.

The FBI warned four years ago that a foundation controlled by the Russian oligarch who allegedly reimbursed Donald Trump's personal lawyer might have been acting on behalf of Russia's intelligence services. 

FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Lucia Ziobro wrote an unusual column in the Boston Business Journal in April of 2014 to warn that a foundation controlled by Russian energy baron Viktor Vekselberg might be part of a Moscow spying campaign that sought to siphon up American science and technology. 

"The foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation's sensitive or classified research, development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial applications," Ziobro wrote. "This analysis is supported by reports coming out of Russia itself." 

Fast forward to this week: Vekselberg's name has been in U.S. headlines because of allegations about his involvement with payments to Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen. 

A lawyer suing Trump and Cohen, Michael Avenatti, released a document on Tuesday charging that Vekselberg might have reimbursed Cohen for the payment he made to Avenatti's client, porn actress Stormy Daniels. Avenatti's document has not been fully verified but important aspects of it have been confirmed. 

Andrey Shtorkh, a spokesman for Vekselberg, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. 

The U.S. subsidiary of the company that Vekselberg controls has acknowledged making payments to Cohen, but it denied that it served as a pass-through for Vekselberg or anyone else outside the United States trying to funnel money to him. 

FBI investigators reportedly stopped Vekselberg on his way into the United States earlier this year to question him. The 2014 column written by Ziobro suggests that Vekselberg has been of interest to U.S. intelligence officials for some time — well before the counterintelligence investigation into Russia's attack on the 2016 presidential election.

For 12 months now the refrain from Trump supporters and pro-Russia fellow travelers has been "If the Trump campaign took money from Russia, there would be a smoking gun."

This gun here may not be smoking, but it sure as hell seems to have been pretty recently fired as the barrel is very warm and it still smells of gunpowder, guys. 

The Cohen case is turning into an even bigger cesspool than Mike Flynn or Paul Manafort, and that's really saying something.

Oh, but of course, Cohen may be directly related the the recent resignation of NY AG Eric Schniederman.

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was informed about allegations of sexual misconduct by then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman around 2013, according to a letter filed in Manhattan federal court on Friday.

An attorney, Peter Gleason, submitted a letter to the court Friday explaining that two women had come to him a half-decade or more ago with complaints that they were “sexually victimized” by Schneiderman.

Counseling against reporting the allegations to Manhattan’s district attorney based on his past experiences with political corruption cases, Gleason says, he discussed the women’s allegations with a retired New York Post journalist, Stephen Dunleavy.

Dunleavy who offered to discuss the matter with Trump. “Mr. Dunleavy did indeed discuss this very matter with Mr. Trump as evidenced by a phone call I received from attorney Michael Cohen,” Gleason, a lawyer in Mahopac, New York, wrote to the judge. “During my communications with Mr. Cohen I shared with him certain details of Schneiderman’s vile attacks on these two women.”

Schneiderman’s lawyer, Isabelle Kirshner, declined to comment. 

Gleason’s letter was the latest salvo in a battle over the records seized by the FBI last month from Cohen’s office and residences and electronic devices. The lawyer requested a protective order to seal all correspondence that Cohen may have had about the women, in part to protect their identities as assault victims. 

Trump’s potential knowledge of allegations against Schneiderman haven’t previously been dislosed, although the men have publicly feuded over Trump’s business practices. Schneiderman sought to sue Trump University in state court in 2012, and filed a complaint the next year in federal court, claiming the for-profit school defrauded students. 

In a tweet on Sept. 11, 2013, Trump took aim at Schneiderman while also referring to New York politicians who’d resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer.

“Weiner is gone, Spitzer is gone -- next will be lightweight A.G. Eric Schneiderman. Is he a crook? Wait and see, worse than Spitzer or Weiner,” Trump tweeted.

He knew, guys.  Not that Schneiderman didn't deserve the boot, he's still a sexual predator and monster who abused women, full stop.  But Trump knew about at least some of the accusations against him and knew about them four years ago.

A lot of people looked the other way on Schneiderman and enabled him to keep his position and to continue to harm women. 

One of those people was Donald Trump.

Kentucky Sucker's Club

Here in Kentucky there's plenty of buyer's remorse over Trump, especially for small businessmen like Eddie Devine.

Eddie Devine voted for President Donald Trump because he thought he would be good for American business. Now, he says, the Trump administration’s restrictions on seasonal foreign labor may put him out of business. 

“I feel like I’ve been tricked by the devil,” said Devine, owner of Harrodsburg-based Devine Creations Landscaping. “I feel so stupid.” 

Devine says it has been years since he could find enough dependable, drug-free American workers for his $12-an-hour jobs mowing and tending landscapes for cemeteries, shopping centers and apartment complexes across Central Kentucky. 

So for years he has hired 20 seasonal workers, mostly from Guatemala, through the U.S. Labor Department’s H2-B “guest worker” program. Importing these workers for a few months cost him an additional $18,000 in fees and expenses beyond their wages, which must be the same as he pays American workers. But that’s the only way he could serve his customers. 

Restrictions on guest-worker visas, which began during President Barack Obama’s second term as immigration became a hot issue for conservatives, have gotten worse under Trump. And it’s even more of a problem now that the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in years. 

Devine says he lost a $100,000 account because he didn’t have enough men to do the job. He’s worried he may be out of business next year if things don’t improve.
He isn’t alone. Cuts in H-2B visas are hurting small businesses across the country that can’t find Americans willing to do hard, manual labor: Maryland crab processors, Texas shrimp fishermen, and Kentucky landscapers and construction companies. 

Nowhere in the article does Devine say he would be willing to 1) pay workers more for backbreaking landscaping work or 2) try voting Democratic in November.

Devine said he believed Trump’s America-first promises. But cutting off a good supply of seasonal foreign labor when Americans won’t take those jobs is only hurting American business owners and the U.S. workers they employ, he said. 

These workers aren’t immigrants, and there is no path to U.S. citizenship. When their seasonal work is done, they return home. That’s why Devine thinks the Trump administration’s stifling of guest-worker programs has more to do with racism than economics. “I think there’s a war on brown people,” he said. 

But what makes him most angry is that Trump’s properties in Florida and New York have used 144 H-2B workers since 2016. “I want to know why it’s OK for him to get his workers, but supporters like me don’t get theirs,” Devine said.

Because Trump got 100% of what he needed out of you: you voted for him and for his party.  Unless that changes Eddie, he owes you nothing.

And nothing is exactly what you'll get out of Donald Trump.  Millions of us saw him for what he was, and you're the reason we're all suffering now.

Man up and help us fix it in November.

StupidiNews!

• VP Mike Pence says it's time for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to "wrap it up" and end the investigation into the Trump regime "in the interest of the country".
• Trump regime Housing Secretary Ben Carson is considering new HUD rules that would reverse Obama-era protections for tenants to sue under the Fair Housing Act.
• US Automakers will meet with Donald Trump at the White House to discuss freezing fuel efficiency standards at 2020 levels and taking on California in court over weakening requirements.
• Italy's new Five-Star Movement government appears to be turning to the right-wing nationalist and virulently anti-immigrant League to form a new populist alliance.
• A new study finds Hurricane Harvey was fueled in part by record heat in the Gulf of Mexico last summer caused by human-created global warming.

Last Call For The Greitens Show On Earth

The saga of Missouri GOP Gov. Eric Greitens continues as the "used his own wounded veterans' charity as a illegal donor list" half of the story just got much, much worse.  Meet former Greitens campaign aide Mike Hafner, who's going public with his story.

Within days after Mike Hafner began work in January 2015 as a full-time campaign staffer for Republican Eric Greitens, Hafner says he was presented with a copy of the donor list for The Mission Continues, the charity that Greitens helped found. 

“We had set a meeting to discuss the donor list, so I could get notes from Eric and build a fundraising plan for his potential candidacy,” Hafner said in an interview Wednesday.
Hafner’s primary job, at that point, was to set up “a master tracking list’’ for Greitens to use to make campaign-related phone calls to the donors who already had given to the charity. 

The donor list was crucial in those early months of fundraising, Hafner said. The Associated Press has calculated that at least $2 million was raised from the donor list for Greitens’ successful campaign for Missouri governor. 

Hafner suspects the tally could be higher, because some of the donors broached early on the idea of forming nonprofit groups so that their contributions could not be tracked. “There was, in the very embryonic stages of the campaign, discussions already being had about C4s and LCs (two types of outside groups) and not disclosing the source of those contributions,” Hafner said. 

At the time, in early 2015, Hafner says he and allied consultants still thought Greitens was exploring a bid for lieutenant governor – not governor. 

Hafner says he also was unaware when he drew up the call list that there could be legal problems with using The Mission Continues donor list without the charity’s specific approval.

And it gets worse.

Hafner said he simply wants to make sure the record is correct about his involvement in Greitens’ early campaign, and why he believes the public should pay attention.
“I do believe in transparency in campaigns,” Hafner said. He contended that Greitens was misleading the public when he appeared on St. Louis Public Radio’s Politically Speaking podcast in January 2016, and declared that his campaign was transparent and his donors would be public. 

Although Hafner was with Brunner’s campaign by then, “I knew what they were already planning’’ with the secret money going to outside groups. 

By Hafner’s calculation, “Eric had (at least) $6 million in untraceable money.” 

Eric has been quite the industrious type, hasn't he?

Hope that serves him well in prison.

The Irreverent Revenant Is Resurgently Relevant

All this talk of Trump's CIA head pick, former 9/11-era torture maven Gina Haspel, and her disastrous confirmation hearing yesterday (so bad in fact that John McCain has turned on her) has had the effect of re-engaging the "debate" of whether or not torturing people is a good idea, and by "debate" I mean the Nameless One has risen from the Void and hungers once more.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said the U.S. should restart its enhanced interrogation techniques — often considered torture — after the issue was thrust to the forefront during Gina Haspel’s confirmation fight to become CIA director.

Yeah, that first sentence is a piece of work by the way.  Thanks, Politico.

 

“If it were my call, I would not discontinue those programs,” he said in an interview that aired Thursday morning on Fox Business. “I’d have them active and ready to go, and I’d go back and study them and learn.”

And feed on their souuuuuuuls.

Cheney has long defended the post-9/11 tactics even as the national climate shifted over the years. Congress has since banned them. 

“I think the techniques we used were not torture. A lot of people try to call it that, but it wasn’t deemed torture at the time,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “People want to go back and try to rewrite history, but if it were my call, I’d do it again.”

Just a friendly reminder that the GOP was awful and repugnant well before Trump, and white people put them back in power anyway.

Haspel, the acting director, faced a barrage of Democratic questions on the morality of techniques like waterboarding at her Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing Wednesday. She oversaw a secret CIA facility in Thailand where two suspected terrorists were subject to them — one on her watch — in 2002 and later pushed for the destruction of tapes of the interrogations.

That should have been the end of Haspel's career.  Alas, it was not.

“I think she’d be a great CIA director,” Cheney said. “I think she’s done a great job in terms of the career she’s built, and the people I know at the agency are very enthusiastic about having one of their own, so to speak, in the driver’s seat at the CIA.”

I bet they are.  Hey listen, "Dick Cheney thinks this is a good idea" should be a pretty big disqualifier for everything, but in the Trump era it's a bonus!

By my math, McCain and Manchin are trading places, so Haspel will still get 51 votes and probably more.  If I'm Rand Paul, I'm calling Susan Collins and seeing what I can get out of the White House while I can.

Sing A Song Of Sick Pence

Pocketful of lies, to paraphrase the old rhyme.  It's also the time of year where that broken clock that is George Will is right for once on Pence being Trump's biggest and most vile enabler.

Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. His chief of staff, Reince Priebus, caught the spirit of the worship service by thanking Trump for the “blessing” of being allowed to serve him. The hosannas poured forth from around the table, unredeemed by even a scintilla of insincerity. Priebus was soon deprived of his blessing, as was Tom Price. Before Price’s ecstasy of public service was truncated because of his incontinent enthusiasm for charter flights, he was the secretary of health and human services who at the Cabinet meeting said, “I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me.” The vice president chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes: “I’m deeply humbled. . . . ” Judging by the number of times Pence announces himself “humbled,” he might seem proud of his humility, but that is impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin. 

Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong. Which brings us to his Arizona salute last week to Joe Arpaio, who was sheriff of Maricopa County until in 2016 voters wearied of his act. 

Noting that Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness from every pore, called Arpaio “another favorite,” professed himself “honored” by Arpaio’s presence, and praisedhim as “a tireless champion of . . . the rule of law.” Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence — or perhaps not — something about honor.

Henry Adams said that “practical politics consists in ignoring facts,” but what was the practicality in Pence’s disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence’s vocation, which is to ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment. The audience for his praise of Arpaio was given to chanting “Build that wall!” and applauded Arpaio, who wears Trump’s pardon like a boutonniere. 

Hoosiers, of whom Pence is one, sometimes say that although Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and flourished in Illinois, he spent his formative years — December 1816 to March 1830 — in Indiana, which he left at age 21. Be that as it may, on Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech, to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Ill., 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy — it would have been unnecessary — Lincoln lamented that throughout America, “so lately famed for love of law and order,” there was a “mobocratic spirit” among “the vicious portion of [the] population.” So, “let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation.” Pence, one of evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require. 

It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.

And as much as it pains me to say it, Will is 100% correct here.  The Republicans who enabled Trump from the beginning, and Mike Pence is absolutely the chief enabler, are the real villains in America right now. 

Of course, those villains are joined by Will and Jennifer Rubin and Rick Wilson and Ana Navarro and the other "Never Trump" Republicans who loudly and boldly attack Trump, and still manage to do absolutely nothing to stop him, let alone the fact that they agree with 95% of his policies.  These are the Republicans who wish Mike Pence was in charge, as awful as he is.

They may very well get that wish. 

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump welcomed home three American detainees held by North Korea and released this week as part of diplomatic overtures ahead of an historic summit with the US later this spring.
• Senate Democrats grilled Trump's pick for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, on her record of overseeing torture of 9/11-era detainees, but Democrats do not have the votes to block her confirmation.
• Israel launched multiple airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria after Iran reported fired rockets towards Israel, no casualties were reported.
• 15 years after stepping down as PM, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad has scored a shocking win, ending the six-decade rule of former PM Najib Razak's party.
• Senate Democrats are forcing GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to take a vote to block the FCC's plans to abandon net neutrality rules, but the move has long odds in the House.

Last Call For Dems Cashing Up

Deep-pocketed Democratic donors have finally decided to fight fundraising fire with fundraising fire and are forming their own big donor network to win the House back.

Major Democratic donors in New York have discreetly formed a new political alliance to raise roughly $10 million that would be injected into as many as two dozen key House battlegrounds in an effort to wrest control of Congress from Republicans. 

Admission to be an official partner in what’s being called the House Victory Project comes with a $108,000 price tag. More than 80 people have each committed that sum, according to a half-dozen donors familiar with the group, whose existence has not previously been reported. 

The $108,000 pledge allows each donor to effectively give the maximum $5,400 contribution to 20 different House candidates. With nearly $9 million in commitments amassed so far, each Democratic recipient could see a windfall of as much as $432,000 — an amount that, for many House candidates, equals months of fund-raising in one fell swoop. 

Jane D. Hartley, a former ambassador to France under President Barack Obama, said that the donors were a “very diverse” group that included philanthropists who have previously not engaged in political giving.

“Many have not been involved in politics in the past, but they’ve said they can’t sit out this election,” she said. 

Ms. Hartley, who hosted an event in recent months to pitch donors on the idea, is one of five organizers of the project, donors said. The others include Robert E. Rubin, the former treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton; Roger C. Altman, the former deputy treasury secretary in the Clinton administration; and two investment bankers who are major Democratic fund-raisers, Deven J. Parekh and Blair W. Effron.

Ms. Hartley, the only of the five to return calls for comment, declined to discuss how candidates would be chosen, but others briefed on the group’s plans said they plan to stay mostly away from contested Democratic primaries and the ideological battles that are roiling the party across the country. 

Instead, the group is focusing on bolstering Democratic candidates in general election battleground races, with the goal of flipping 24 Republican seats to take the House in November. 

Donors who got pitches to contribute said the group was focused on quantitative criteria that included the results in the past election, such as if President Trump or Hillary Clinton carried a district, as well as the ratings of the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato, a race prognosticator. Candidates have not been brought in for interviews. 

“The idea is to win 24 highly curated races,” said Alan Patricof, a venture capitalist and Democratic donor, who said that many of the contributors involved have worked together for decades. 

Mr. Patricof said the goal was finding candidates with a “high probability of prevailing” in November.

And hey, unlike the Republican version of this, we know who the donors are, and they're putting their money where their ideals are.  Pick the 24 races most likely to win, and give them the money to prevail, what a concept.

Now, I'm sure some of these candidates will turn the money down, and that's fine.  But precisely zero Republicans would ever turn down a dime for attack ads, so if the issue is "Dems can't get their message out" well now here's the money to do that.

It's better than the alternative, which is "complain that Republicans are spending money to win" and then Democrats kicking rocks.

Let's fight to win, guys.

Stopping The Schneid

So far NY state Solicitor General Barbara Underwood is taking over as interim state AG from the disgraced (and probably headed to jail) Eric Schniederman, who resigned Monday after a bombshell New Yorker article detailing a years-long pattern of sexual assault against multiple women.  But Emprire State politics wait for no one, and the jockeying for position means several candidates will running for not only a possible appointment by NY state legislators but again in November.  Politico's crew has the rundown, but a couple names seem to be at the top:

State Sen. Mike Gianaris

The Queens Democrat has spent years preparing to run for the attorney general’s office whenever Schneiderman declined to do so — and he’s amassed a $2.2 million war chest for just that purpose. On Tuesday, he said he was still very interested. 

“I’m getting a lot of really strong encouragement to run, which I appreciate,” he told POLITICO. “There are a lot of moving parts right now, this is all one day old, so I think there’s still time for this thing to play out, but I’m interested and exploring it.” 

As the head of his conference’s campaign efforts for the past seven years, Gianaris might have an advantage in a potential crowded primary field, as he’s spent the past several election cycles getting to know top Democrats in every corner of the state. But as a white male, he could face a hurdle in the Legislature, where Democrats are clearly hungry for a candidate who’ll add diversity to the roster of statewide officials. 

New York City Public Advocate Tish James

James rapidly emerged as a candidate who could possibly win appointment by the Legislature and continue into the general election season. She’s a woman of color and an attorney who as New York City’s public advocate already has been active filing lawsuits as a kind of people’s lawyer. 

James is also well-liked by leaders of the Working Families Party, which would provide a critical buttress in a competitive Democratic primary, and had been floated as a possible replacement for Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul — a sign that Cuomo would be open to her candidacy. 

And critically, several sources said, Heastie and other Democrats from the Bronx are open to pushing the former Brooklyn council member because of the move’s secondary effects. James is considering a run for mayor in 2021, when she is term-limited in her current job (as is Mayor Bill de Blasio). If she were state attorney general, however, it’s unlikely that she would make a bid for mayor. That could benefit Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., who is also looking at a mayoral run. 

At several points on Tuesday, James refused to say whether she wanted the job. “The next attorney general will be decided by the state legislature and I await their decision. Thank you,” she said before running away from reporters. 

Rep. Kathleen Rice

A former Nassau County district attorney, Rice ran for attorney general in 2010 and finished just a few points behind Schneiderman in a five-way primary where she was the only woman. She still has $1.6 million in a state campaign account that could be used for a run. 

Nassau County Democratic Chairman Jay Jacobs told POLITICO that he has spoken with Rice and “she definitely has an interest in it and is taking a good look at it."
“She's run for it before. It is a job she aspired to at one time and I think she does again. She'll be a formal candidate, and I'm sure she'll throw her hat in the ring,” Jacobs said. 

But such a candidacy would reverberate: it would require Rice to vacate her House seat, which is in a potentially competitive district. That would potentially draw out state Sen. Todd Kaminsky (D-Long Beach) as a congressional candidate, which would in turn create a competitive race in the state Senate. Democrats are fighting to take outright control of the chamber in November’s general election. 

“There’s a lot of moving pieces that all impact one another,” Jacobs said. “Just what I was looking forward to.”

And of course, Republicans could just refuse to play along with Democrats and force them to keep Underwood.  Things get messy depending on who is picked and then runs in November, New York's famously (and ridiculously) late mid-September primary means we could be having this fight for some time.

The most important thing to remember is that Schneiderman was looking into the Trump organization, and keeping those cases moving has to be the top priority for Dems, not that I expect a Trump partisan to win.

But there's one more name that needs to be mentioned, of course.

Preet Bharara 

The former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York quickly emerged quickly on Twitter as a potential candidate, but on Tuesday gave no signals that he would do so. 

One political operative referred to Bharara as the “800-pound gorilla” looming over the primary, but after he was fired by President Donald Trump last spring he ignored pleas to seek office in New York. He has not laid any groundwork for a political campaign, and has focused on media commentary about the Trump administration. 

And as a prosecutor who targeted state legislators, he would have no chance of winning their appointment, lawmakers said.

We'll see.  Bharara has made some indication today that he's not ruling out a run.

Primary Evidence, Con't.

In Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana, primaries went pretty much according to plan.  Former Obama Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray will face off against GOP AG Mike DeWine for Ohio governor, Convicted WV con man Don Blankenship finished third in his primary to take on Joe Manchin in November, and Mike Pence's brother Gary will be running for Mike's old House seat.

But in North Carolina, things got pretty surprising last night as NC-9 GOP Rep. Robert Pittenger is out after losing his primary to challenger Mark Harris.

Former Charlotte pastor Mark Harris defeated Rep. Robert Pittenger in Tuesday's primary in North Carolina's 9th District, making him the first incumbent in the country to lose this year.

Pittenger also became North Carolina's first member of Congress in memory to lose a primary to a nonincumbent opponent.

"I've called Mark Harris, I've conceded the race and I wish him the best," Pittenger told supporters at what was expected to be a victory party.

Harris said, "I invite the congressman and his supporters to join our journey as we focus on keeping the 9th District red in November, ensuring the hard-working people of the 9th District have a congressman who is focused on representing them and their values ... "

The 9th contains Monroe and the southwest Charlotte suburbs and the counties east along the border with SC, up into Fayetteville, along where US Highway 74 and Interstate 74 cross, out to Interstate 95.  It's arguably the most boring part of the state I grew up in, nothing much out that way but tobacco farms and Lumberton (where David Lynch set Blue Velvet) and it's still a good hour and change to the coast.  Believe me, made the trip out through here several times over the years.  You're not missing much. 

But Pittenger going down means the Dems have a real shot in what's now an open district.

With nearly 95 percent of the precincts counted, Harris had 48.5 percent to Pittenger's 46.2 percent. A third candidate, Clarence Goins of Cumberland County, had 5.3 percent.

Harris enjoyed leads in Union and Bladen counties that had offset Pittenger's lead in Mecklenburg.

Pittenger, a former state senator first elected in 2012, was seeking a fourth term in the district that extends from southeast Charlotte east to Bladen County. In 2016 he defeated Harris by 134 votes, one of the country's closest congressional races.

Harris cast the primary as a battle for "the heart and soul of the Republican Party." He ran as much against the GOP-controlled Congress as against Pittenger. He said Pittenger was part of the Washington "swamp."

Pittenger had the backing of Washington's GOP leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who wrote a testimonial, and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who visited for a fundraiser. Vice President Mike Pence shared a Charlotte stage with him.

Harris sided with mavericks, once suggesting he'd support a co-founder of the conservative Freedom Caucus for speaker.

In TV ads and on the stump, each candidate portrayed himself as President Donald Trump's more loyal supporter.

Here's the thing through, NC-9 has a significant black and Native American population.  It's R+8, which is exactly the kind of district the Dems would need to win in order to take back the House, and in a wave year, this would be a district that would go blue.  It's one of the districts that got redrawn twice in in the last five years over the state's GOP gerrymandering fight.  The Democrat in the race is Dan McCready.

Democrats compare McCready, a Marine combat veteran, to Conor Lamb, the Democrat who won a special election this year in a Pennsylvania district that had gone for Trump by 20 points. McCready has attempted to steer toward the middle of the road, saying he would not support Nancy Pelosi for Democratic leader.

These are the red state districts Dems will have to win and keep in order to take the House, guys.  Until things can get redrawn in 2021, Republican-leaning districts like this are going to be the key.

StupidiNews!

• Trump's crackdown on Iran comes as oil prices have hit a nearly four-year high, the average family will pay $200 more this summer at the pump in higher gas prices.
• Award-winning international journalist Chrstiane Amanpour will take over Charlie Rose's PBS show in July, Amanpour will also continue her work as CNN's chief international correspondent.
• Saudi Arabia's government says it intercepted two ballistic missiles over Riyadh, state security officials are blaming Iranian-armed Houthi separatists for the attempted attack.
• A technical failure aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the costliest carrier in the fleet, forced the ship back to port in January as the Pentagon is pushing for dozens of new ships by 2035.
• New NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says America will return to the moon within ten years, but the big questions on whether NASA will use commercial rockets are still unanswered.