Last Call For Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The Trump regime is now demanding the right to openly rewrite CDC COVID-19 reports in order to help keep Trump in power, because this is what fascist regimes do.

The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.
In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

CDC officials have fought back against the most sweeping changes, but have increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording, according to three people familiar with the exchanges. The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer and continued as recently as Friday afternoon.

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation's public health work for decades.

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.

Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC's findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.

Caputo's team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that "the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks."

In one clash, an aide to Caputo berated CDC scientists for attempting to use the reports to "hurt the President" in an Aug. 8 email sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other officials that was widely circulated inside the department and obtained by POLITICO.

"CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration," appointee Paul Alexander wrote, calling on Redfield to modify two already published reports that Alexander claimed wrongly inflated the risks of coronavirus to children and undermined Trump's push to reopen schools. "CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening . . . Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear."

This has been going on for months now.

Understand that our entire executive branch, the federal agencies under its control, all exist now with the priority to keep Donald Trump in power. It's not the only job for all these agencies, but it is the top priority. Trump has successfully suborned the entire federal apparatus to serve his interests, and the people running these agencies and Cabinet departments are there to make sure that happens.

It's horrific. The American public is secondary, if not tertiary, to the goals of Trump and the money he's making for his friends and allies.

We've got to get rid of him before more Americans die.

It's About Suppression, Con't

 I did warn everyone that the Florida state constitutional amendment battle to restore voting rights to felons would end badly for Black Floridians, and Friday's 11th Circuit ruling has just restored the Poll Tax for felons.

In a significant reversal, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta ruled on Friday that a Florida law requiring people with serious criminal convictions to pay court fines and fees before they can register to vote is constitutional.

The decision overturned a ruling by a lower court in May that found the law discriminated against the majority of felons, many of whom are indigent, by imposing an unlawful “pay-to-vote system.”

The ruling, if upheld, will put new hurdles in place for people convicted of crimes who are seeking to vote, after Florida’s voters had amended the state’s Constitution in 2018 to end the disenfranchisement of those convicted of felonies, except for murder and sexual offenses. And with Florida a perennially close state in presidential elections, the decision could help shape the outcome this year.

The appeals court sided with the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and found that the felons who sued had failed to prove the law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It reversed the prior ruling by the United States District Court in Tallahassee.

“If a State may decide that those who commit serious crimes are presumptively unfit for the franchise,” the 11th Circuit ruled, “it may also conclude that those who have completed their sentences are the best candidates for re-enfranchisement.”

At issue was a Florida law passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Mr. DeSantis last year that required those convicted of felonies to settle their financial obligations to court before having their voting eligibility restored.

The law was passed after an overwhelming majority of Florida voters in 2018 approved Amendment 4, a landmark measure that automatically restored voting rights for people who have completed their sentences for felonies other than murder and sex crimes.

Lawyers for the DeSantis administration argued at trial that voters knew that felons would first have to pay their outstanding debts before becoming eligible to vote, a notion civil rights groups dismissed, countering that the state had no centralized system to let people know how much they might owe.

With Florida elections frequently decided by tiny margins, the restoration of felons’ voting rights was seen as a way to expand the electorate in the nation’s biggest presidential battleground state. An expert for the American Civil Liberties Union and the other civil rights groups testified at trial that more than 774,000 felons in the state owe legal financial obligations. Most criminal defendants are indigent when they are arrested.

“This ruling runs counter to the foundational principle that Americans do not have to pay to vote,” said Julie Ebenstein, a senior staff attorney with the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project. “The gravity of this decision cannot be overstated. It is an affront to the spirit of democracy.”

Again, the real issue here is that the vast majority of felons who are too poor to pay their court fines are Black or Latino, and Florida Republicans are completely okay with restoring voting rights to rich, white-collar felons who can pay while leaving non-white felons disenfranchised permanently.

The state doesn't even have a system to track exactly how much felons owe, but if they owe even a dollar, they can't vote. Effectively, the burden is placed on the felon to get their rights back even after serving their time. It's a poll tax, period.

But Trump of course packed the 11th Circuit over the last four years and now it's paying off.  Republicans will continue to rule Florida for the foreseeable future.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Black community leaders who approached Trump in order to get help for Black America have not only found that Trump kept none of his promises and used every Black person he could get close to as a photo op, but that Trump is actively eliminating what Barack Obama did to help Black America, one checklist point at a time.

On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in January 2017, Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect, welcomed a group of civil rights leaders, led by Dr. King’s eldest son, into his office in Trump Tower.

After a tour of Mr. Trump’s celebrity curio collection (Shaquille O’Neal’s sneakers, size 22, were a highlight), the visitors presented him with a proposal intended to prevent state voter identification laws from disenfranchising people of color.

The delegation had low expectations. Mr. Trump had championed the lie that President Barack Obama was not born in America and, in their view, played to racial fears during the 2016 campaign. He quickly dashed even those modest hopes. Low turnout among Black voters, Mr. Trump declared, had helped him defeat Hillary Clinton.

“Many people didn’t go out — many Blacks didn’t go out — to vote for Hillary because they liked me. That was almost as good as getting their vote,” Mr. Trump said, lowering his voice to say the word “Blacks,” on a recording provided by a meeting participant and confirmed as authentic by three others. (A White House spokesman did not dispute the veracity of the recording.)

Mr. Trump promised he would seriously consider their proposal. It went nowhere.

“I will be better to the African-American people than anybody else in this room,” he declared just before heading down the elevator to appear before the cameras with his guests, according to the recording, which was shared with several news organizations last month.

To Mr. Trump, this was little more than a photo op: Two former aides recalled that he wanted to be seen with a group of Black leaders to rebut an assertion made by Representative John Lewis, the late civil rights paragon, who at the time had said he did not “see this president-elect as a legitimate president.”

As the 2020 campaign hits the homestretch, Mr. Trump has been claiming that he is the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln and papering over his history of racist remarks by having Black supporters at the Republican convention back his boast that he “is the least racist person in the world.”

In fact, Mr. Trump has hired very few Black officials to positions of authority in the White House and for his re-election effort. And his campaign has stoked racial divisions to an extent not seen since George Wallace’s run in 1968. He has tried to block or hamper efforts to expand ballot access. He has said Black people were “too stupid” to vote for him, according to his estranged former attorney, Michael Cohen.

When asked about Mr. Cohen’s charge, a White House spokesman emailed a statement by Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany calling Mr. Cohen, “a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress.”

And as the 2017 meeting illustrates, many of Mr. Trump’s interactions with Black leaders have followed a similar pattern: He has turned opportunities for reconciliation, or even to debate policy differences, into empty-calorie encounters in front of the cameras, according to interviews with more than 30 Black officials, civil rights leaders, and former and current administration officials.

Trump campaign officials told reporters last week that they were working hard to slightly exceed their performance with Black voters in 2016 when they won about 8 percent of their vote. The president has also tried to mollify white moderates who might be turned off by his racial rhetoric.

The result is a jarring, split-screen approach: The president talks up his friendships with Black Americans (often famous ones like Kanye West) while running a campaign whose objective is to frighten white suburban voters into thinking a Biden presidency will bring problems from inner-city America to their front lawns.

What Trump wants is worship, adoration, and fear. Those he cannot control, he destroys. He asked us what we had to lose by supporting him. Obviously, the answer is everything.

When we told America this, we were dismissed as hysterical, hyperbolic, and crazy. The system wouldn't allow anyone as racist as "The Trump in our heads" to become President.

The system has obviously failed.  We have one chance left to correct it.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

It's becoming more and more apparent that the Trump regime is counting on a massive October Surprise that involves the possible indictment of several Obama administration officials, and the people responsible for it, Attorney General Bill Barr and US Attorney John Durham, are now facing pushback from their own people who see the writing on the wall.

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned from the U.S. Justice Department probe - at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening. The short email was a brief farewell message and said nothing about political pressure, her work for Durham or what the Durham team has produced, according to people who received it.

Durham’s office, who has never even acknowledged that Dannehy was in Washington working for him, had no immediate comment on the resignation.

Durham recruited Dannehy to join his team after he was appointed by Attorney General William Barr more than a year and a half ago to examine the the FBI’s legal justification for a disputed counterintelligence investigation that looked for ties between President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian efforts to meddle in the election.

Dannehy is a career prosecutor who worked closely with Durham before leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office about a decade ago for a corporate position in the defense industry. Durham persuaded her to return to the justice department and, withing weeks, join his team in Washington in the spring of 2019.

Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr - who appointed Durham - to produce results before the election. They said she has been considering resignation for weeks, conflicted by loyalty to Durham and concern about politics.

Durham is notoriously circumspect and neither he nor members of his team have revealed anything about the direction of their work. But Durham associates, none of whom have specific knowledge of the investigation, have said recently that it is their belief he is under pressure to produce something - perhaps some sort of report - before the presidential election in November.

The fix is in, folks. The Durham investigation is a sham. 

This is somebody John Durham went out of his way to get back on to his team, and 18 months later she has resigned knowing exactly what the appearance of her doing so would mean. She could have stuck around and said nothing in order to support her boss.

But she resigned.

This is a message, and the message is Bill Barr is planning to use the Durham investigation to win the election in the next few weeks.

Florida Schools Go Viral

Several school districts in Florida are outright defying GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's executive order to remain silent on COVID-19 infections among schoolchildren as parents, teachers, and school administrators realize they could never keep this under wraps.

Florida school districts are defying Gov. Ron DeSantis and publicly reporting new Covid-19 cases among students and staff that the state government considers confidential.

The state Department of Health has tried to directly quash reporting on the virus in some instances, after DeSantis said K-12 testing data “needs to be put in the right context.”

With no statewide standard, local leaders are left to decide on their own how and when to report Covid-19 cases in their districts. The result is a mix of differing daily and weekly reports and digital dashboards at school districts across Florida, with some counties not reporting any data to the general public.

In Bay County, for instance, school officials are aiming to produce three coronavirus reports a week. The district initially held off reporting anything to parents and the community as it watched the Department of Health’s response to counties that had built online dashboards to track the virus.

“We don’t want to get into any trouble, but we think transparency is the best way to go,” Bay County Superintendent Bill Husfelt said in an interview.

In a message to his school district, Husfelt noted that the Department of Health had asked some districts to take down their Covid-19 dashboards. In northeast Florida, Flagler County said the state forbid its local health department to release coronavirus data tied to schools. The DeSantis administration delivered a similar message to other counties, leading the state’s largest teachers union to blast the Republican governor in ads airing in Orlando and Tampa.

The state and local showdown over coronavirus messaging is the latest example of how state health officials have aided in the Republican governor’s plan to keep schools open during the pandemic. The state health department was “notably absent” when local school boards sought advice for closing classrooms during the pandemic, essentially forcing them to reopen, a circuit court judge wrote in an Aug. 24 ruling.

DeSantis and the Florida Education Association, a teachers union, have tangled in court over the state’s hardline school reopening policy. About 1.6 million students have returned to school for in person classes, while some 1.4 million students are beginning the year online, according to the state.

It's the week after Labor Day and schools are now open across America, but it's only a matter of time now before COVID-19 cases skyrocket in the weeks ahead and schools are forced to shut down campus instruction and go to all virtual classes later this fall.

It's possible that the infections can be contained by masks and measures in place, but I just don't see it holding as flu season gets underway.  We're going to have a lot of sick kids, sick parents, teachers and educators, and we're going to then have a lot of casualties as a result, heading into the election.

This could have been prevented six months ago.  Trump knew and actively chose not to do it.

Now we have to actively choose.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Looks like Rudy Giuliani is being hung out to dry as the Trump regime has designated his main source of Ukranian evidence against Joe Biden as a Russian agent.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday placed sanctions on a member of Ukraine’s parliament for running an “influence campaign” against former vice president Joe Biden, dubbing the lawmaker “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who has maintained “close connections with Russian intelligence services.”
The sanctions against Andriy Derkach — who in an attempt to tarnish the Democratic nominee for president released pilfered and edited phone conversations that Biden had years ago with Ukraine’s leadership — come less than two months before the 2020 presidential election and mark the most aggressive public action the U.S. government has taken to date to stanch foreign interference ahead of the vote.

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani has met at least three times with Derkach since late last year and publicized the Ukrainian lawmaker’s claims on his podcast and elsewhere, elevating what the Treasury Department has now characterized as a foreign interference campaign by an active Russian agent aimed at influencing the 2020 election. Giuliani met Derkach in Kyiv late last year, just as the House prepared to impeach Trump over a pressure campaign orchestrated by Giuliani to induce the Ukrainian government into announcing probes of Biden. Derkach later visited Giuliani in New York, months before he began releasing the tapes of Biden at news conferences in Kyiv.
Derkach “and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”

The Treasury Department said Derkach had “directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

“Today’s designation of Derkach is focused on exposing Russian malign influence campaigns and protecting our upcoming elections from foreign interference,” the department said in a statement. “This action is a clear signal to Moscow and its proxies that this activity will not be tolerated.”

Adam Silverman over at Balloon Juice explains the scam.

What the Treasury Department’s press release does not say is who, exactly, Mr. Derkach is partnered with in his activities against the United States as a Russian Intelligence Services officer. We know the answer to that because Derkach and his American accessories have been very up front about their activities. Derkach’s two main partners in his endeavors, which The Department of the Treasury has now stated unequivocally are the endeavors of the Russian Intelligence Services, are Rudy Giuliani and Chanel Rion, the far too credulous reporter from One America News Network (OANN).

Rion has her own issues, which I won’t get into here, but quite simply she is the poster girl for the counterintelligence concept of MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Rudy Giuliani is definitely one of the poster boys for MICE! He’s constantly chasing money to maintain his lavish lifestyle and pay alimony; his ideology has been all over the map for years, but basically comes down to whatever benefits Rudy Giuliani; he’s carried on multiple affairs and tries to keep them secret and he’s constantly chasing shady security consulting contracts in the post-Soviet states and the Middle East, so there’s a lot of compromising information on him out there; and his ego is ginormous!

What the Treasury Department makes clear today in their press release announcing the imposition of sanctions on Derkach, is that both Rudy Giuliani, who is the President’s personal lawyer, and Chanel Rion, who is one of his favorite reporters, have both been compromised by a Russian Intelligence officer and are being used by him to interfere in the 2020 US election to the benefit of Russia. It is important to keep in mind that both Giuliani and Rion most likely believe that they are using Derkach, not being used by Derkach, though the reality is the direction of control runs the other way. The Russians have watched and assessed exactly what bait they needed to use to attract Giuliani and Rion, as well as others like Congressman Nunes and his catspaws Derek Harvey and Kash Patel, the latter of whom is now embroiled in the new DHS whistleblower allegations just as he got himself wrapped up in the Ukraine phone call when Nunes placed him on the National Security Staff during 2019. All of these people are convinced of their own superior intelligence and the righteousness of their cause and they are desperate to be important and be world changing figures, which makes them ripe for manipulation and easy to control.

It also means that the cornerstone of the President’s impeachment defense was supplied by the Russian Intelligence Services via Derkach to and through Giuliani as the President’s pro bono personal lawyer and Rion and her reporting. And which is also being used by Senators Johnson, Grassley, and Graham in their attempts to use their Senate committees to dirty up VP Biden prior to the election.

Rudy Giuliani – America’s Mayor, Mr. a Noun, a Verb, and 9-11, the first name in cybersecurity, coveter of the position of Secretary of State, and the President’s pro bono personal lawyer – is being run as an asset by Andrii Derkach, a US identified Russian Intelligence officer who is overseeing an ongoing, active measures campaign to subvert the 2020 US election to the advantage of Russia in a war that Putin believes Russia has been fighting against the US since at least 2014. Rudy Giuliani has betrayed his country. Rudy Giuliani is currently acting against the United States on behalf of Russia’s Intelligence Services. Rudy Giuliani is a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United States.

Keep in mind also that this is happening on the same week as 9/11, where Rudy comes out of his gopher hole every year and reminds everyone that he's really famous for being in charge when thousands of people died 19 years ago.

He's also a Russian agent's pawn and active traitor, in a clear plot to interfere with the election, one so obvious that even the Trump regime is putting an end to it.

This should be the absolute end of Trump's camapign and a Biden landslide, but of course it won't be.

We've fallen that far in four years.  We have to climb out in November with Joe Biden, or we're all lost.

StupidNews!

• CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques of mining giant Rio Tinto has resigned in the wake of the destruction of a 46,000-year-old indigenous cultural heritage site in Australia to expand an iron mine.
• A federal judge has rejected the Trump regime's plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the US Census as a violation of "constitutional responsibility" to count all persons in a district.
• Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be in Pennsylvania and New York today to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on America.
• Voters in Russia go to the polls for regional elections this week as Moscow is demanding access to Putin critic Alexey Navalny in Germany, insisting the regime can prove he was not poisoned.
• Donald Trump says Chinese social media app TikTok will not get an extension from its Tuesday deadline to be sold to an American firm or to be banned in the US as a national security risk.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The good news is the Breonna Taylor murder case is finally going before a grand jury. The bad news is, KY GOP Attorney General Daniel Cameron is running this show, and there's every reason to believe he's going to purposely sandbag the case.

A decision on possible charges in the Breonna Taylor case is expected soon, WAVE 3 News Troubleshooters have learned.

Multiple sources confirmed the case will be presented to a grand jury at an undisclosed location.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office has been investigating the shooting death of Taylor, who was killed when LMPD narcotics officers served a warrant at her Louisville home in March.

The presentation was expected to take at least two days. The grand jury will then have time to deliberate whether any of the officers involved should face criminal charges.

Former Commonwealth’s Assistant Attorney Brian Butler said he would expect the Taylor presentation to take longer than a regular case.

“Historically in Jefferson County those cases have been presented in detail to grand juries,” said Butler, who is not involved in the case. “The grand jury can ask questions, the grand jury can interview witnesses themselves, they can ask to see additional evidence if they want to.”

Butler said grand jury members are selected randomly, and a judge usually asks questions to see if there’s any reason why they shouldn’t serve.

“In officer-involved shootings, it’s not uncommon at all to have multiple people testify,” he said.

Again, the bad news is Cameron himself. He has every reason to make this case vanish right now, and "The grand jury did not find enough evidence to go to trial" is his ticket to Trump's side in a second term, God forbid.

President Donald Trump has announced 20 people he'd consider to be on the U.S Supreme Court if he has to fill another vacancy, and among them is first-term Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

Cameron is 34 years old and the first Black person to independently hold statewide office in Kentucky. He is a protégé of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and worked as general counsel in his Senate office.

Trump's announcement reprises a tactic from his 2016 campaign when he provided a list of potential justices amid controversy over a Supreme Court vacancy.

"Should there be another vacancy on the Supreme Court during my presidency, my nominee will come from the names I have shared with the American public, including the original list and these 20 additions," Trump said on Wednesday.

Cameron has rocketed to public prominence over the last year — becoming the first Republican Kentucky attorney general since the 1940s and speaking at the Republican National Convention last month.

Trump also endorsed Cameron when he came to Kentucky last fall to stump for the state's Republican slate of statewide candidates.

Cameron is also overseeing the investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor, which has dragged on since May.

Now it's possible the grand jury will come back with indictments and Cameron will have to go to trial, well after the election. But there's every reason to believe the prosecution will be less than rigorous if that's the case.

Unfortunately, I expect the grand jury to come back with nothing, and I expect more protests with national focus, and I expect bad things will happen as a result.

Cameron is going to wave a wand and trash this case, and it's going to be a terrible time here in the commonwealth.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Trump/Russia interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections isn't going away anytime soon, and a new Homeland Security whistleblower complaint alleges that a senior intelligence official was told by the regime specifically to stop Russian all counterintelligence analysis on it.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official alleges that he was told to stop providing intelligence analysis on the threat of Russian interference in the 2020 election, in part because it “made the President look bad,” an instruction he believed would jeopardize national security.

The official, Brian Murphy, who until recently was in charge of intelligence and analysis at DHS, said in a whistleblower complaint that on two occasions he was told to stand down on reporting about the Russian threat.
On July 8, Murphy said, acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf told him that an “intelligence notification” regarding Russian disinformation efforts should be “held” because it was unflattering to Trump, who has long derided the Kremlin’s interference as a “hoax” that was concocted by his opponents to delegitimize his victory in 2016.
It’s not clear who would have seen the notification, but DHS’s intelligence reports are routinely shared with the FBI, other federal law enforcement agencies, and state and local governments.

Murphy objected to Wolf’s instruction, “stating that it was improper to hold a vetted intelligence product for reasons [of] political embarrassment,” according to a copy of his whistleblower complaint that was obtained by The Washington Post.

Murphy also alleges that two months earlier, Wolf told him to stop producing intelligence assessments on Russia and shift the focus on election interference to China and Iran. He said Wolf told him “that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien.”

Murphy said he would not comply with the instructions, which he believed would “put the country in substantial and specific danger,” according to the complaint, which was filed Tuesday with the DHS inspector general.

The White House and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.

“Mr. Murphy followed proper lawful whistleblower rules in reporting serious allegations of misconduct against DHS leadership, particularly involving political distortion of intelligence analysis and retaliation,” his attorney, Mark Zaid, said in a statement. “We have alerted both the Executive and Legislative Branches of these allegations and we will appropriately cooperate with oversight investigations, especially in a classified setting.”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that Murphy’s complaint “outlines grave and disturbing allegations that senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials improperly sought to politicize, manipulate, and censor intelligence in order to benefit President Trump politically. This puts our nation and its security at grave risk.”

When I said seven months ago after the Senate GOP refused to convict and remove Trump that Trump now had free reign to do whatever he wanted to do, this is exactly what I meant. Of course the politicization of intelligence was going to be total heading into the 2020 election. Of course Russia was going to get a free pass to do whatever it takes to keep Trump in power, as Trump would make sure our counter-intelligence folks were blinded on purpose.

Murphy will be testifying later this month, or maybe not, I'm sure the White House will block it. But at this point there are too many cracks in the dam to cover up every single thing.

The caveat on all this is that Murphy was fired last month after gathering intelligence on journalists.

The Department of Homeland Security official who oversaw the intelligence division at the department is being reassigned after it was revealed his office had gathered intelligence reports on two US journalists, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

Brian Murphy, who served as the acting under secretary for the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, was summoned to acting Homeland Secretary Chad Wolf's office Friday night, as speculation grew that he would be moved out of his role, according to another source familiar. 

Murphy is a career official who filled the position after the Senate-confirmed Under Secretary David Glawe left DHS earlier this year. It's unclear what Murphy's next role will be. The Washington Post was first to report on Saturday that Murphy had been removed from his job. 

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that DHS had sent Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies summarizing tweets sent by two journalists -- New York Times reporter Mike Baker and Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of the blog Lawfare -- who had published leaked unclassified government documents while covering the unrest in Portland, Oregon. 

The collection and dissemination of information on journalists was carried out by lower level officials acting on broad guidance, the source told CNN, adding that Murphy was not fully aware until after the fact. 

Wolf, who has led the department in an acting capacity since last November, sought to distance himself from the incident.

So is this retribution from a corrupt DHS official taking down as many people as he can, or was Murphy preemptively reassigned because he threatened to go public about the Russian intelligence?

Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee needs to have a little chat with him ASAP. We'll see if it happens.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr continues to serve as Donald Trump's legal bag man as he is having the Justice Department step in on the state defamation case filed against Trump by E. Jean Carroll.

The Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private legal team with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.

In a highly unusual legal move, lawyers for the Justice Department said in court papers that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Ms. Carroll and thus could be defended by government lawyers — in effect underwritten by taxpayer money.

Though the law gives employees of the federal government immunity from most defamation lawsuits, legal experts said it has rarely, if ever, been used before to protect a president, especially for actions taken before he entered office.

“The question is,” said Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, “is it really within the scope of the law for government lawyers to defend someone accused of lying about a rape when he wasn’t even president yet?”

The motion also effectively protects Mr. Trump from any embarrassing disclosures in the middle of his campaign for re-election. A state judge issued a ruling last month that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump being deposed in the case before the election in November, and Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have also requested that he provide a DNA sample to determine whether his genetic material is on a dress that Ms. Carroll said she was wearing at the time of the encounter.

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer said in a statement issued Tuesday evening that the Justice Department’s move to intervene in the case was a “shocking” attempt to bring the resources of the United States government to bear on a private legal matter.

“Trump’s effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent,” the lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said, “and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”

Ms. Carroll herself accused the president of siccing Attorney General William P. Barr against her. “TRUMP HURLS BILL BARR AT ME,” she wrote on Twitter.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on the motion.

It's the "effort to shield Trump from disclosure during the campaign" that is the real driver of this idiotic notion that federal taxpayers should fund Trump's defense in a case like this, but the fact of the matter is Trump being in the Oval Office now gives him a lot of power.

Trump can keep things tangled up in the courts as long as he remains in the office.  Once he's out, however...

We all know that Trump will not leave power willingly. He will face a bevy of immediate indictments in January. Democrats still don't seem to understand this key factor.  He will do anything to stay in power.

Anything.

Be ready now for that, and vote early.

StupidiNews!

• Trump campaign rallies in Nevada this weekend have been cancelled after local officials refused to sign off the events over COVID-19 mass gathering limits of 50 in the state.
• Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins is facing allegations of corruption after reports surfaced showing Collins and her husband benefited financially from the 2017 GOP tax bill.
• Microsoft security officials have informed the Biden campaign that a major advisory firm has been targeted by Russian state-sponsored hackers.
• Senate Republicans will vote today on a limited COVID-19 bill that doesn't provide any direct help for Americans, the vote is expected to fail over objections from Democrats.
• A new Commerce Department report finds climate change to be a "major risk to the stability of the US financial system" that "urgently and decisively" requires federal action to mitigate.

Last Call For Trump Goes Viral, Con't

As the US comes up on 200,000 dead from COVID-19, journalist Bob Woodward's book on the Trump regime, "Rage", confirms that Trump knew the virus was deadly back in February, but downplayed it on purpose, wasting months that could have saved thousands of lives.

President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and "more deadly than even your strenuous flus," and that he repeatedly played it down publicly, according to legendary journalist Bob Woodward in his new book "Rage." 

"This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward on February 7.

In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. "Pretty amazing," Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times "more deadly" than the flu.

Trump's admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was "going to disappear" and "all work out fine."

The book, using Trump's own words, depicts a President who has betrayed the public trust and the most fundamental responsibilities of his office. In "Rage," Trump says the job of a president is "to keep our country safe." But in early February, Trump told Woodward he knew how deadly the virus was, and in March, admitted he kept that knowledge hidden from the public.

"I wanted to always play it down," Trump told Woodward on March 19, even as he had declared a national emergency over the virus days earlier. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic."

If instead of playing down what he knew, Trump had acted decisively in early February with a strict shutdown and a consistent message to wear masks, social distance and wash hands, experts believe that thousands of American lives could have been saved.

We now know, in his own words, what Trump is guilty of.

Donald Trump intentionally misled the nation on the threat of COVID-19.

Frankly, this should be the end of Trump, but if there was any chance of his resignation it would have happened years ago. Luckily, we have an election in order to make that happen. In case you need a recap:

The startling revelations in "Rage," which CNN obtained ahead of its September 15 release, were made during 18 wide-ranging interviews Trump gave Woodward from December 5, 2019 to July 21, 2020. The interviews were recorded by Woodward with Trump's permission, and CNN has obtained copies of some of the audio tapes. 

"Rage" also includes brutal assessments of Trump's presidency from many of his former top national security officials, including former Defense Secretary James Mattis, former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Mattis is quoted as calling Trump "dangerous" and "unfit" to be commander in chief. Woodward writes that Coats "continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that Putin had something on Trump." Woodward continues, writing that Coats felt, "How else to explain the president's behavior? Coats could see no other explanation."

The Director of National Intelligence thought Donald Trump was compromised by Putin.

Trump fired him as a result.

We get to fire Trump in less than eight weeks.

Biden, His Time, Con't

The election will come down to eight swing states: Arizona, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida we all know, but Politico's team is wisely adding Georgia and Minnesota as the "canary" states. Inside those eight states, there are counties that will decide the entire state. Like it or not, the hard math of the Electoral College means these counties will almost certainly decide the President in November.

Minnesota’s Iron Range. Wisconsin’s “WOW” counties. Suburban Charlotte. The city of Philadelphia. 

Each is a shorthand for the building blocks of victory in the swing states that will determine the presidential election. 

At the traditional, post-Labor Day start of the fall campaign, POLITICO is zeroing in on eight critical battlegrounds where the 2020 election will be won or lost: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The selection of these swing states is based on a variety of factors — polling, demography, past and recent election history, voter registration, interviews with state and local party officials, strategists and pollsters. The individual campaigns have also revealed the places they are prioritizing through staffing, resource allocation, TV and radio advertising and candidate visits. 

Within each of these swing states, the roadmap ahead for President Donald Trump and Joe Biden is clear. The president must max out his performance with rural voters. Biden needs a robust turnout in the big cities, particularly among African-American voters. Trump must halt his erosion in the suburbs, and turn out white working-class voters who didn’t vote in 2016. Biden has to increase his current share among Latino voters and recapture some of the places that flipped to Trump after twice voting for President Barack Obama. 

Together, these eight states represent 127 electoral votes — and a departure from the fairly static map of the pre-Trump era. Missing from this swing state list are familiar presidential battlegrounds like Colorado, Ohio and Virginia. In their stead are states like Arizona and Georgia — which haven’t voted for a Democratic nominee since the 1990s — and Minnesota, which hasn’t voted for a Republican in nearly a half-century. 

The contours of the 2020 map reflect the disruptive political forces unleashed by Trump. His path to victory in 2016 revealed the limits of the Obama coalition, and drew sharp lines of demarcation around what’s been called the diploma divide: the gap between white voters with a college degree and those without one.

Race, class and educational attainment have always played pivotal roles in presidential voting. But, as with everything else, Trump has accelerated and amplified existing differences — while harnessing them to his political advantage. 

The question is whether his brand of smash-mouth, feed-the-base politics has gone too far — or whether there is still room to grow his base. His campaign is convinced it there is. 

Still, while national polls have generated a portrait of Biden holding a commanding lead, it’s something of a mirage. In the swing states that matter, it is trench warfare: Biden’s advantage, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, is within the margin of error in half of the eight states. And Trump is a president whose support has been notoriously difficult for pollsters to survey. 

Consider this fact: From July 2016 until Election Day in the three Rust Belt states that Trump unexpectedly picked off — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — 94 public polls were released. Trump led in just three of them.

It's not 2016. The battle is different.  Trump is hurting with seniors on COVID-19, but Biden is still underperforming significantly with Latino voters because Trump treating Cruz and Rubio like trash in 2016 hurt him, and now both have come crawling back to his boots to lick, so we're getting back to normal Latino voting percentages in Florida and Arizona.

Having said that, Trump is behind in both states.

Even if you give Trump Florida and Georgia, Biden wins with the other six states in a cake walk.

Trump knows this.  He knows a late October Surprise can win this for him, the problem is he's terrible at keeping secrets. He's already blown his Post Office mail ballot delay and COVID-19 vaccine scenarios, and he's running out of options.

That makes him extraordinarily dangerous.

Trump Goes Postal, Con't

House Democrats would definitely like to take a look at Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's alleged campaign finance felonies, as well as his apparent lying to Congress.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee is launching an investigation into embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy following a report alleging he pushed employees at the logistics company he led to make campaign contributions to Republican candidates and reimbursed them for the donations. 

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York who chairs the Oversight panel, said in a statement DeJoy "could face criminal exposure" for the scheme reported by The Washington Post, as well as for lying to her panel under oath, if the accusation are true. 

"We will be investigating this issue, but I believe the Board of Governors must take emergency action to immediately suspend Mr. DeJoy, who they never should have selected in the first place," she said.

Like I said earlier this month, Louis DeJoy is facing prison time from a state investigation in North Carolina over this too.

The problem is Trump can't steal the election without rigging the postal service to "lose" votes from particular ZIP codes, something a professional logistics man like DeJoy was hired to sabotage.  Trump has to cover him until after the election at least. Since Trump has appointed all seven of USPS Board Governors (Thanks again Bernie Sanders!) there's no way they will suspend DeJoy, so while this is necessary oversight, it comes far too late in order to save the voting process.

Again, a reminder to get your ballots requested and into the post office this month, rather than waiting until October. Election Day is less than eight weeks away.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump called on his supporters at a NC rally to become poll watchers and to report "thieving, stealing, and robbing" by Democratic voters.
• University of San Diego researchers believe last month's Sturgis Bike Rally in South Dakota may be responsible for over a quarter-million new COVID-19 cases.
• Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, stepping down for health reasons, appears to be ready to be succeeded by his lieutenant, current chief cabinet secretary Yoshihida Suga.
• UK PM Boris Johnson is facing massive pushback on his Brexit plan that would break EU and international law by revoking his promise to keep Northern Ireland under EU customs rules.
• Apple's battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games continues as the tech giant has filed a countersuit accusing the game company of breach of contract and theft.