Last Call For 44 Years Later, it's 45

With the twin clocks of the 2018 midterm elections and the Mueller probe into Donald Trump's obstruction of justice ticking, the regime has now shifted from mass denial and "fake news" conspiracies to full Nixonian "If the President does it, it can't be illegal" mode.

President Trump said on Sunday that a Trump Tower meeting between top campaign aides and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was designed to “get information on an opponent” — the starkest acknowledgment yet that a statement he dictated about the encounter last year was misleading. 

Mr. Trump made the comment in a tweet on Sunday morning that was intended to be a defense of the June 2016 meeting and his son Donald Trump Jr.’s role in hosting it. The president claimed that it was “totally legal” and of the sort “done all the time in politics.” 

But the tweet also served as an admission that the Trump team had not been forthright when Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement in July 2017 saying that the meeting had been primarily about the adoption of Russian children. Donald Trump Jr. made the statement after The New York Times revealed the existence of the meeting. 

A few days later, Mr. Trump posted a tweet similar to the one he wrote on Sunday morning: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” But his administration at the time was sticking to the adoption story line, with his press secretary, Sean Spicer, saying later that day there was no evidence that anything but that topic had been discussed during the meeting.

Although the president tried again on Sunday to portray the meeting as routine, it is a key focus of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Mueller is looking into whether the president’s campaign worked with Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and whether Mr. Trump or his associates obstructed justice by lying about their activities. 

It is illegal for a campaign to accept help from a foreign individual or government. 

Mr. Trump’s tweet on Sunday was one in a series in which he renewed his attacks on Mr. Mueller, saying his inquiry was riddled with “lies and corruption.

The president denied a report in The Washington Post that he was worried about the legal exposure for Donald Jr., who had been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to hold the meeting with the Russian lawyer. While he said that the meeting was legal, he also distanced himself from it, repeating his assertion that he knew nothing about it at the time. 

At some point, somebody must have told Trump to stop talking and to get off Twitter, but as any good prosecutor will tell you, letting the suspect talk himself into a conviction because they lack basic self-control is tried and true.

So now, with Trump's public admission that he has committed both obstruction of justice and campaign law contributions, we arrive at the inevitable test of the durability of the Republic. 

It was always going to reach this point, I have been saying this for 18 months now.  But today is the day we turn the corner from midgame to endgame, and we finally see if anyone is willing to stand up to Trump. We've been down this road as a country before, and I don't use the term Nixonian lightly.

August 5, 1974, was the day the Nixon Presidency ended. On that day, Nixon heeded a Supreme Court ruling and released the so-called smoking-gun tape, a recording of a meeting, held two years earlier, with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. Many of Nixon’s most damaging statements came in the form of short, monosyllabic answers and near-grunts—“um huh,” the official transcript reads, at one point—as he responds to Haldeman’s idea of asking the C.I.A. to tell the F.B.I. to “stay the hell out of” the Watergate investigation. The coverup is clearly of Haldeman’s design. Nixon’s words are simple: “All right. Fine.” Then, “Right, fine.” 

Haldeman’s idea seemed clever. He believed the F.B.I. was close to concluding that the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate hotel was the work of a C.I.A.-led operation, which had something to do with Cuba and the Bay of Pigs. Nobody would have to actually lie, he seems to suggest—it wasn’t “unusual” for the C.I.A. to warn the F.B.I. to drop an investigation that could harm national security. “And that will fit rather well because the F.B.I. agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that’s what it is. This is C.I.A.”

Nixon’s strongest statement to Haldeman is, surprisingly, a word of caution. “Don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it,” he says. “Say that we wish, for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!” When Nixon released the tape, he acknowledged that it would lead to his impeachment. Three days later, he resigned the Presidency.

The fact that there's only a 0.0001% chance that Trump resigns after this admission makes me have my extreme doubts.  But we will see if we survive this or not.

Open Mic Night, Only With Moonshine

If it's the first August Saturday in Kentucky, it's time for Fancy Farm, the Bluegrass State's annual "pretend we're normal people" political speechifying event/open mic night.  It's something that every political hopeful here attends, and this year was no different as human-terrapin hybrid Mitch McConnell announced his intent to run for Senate again in 2020.

Saying it was never too soon to start, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell formally announced his 2020 re-election bid in his home state Saturday and tapped the young leader of the state’s House Republicans as his campaign chairman. 

The 76-year-old McConnell has said for months that he intends to run for re-election in 2020. But he left little room for doubt while speaking at a GOP breakfast in far western Kentucky, the precursor to the Fancy Farm picnic that serves as the traditional starting point for the state’s fall campaign season. 

“I have some news to make this morning. I’m going to be running for re-election in 2020,” McConnell told the crowd at Graves County Middle School, adding: “I don’t like starting late.” 

McConnell chose Jonathan Shell, the 30-year-old majority leader of the Kentucky House of Representatives, as chairman of his campaign. Shell made national news in May when he was ousted in a Republican primary by a high school math teacher who had never run for office before. The election was seen by many as result of massive protests across the country by teachers and public workers upset with education funding, retirement benefits and low pay. 

Hundreds of teachers mustered at the Fancy Farm picnic Saturday. The 138-year-old tradition in western Kentucky is known for pitting politicians of both parties onstage before a crowd of raucous hecklers who do their best to fluster those brave enough to stand at the microphone. Raising the stakes, the speeches are broadcast live on statewide television. 

As McConnell spoke Saturday, hundreds of teachers in matching red T-shirts stood and turned their backs on him as they chanted, “Vote him out!” 

But McConnell was steady, seeming amused by some of the reactions. Near the end of his speech, McConnell addressed the Republican side of the crowd by turning to the Democrats and saying: “Don’t be afraid of these people. Stand up for America and help us make America great again.”

I will admit, anyone who thought Mitch would be bothered by the political pressure he's under never put up with Fancy Farm crowds in a sweltering Kentucky August. Especially in the Trump era of "civility" heckling everyone on stage is free game and absolutely expected, and you're supposed to give as good as you get but you'd better keep it clean.  After all,  this is a church picnic, folks.

But you know who wasn't here?

GOP Gov. Matt Bevin.

Couldn't stand the heat, I guess.  Next year should be real interesting.

Sunday Long Read: An Eye For The Trump Era

Author Laurie Penny brings us this week's Sunday Long Read at the Baffler, an in-depth look at why Netflix's reboot of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy may arguably be the most timely and important social commentary on the Trump era so far, why late-state capitalism is an impressive failure, why toxic masculinity is destroying the country, and why we're packaging it all as feel-good reality TV.

SOME THINGS ARE JUST TOO PURE for this weird and wicked world. That video of the golden retriever failing an agility test. Golden retrievers in general. Political science majors who truly believe they can change the system from within. And Queer Eye.

Queer Eye is a cultural intervention masquerading as a Netflix series. It has rapidly become essential to the well-being of a great many good and decent human beings who had otherwise stopped turning on the television for fear of the horror leaking out of it. I’m only slightly exaggerating: you’ve got to wonder what will become, for example, of the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman—who has now written a heart-wrenching daisy-chain of Queer Eye columns—if the show’s producers don’t make a third season. Which they will. I promise. Nobody panic.

Queer Eye is wonderful and terrible and probably the last significant statement to be made in reality television. The show, a Netflix-produced reboot of the original, squealsome mid-aughts judge-your-jeans extravaganza, instantly launched a thousand memes when it premiered in February, and the new second season has been a huger hit than anyone expected. In a culture awash in both mawkish reality vehicles dripping with kitsch and nostalgic reboots of shows from a softer world, Queer Eye is both. It manages to exceed the sum of its parts by not actually being about what we’re told it’s about. It’s not about queerness at all. It’s actually about the disaster of heterosexuality—and what, if anything, can be salvaged from its ruins.

On the surface of things, it’s a straightforward quest for “acceptance,” supposedly of homosexuality, dramatized via the no-longer-so-outlandish vehicle of sending five gay men on an outreach mission to small-town Georgia with a vast interior design budget and a vanload of affirmations. What it turns out to be, though, is a forensic study of the rampaging crisis of American masculinity. In each new installment of the reboot, queerness is gently suggested as an antidote to the hot mess of toxic masculinity under late-stage capitalism. I am absolutely here for it, as long as we all get paid.

The basic formula has barely changed: five gay men in an SUV descend on one hapless, shlubby, usually straight guy and sort his life out. In seven days, Jonathan Van Ness, Bobby Berk, Tan France, Karamo Brown, and Antoni Porowski give him a whole new look, redesign his home and wardrobe, teach him some basic kitchen skills, and provide scripted space to talk about his feelings with the cameras rolling.

In its aughts heyday, the original Queer Eye was catty and consumerist, with a side-order of snide eye-rolling and dreadful puns. The gimmick, the selling point, was that gay men are actually fun and fabulous and it’s safe to let them in your homes, because they might redecorate. The reboot follows the same beats with a more compassionate melody, and this time the gimmick is different. The gimmick is that heterosexuality is a disaster, toxic masculinity is killing the world, and there are ways out of it aside from fascism or festering away in a lonely bedroom until you are eaten by your starving pitbull or your own insecurities. The men typically featured as the show’s reclamation projects remind me of some of the men who I see on Tinder, sitting on that touring reproduction of the Iron Throne, staring into the middle distance, while in their real lives, and certainly on Queer Eye, they sit on ugly, painful furniture, faux-leather recliners that damage their backs, couches soaked in cat urine.

People on this show are extremely sweet to one another. That is rare enough within the reality TV genre, where “reality” is usually flattened into an exaggerated Hobbesian melee of shark-eyed competition and high-stakes back-stabbing. Most reality shows replicate the ruthless dogma of the age whereby life is made up of winners and losers and the trick is to hammer the other guy into the ground before he can do the same to you. On this show, men do not compete with each other. They touch each other, a lot, and seeing that brings home just how horrifyingly rare that is in untelevised reality. They cry and admit to one other how much it hurts to be alive while a handsome stranger teaches them how to make guacamole. There are no winners on Queer Eye—just better losers.

Fixing a few of these losers is the best we can hope for, I guess.  Fixing the system that created these losers, well, that's the reality show we're all living in today.

The Erdogan Model Comes To Caracas

Brutally cracking down after "rebel action" is a tried and true autocrat maneuver straight from the dictatorship playbook, and Venezuela is no different as an "assassination attempt" on President Nicolas Maduro over the weekend will certainly lead to a massive military purge of his enemies.

Explosions caused pandemonium at a military ceremony where President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela was speaking on Saturday, making the first lady flinch and sending National Guard troops scurrying in what administration officials called an assassination attempt using drones.

The president, who was unharmed, later told the nation, “To all of our friends in the world, I am fine, I am alive.” He blamed right-wing elements and said, “The Bolivarian revolution keeps its path.”

Mr. Maduro has presided over a spectacular economic collapse in Venezuela, where inflation is expected to reach one million percent this year despite the country’s large oil reserves. Economists blame decades of mismanagement under Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez.

The drone attack was the latest in a string of attempts in recent years to end the tenure of Mr. Maduro, who was declared the victor of an election in May that carries his term until 2025. No previous assaults have been as bold, though, and this appeared to have been the first assassination attempt on a head of state using drones.

It was an attack that seemed scripted for Hollywood: Off-camera explosions. Low-flying drones exploding midair. The president and first lady ducking for cover. Thousands of soldiers in a military parade suddenly fleeing in a stampede that was broadcast to the country, live.

Jorge Rodríguez, the communications minister, said the attackers had used “several flying devices” that were detonated near where the president was standing.

The attack came shortly after 5:30 p.m. during an event the government said was meant to celebrate the 81st anniversary of the country’s National Guard.

During the president’s speech, which was broadcast live on state television, the camera began to shake. Mr. Maduro then looked into the air as his wife, Cilia Flores, flinched and reached for another official to brace herself.

The video feed was interrupted, but Mr. Maduro could be heard continuing to talk as voices in the background yelled for people to flee.

The video feed then showed figures dressed in black breaking through a barrier from the sidelines of a wide street where hundreds of uniformed guardsmen were arrayed in formation. The figures in black ran toward the guardsmen, who abruptly fled in panic.

Maduro is already blaming Colombia and President Juan Manuel Santos for the incident, as well as ex-pat "financiers" in Florida.  Authorities have of course immediately picked up suspects.

Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez said the incident took place shortly after 5:30 p.m. as Maduro was celebrating the National Guard’s 81st anniversary. The visibly shaken head of state said he saw a “flying device” that exploded before his eyes. He thought it might be a pyrotechnics display in honor of the event.

Within seconds, Maduro said he heard a second explosion and pandemonium ensued. Bodyguards escorted Maduro out of the event and television footage showed uniformed soldiers standing in formation quickly scattering from the scene.

He said the “far right” working in coordination with detractors in Bogota and Miami, including Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, were responsible. Some of the “material authors” of the apparent attack have been detained.

“The investigation will get to the bottom of this,” he said. “No matter who falls.”

Venezuela’s government routinely accuses opposition activists of plotting to attack and overthrow Maduro, a deeply unpopular leader who was recently elected to a new term in office in a vote decried by dozens of nations. Maduro has steadily moved to concentrate power as the nation reels from a crippling economic crisis.

Mismanagement and corruption has caused one million percent inflation in the country, and Maduro is hated.  But now, this "assassination attempt" by Colombia allows Maduro to consolidate power and rally it against an external enemy.  It's a move as old as civilization itself.

Just like Turkey and the Philippines, expect bloodshed and purge.

Last Call For The (Archie) Bunker Mentality

We're starting to freely get Trump regime "bunker mode" stories again, which is a fair indication that the people behind the scenes with Trump realize that when the hurricane hits, every one of them will be tossed in the path of the storm by Trump in order for him to survive.

In private, President Trump spent much of the past week brooding, as he often does. He has been anxious about the Russia ­investigation’s widening fallout, with his former campaign chairman standing trial. And he has fretted that he is failing to accrue enough political credit for what he claims as triumphs.

At rare moments of introspection for the famously self-centered president, Trump has also expressed to confidants lingering unease about how some in his orbit — including his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — are ensnared in the Russia probe, in his assessment simply because of their ­connection to him.

Yet in public, Trump is a man roaring. The president, more than ever, is channeling his internal frustration and fear into a ravenous maw of grievance and invective. He is churning out false statements with greater frequency and attacking his perceived enemies with intensifying fury. A fresh broadside came on Twitter at 11:37 p.m. Friday, mocking basketball superstar LeBron James and calling CNN’s Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television.”

This is the new, uneasy reality for Trump at an especially precarious moment of his presidency, with the Republican Party struggling to keep control of Congress, where a Democratic takeover brings with it the specter of ­impeachment, and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s grip seeming to tighten on the president and his circle.

Trump, who has decamped to his New Jersey golf estate for an 11-day working vacation, is at a critical juncture in the Russia investigation as he decides in coming days whether to sit for an interview with Mueller or defy investigators and risk being issued a subpoena.

“He’s more definitive than ever: This investigation should end now, and Mueller should put out what he has,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. “He doesn’t think they have anything, and he wants the country to move on.”

This portrait of Trump behind the scenes is based on interviews with 14 administration officials, presidential friends and outside advisers to the White House, many of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments.

Trump appeared to stand in conflict with his own government when he blasted the “Russian hoax” just hours after his national security team gathered at the White House on Thursday in a rare show of force to warn that Russia is yet again trying to interfere in U.S. elections. But a White House spokesman said Trump instructed them to hold the news conference and was adamant that they explain what the administration is doing to safeguard the ­midterm elections.

The frequency of the president’s mistruths has picked up, as well. The Washington Post Fact Checker found last week that Trump has now made 4,229 false or misleading claims so far in his presidency — an average of nearly 7.6 such claims per day, and an increase of 978 in just two months.

They still refuse to use the word "lie" and "liar" for Trump and what he does, but this is the closest they've come yet to fully describing the trainwreck stage that this is rapidly becoming.  The post-Helsinki distancing of Trump's national security team from Trump's own actions would have been unthinkable even thirty days ago, but the twin pressures of Mueller and the midterms are serving as hammer-and-anvil to the GOP and they know it.

Trump could care less about Manafort, really.  But Don Junior, well, that's a different story.

President Donald Trump is concerned about whether his son Donald Trump Jr. might have exposure in the special counsel's Russia investigation, leading to his increasingly frenzied public agitation over Robert Mueller, sources close to the White House tell CNN. 

Trump has been concerned for months now that the Mueller probe could reach his family, and potentially his son-in-law Jared Kushner, but his focus has turned to his namesake in recent weeks, one person who speaks with Trump frequently tells CNN. This is one of several reasons Trump has upped his public attacks on Mueller, because he doesn't want him touching his family, the person adds. 

Trump Jr. and his attorney have insisted he has always told the truth. But his claims publicly and to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he never told his father about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian attorney promising dirt on Hillary Clinton have been contradicted by others in Trump's orbit. Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime attorney and former fixer, is said to be prepared to testify that the President knew about the Trump Tower meeting ahead of time sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN. Trump has denied knowing about the meeting before it happened. 

Others who have been close to the President -- including his former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon — have suggested the President at the very least knew shortly after the fact. 

Asked about CNN's latest reporting on the President's mindset, a source close to Trump Jr. said he's not concerned and maintains he did nothing wrong. 

Earlier this week, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, told CNN, "If he misled the committee, he's lying to Congress. That's a crime. And that'd be up to the prosecutors, not me." 

 We'll see what happens.  As I said earlier today, the hammer of justice is coming.

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It's About Suppression, Con't

It's been clear for well over a year now, but the "massive Democrat voter fraud" that the Trump regime vowed to find after the 2016 election never existed, and was completed manufactured in order to justify GOP voter suppression efforts.

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states. Kobach, too, spoke around that time about how “some people on the left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”

In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.

“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.” 

It wasn't just about validating Trump's false claims of "widespread" voter fraud by "illegal immigrants", it was a moneymaking opportunity for Republican grifters like Kobach, who is now the leading GOP candidate for Kansas governor in Tuesday's primary.

Kris Kobach likes to tout his work for Valley Park, Missouri. He has boasted on cable TV about crafting and defending the town’s hardline anti-immigration ordinance. He discussed his “victory” there at length on his old radio show. He still lists it on his resume.

But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them. But after two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there—something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.

“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”

Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns—some with budgets in the single-digit-millions—ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances. Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Pennsylvania, took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. In Fremont, Nebraska, the city raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns is currently enforcing the laws he helped craft.

“This sounds a little bit to me like Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man,'” said Larry Dessem, a law professor at the University of Missouri who focuses on legal ethics. “Got a problem here in River City and we can solve it if you buy the band instruments from me. He is selling something that goes well beyond legal services.”

Kobach rode the attention the cases generated to political prominence, first as Kansas secretary of state, and now as a candidate for governor in the Republican primary on August 7. He also earned more than $800,000 for his immigration work, paid by both towns and an advocacy group, over 13 years.

Kobach has made a career of fake voter fraud claims, using it to stoke racial fears, and eagerly using his reputation to recruit help from white nationalists too.

Kobach has been the architect of GOP voter suppression efforts for years now, and it's high time Kansas voters put a stop to his adventures.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Long-time Democratic strategist Brent Budowski predicts Robert Mueller will soon drop the obstruction of justice hammer on the Trump regime, and that the true battle for the soul of America will begin...

Why is President Trump escalating his attacks against special counsel counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the free press to a fever pitch in recent days?

The reason is that the odds are very high that Mueller will offer a declarative public statement before the midterm elections, and very likely before Labor Day, that the president is guilty of obstruction of justice.The Mueller declaration of obstruction of justice could be issued in the form of a letter to Congress and may or may not ultimately be issued in the form of an indictment if he believes that the Trump situation creates extraordinary circumstances that warrant his seeking approval for a formal indictment.

It is impossible to know exactly what Mueller will do. We do not know the evidence he has that has not yet been made public. We do not know his private thinking on great matters of state and law that will govern his actions.

In April, there were public reports that Mueller would ultimately release his findings in two stages, the first being obstruction of justice, which could be released in whatever form it takes this summer.

When public reports indicated that Mueller is looking at Trump tweets, among other factors, in the obstruction investigation, some of his handful of legal defenders suggested that Trump tweets are not relevant evidence of obstruction. They are wrong, though the tweets are far from the most important evidence.

Consider the obstruction of justice provisions in the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon that were passed by the House Judiciary Committee before Nixon resigned. Article 1, Section 8 of the articles of impeachment included this:

“making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation had been conducted with respect to allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel of the executive branch of the United States and personnel of the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and that there was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct.”

In other words, repeatedly making false statements intended to deceive the public about matters under investigation constitute acts in furtherance of obstruction of justice in violation of American law.

Now consider this. Literally in real time, Trump is virtually at war over facts with leading members of his Cabinet about whether Russia has attacked American elections in the 2016 campaign and continues to attack American elections in the 2018 midterms.

On Thursday, leading members of his administration joined together in an extraordinary public session warning the nation about the continuing Russian attack against our elections. His national security adviser, director of National Intelligence, FBI director and secretary of Homeland Security stood united before the nation, warning of the continuing Russian attack in clear and powerful terms.

Trump could have joined them in person to offer his support. He did not. Instead, only hours later, he publicly claimed, again, that the Russia investigation was a hoax and that his recent meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin was a huge success.

If charges that Trump obstructed justice by making false statements are considered in court or congressional hearings, it would be powerful testimony for his Cabinet members to be called to testify about whether Trump’s statements that the Russia investigations are a hoax are true or false.

Similarly, Trump’s fevered and escalating attacks against the free press, which even his daughter Ivanka had the good sense to rebut, provide more powerful and compelling evidence of intent to mislead the public about matters under intense investigation.

While Trump is in dramatic conflict with Cabinet members who warn about the Russian attack, which he falsely claims is a hoax, he attacks the free press for reporting about the Russian attack, which he falsely claims is fake news.

Mueller could argue that Trump is seeking to execute the first televised obstruction of justice, in plain view before the nation every day.

With a high probability that the obstruction issue reaches a crescendo before the midterm elections, there is now a growing likelihood that an anti-Trump wave will doom Republicans to a disastrous defeat in November.

I'm not 100% sure this is the path that will unfold.  I still believe, given Trump's long history of petty vengeance and mendacity, that he will attempt to fire Mueller before such a report can be issued.  There is the very real possibility that he will be successful in doing so.  The notion that Trump's own cabinet members will do the right thing here is laughably low.

What happens from that point on determines whether or not we keep the Republic, including the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections.

Last Call For Immigration Nation, Con't

A federal judge has ordered the Trump regime to fully restore the DACA program within 20 days, something that is definitely going to lead to a mess and soon.

A federal judge on Friday upheld his order that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program should be fully restored, setting a 20-day deadline for the administration to do so. 

DC District Judge John Bates said the Trump administration still has failed to justify its proposal to end DACA, the Obama-era program that has protected from deportation nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children. 

But Bates agreed to delay his ruling for 20 days to give the administration time to respond and appeal, if it chooses. 

The ruling sets up potentially conflicting DACA orders from federal judges by the end of the month. 

The decision comes less than a week before a hearing in a related case in Texas. In that case, Texas and other states are suing to have DACA ended entirely, and the judge is expected to side with them based on his prior rulings. 

Previous court rulings in California and New York have already prevented the administration from ending DACA, but they only ordered the government to continue renewing existing applications. Bates' ruling would go further and order the program reopened in its entirety. The earlier decisions are pending before appeals courts. 

Bates on Friday upheld a ruling he had issued in April that ordered the administration to begin accepting DACA applications again. He had postponed that order for 90 days to give the government time to offer a better legal justification for its decision last September to end the program. 

The Department of Homeland Security followed up by largely reiterating its previous argument: that DACA was likely to be found unconstitutional in the Texas case if it were challenged there and thus it had to end. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also said in the DHS response that the agency had the discretion to end the program, as much as its predecessors had the discretion to create it. 

I would almost certainly expect SCOTUS to step in with a permanent stay of the order, the Texas order being upheld, and that order immediately being challenged in court.  How quickly the case gets to SCOTUS, I don't know, but my guess will be the Trump regime will want Kavanaugh in place before that happens.

We'll see what happens, but this order won't survive the week, it may not survive the weekend.

 

 

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The spy games between the Trump regime and the Kremlin continue, as The Guardian breaks an impressive story of a deep-cover Russian agent with access to the US embassy in Moscow.

US counter-intelligence investigators discovered a suspected Russian spy had been working undetected in the heart of the American embassy in Moscow for more than a decade, the Guardian has learned.

The Russian national had been hired by the US Secret Service and is understood to have had access to the agency’s intranet and email systems, which gave her a potential window into highly confidential material including the schedules of the president and vice-president.

The woman had been working for the Secret Service for years before she came under suspicion in 2016 during a routine security sweep conducted by two investigators from the US Department of State’s Regional Security Office (RSO).

They established she was having regular and unauthorised meetings with members of the FSB, Russia’s principal security agency.

The Guardian has been told the RSO sounded the alarm in January 2017, but the Secret Service did not launch a full-scale inquiry of its own. Instead it decided to let her go quietly months later, possibly to contain any potential embarrassment.

An intelligence source told the Guardian the woman was dismissed last summer after the state department revoked her security clearance. The dismissal came shortly before a round of expulsions of US personnel demanded by the Kremlin after Washington imposed more sanctions on the country.

The order to remove more than 750 US personnel from its 1,200-strong diplomatic mission is understood to have provided cover for her removal.

“The Secret Service is trying to hide the breach by firing [her],” the source said. “The damage was already done but the senior management of the Secret Service did not conduct any internal investigation to assess the damage and to see if [she] recruited any other employees to provide her with more information.

“Only an intense investigation by an outside source can determine the damage she has done.”

Asked detailed questions about the investigation into the woman, and her dismissal, the Secret Service attempted to downplay the significance of her role. But it did not deny that she had been identified as a potential mole.

In a statement, it said: “The US Secret Service recognizes that all Foreign Service Nationals (FSN) who provide services in furtherance of our mission, administrative or otherwise, can be subjected to foreign intelligence influence.

“This is of particular emphasis in Russia. As such, all foreign service nationals are managed accordingly to ensure that Secret Service and United States government interests are protected at all times. As a result, the duties are limited to translation, interpretation, cultural guidance, liaison and administrative support.

To recap, the US had identified a possible Russian mole in the USSS, who had been in the agency's employ for a decade.  The Trump regime was informed when Trump took office.  The USSS quietly let her go and pretended nothing was wrong.   Nobody would have suspected anything, but then this story hits.

On the same day that this story broke, yesterday, the White House press briefing was presented by not just press secretary Sarah Sanders, but by four cabinet officials who all just happened to be responsible for the executive branch's defense against Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections.

The top officials' presence in the White House briefing room amounted to the administration's most significant effort to date to convey that a whole of government effort is being undertaken to combat Russian attacks on US democracy, which Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said is "in the crosshairs." 

The briefing came on the heels of weeks of scorching criticism Republicans and Democrats have unleashed on the President following his refusal to back the US intelligence community's conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election over Russian President Vladimir Putin's denials.

"Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and it has become clear that they are the target of our adversaries who seek ... to sow discord and undermine our way of life," Nielsen said. 

The briefing came on the heels of weeks of scorching criticism Republicans and Democrats have unleashed on the President following his refusal to back the US intelligence community's conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election over Russian President Vladimir Putin's denials. 

Trump has since reaffirmed his confidence in the US intelligence assessment, but his absence from the briefing room on Thursday and his ongoing branding of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as a "witch hunt" have only kept alive questions about whether Trump is serious about confronting ongoing Russian interference. 

That cognitive dissonance was on display during the briefing Thursday as Coats, national security adviser John Bolton and FBI Director Chris Wray were pressed about contradictions in the administration's messaging and the President's. 

"I think the President has made it abundantly clear to everybody who has responsibility in this area that he cares deeply about it and that he expects them to do their jobs to their fullest ability and that he supports them fully," Bolton said, adding that Trump opened his private meeting with Putin by raising election interference. 

Still, Coats said he is "not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened in Helsinki," despite being one of the US's top intelligence officials. 

And so the same day we find out about a major, major Russian mole in the USSS.

This is not a coincidence.  Maybe there's finally enough pressure from Republicans in Congress to motivate the Trump regime to fight back.

Maybe.  I have serious doubts, but we'll see.  

StupidiNews!

• Former Tennessee Democratic Gov. Phil Breseden will take on GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn for the Senate seat of retiring Republican Bob Corker, both Breseden and Blackburn easily won primaries.
• Firefighters in California continue to battle dangerous winds and tinder-dry conditions as nearly 20 wildfires are raging across the Golden State this wildfire season.
• Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa is calling for calm as protesting opposition demonstrators are questioning the results of Mnangagwa's election victory this week.
• Japan has retaken the number two position in world stock market value over China as Beijing's sharp tech slump continues to batter prices, Japan was last number two to the US in 2014.
• Apple has become the first company to hit $1 trillion in stock market value as the tech giant's shares rose on strong second quarter earnings boosted by $100 billion in stock buybacks.

Last Call For That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

If Vanity Fair's Gabe Sherman is correct here, the Manafort trial is the trigger event for Trump soon making his move on Rosenstein and Mueller.

In the Trump West Wing, new external pressure inevitably brings the buildup of internal heat, followed by its release, often most visibly in a series of tweets. The start of Paul Manafort’s federal trial this week has triggered Trump’s hottest blast yet, and has renewed the possibility that Trump will fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. “This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further,” Donald Trump tweeted yesterday. “Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!”

Whether it’s confidence, bluster, or delusion, Trump is venting to advisers both inside and outside the White House that the Manafort trial proves Mueller has nothing on him and his family, because Manafort’s trial doesn’t involve Russia or the 2016 campaign. “The Manafort trial is spinning him into a frenzy,” one Republican in frequent contact with the president told me. Another Republican told me Trump thinks “the only thing the trial shows is that Manafort is a sleaze.”

Sources say Trump is increasingly taking his legal defense into his own hands—very much at his own peril. The Sessions tweet crossed a line into what many interpreted to be outright obstruction of justice. Trump also is arguing that he wants to sit for an interview with Mueller, against his lawyers’ advice, The New York Times reported. This is partly driven by Trump’s frustration with his legal team’s inability to end the Mueller probe. As I reported this week, Trump is angry with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani for giving a series of erratic television interviews that seemed to disclose a previously unknown strategy meeting at Trump Tower that took place days before Don Jr.’s infamous sit-down with a Russian lawyer to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Trump is also unhappy with White House counsel Don McGahn, who in the past stood in the way of Trump’s effort to fire Mueller.

Trump’s latest attacks on Mueller are partly being enabled by conversations with his attorney Emmet Flood, one source told me. “Emmet feels there’s nothing there with collusion, so it’s fine for Trump to comment and tweet,” the source explained. This person added that Trump appears to be in earnest about his desire for Sessions to end the Mueller probe, and spoke of a timeline of a couple of weeks. Otherwise, Trump has threatened to fire Rosenstein himself.

A couple of weeks would put us near the end of the Manafort trial, but still in August before the House has returned from recess.  (Mitch McConnell is of course keeping the Senate in session through Labor Day in order to prevent incumbent Senate Democrats from being able to campaign at home, while their GOP challengers have no such restrictions.)

As I've said before, Trump has everything in place now to fire Rosenstein from both a technical and political aspect. I've been predicting this since February, when the previous number 3 official as Justice, Rachel Brand, abruptly resigned.  It took until Brand's replacement, Brian Benczkowski, was confirmed three weeks ago that the plan picked up speed.

Since then, Robert Mueller has upped the ante with the indictments of Russian GRU agents accused of interfering in the 2016 elections, and the GOP countered with the House Freedom Caucus plan to impeach Rosenstein.  The impeachment threat against Rosenstein didn't gain any traction before the House adjourned for August recess, but then came Trump's tweets on Wednesday.

That brings us to now, where Trump is supposedly giving Jeff Sessions a "couple of weeks" to end the Mueller probe or he fires Rosenstein.

If that's the case, then we're heading for the cliff, guys.

Be ready.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Long-time readers of ZVTS will recognize that I've long held the theory that a significant number of white Obama voters turned on President Obama and the Democrats after he defended Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter.  For these voters, the fact that Barack Obama recognized that his election was not the end of racism in America was too much of an admission for them to handle.  

It was an unforgivable crime in their eyes that kindled resentment and revenge on Hillary Clinton in 2016.  "We elected a black president, what more do you people want?  Maybe four years of Donald Trump will teach you gratitude for what we allow you to have!" is the kind of thought process I'm talking about here.

The answer to that question is "We'd like to work at our employer's place of business without the police being called on us for the crime of being black."

The rising sophomore at Smith College was quietly eating her lunch in a campus common room when a police officer approached her Tuesday afternoon.

A college employee had called police to report someone who “seemed out of place” in a Smith building that was being used for a summer program. But when campus police arrived, they found a Smith student, taking a break from her campus job.

There was “nothing suspicious about the student’s presence,” the school said in a statement released Wednesday about the incident, the latest example of police being called to investigate black people in everyday situations.

In two posts to Facebook on Tuesday, the woman identified herself as the student in question. She wrote that a white college employee had reported her to the police as a “suspicious black male.”

“I am blown away at the fact that I cannot even sit down and eat lunch peacefully,” she wrote in one post. “I did nothing wrong, I wasn’t making any noise or bothering anyone. All I did was be black.”

The student was working on campus this summer as a teaching assistant and residential adviser, according to her Facebook page.

“It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color,” she wrote. The student did not respond to requests for comment.

Amy Hunter, the college’s interim director of diversity and inclusion, said the school “does not tolerate race- or gender-based discrimination in any form.”

“Such behavior can contribute to a climate of fear, hostility and exclusion that has no place in our community,” she wrote in a message sent to students, faculty, staff, and alumni Wednesday morning, said Samuel Masinter, a college spokesman.

When police are called for situations like this, there is always the non-zero chance that it turns deadly.  Black people can die when it does.  Any confrontation between a black person in America and the police can potentially lead to death.

"But that's true for any police interaction, that's why law enforcement officers risk their lives every day with every move they make!"

So do black people in America.

In only one of these two situations is the risk voluntarily accepted.

Immigration Nation, Con't

Get used to headlines like this from the NY Times when it comes to the Trump regime and legal immigration: Trump May Slash Number of Refugees U.S. Accepts by 40%

The White House is considering a second sharp reduction in the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States, picking up where President Trump left off in 2017 in scaling back a program intended to offer protection to the world’s most vulnerable people, according to two former government officials and another person familiar with the talks. 

This time, the effort is meeting with less resistance from inside the Trump administration because of the success that Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser and an architect of his anti-immigration agenda, has had in installing allies in key positions who are ready to sign off on deep cuts. 

Last year, after a fierce internal battle that pitted Mr. Miller, who advocated a limit as low as 15,000, against officials at the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Pentagon, Mr. Trump set the cap at 45,000, a historic low. Under one plan currently being discussed, no more than 25,000 refugees could be resettled in the United States next year, a cut of more than 40 percent from this year’s limit. It would be the lowest number of refugees admitted to the country since the creation of the program in 1980. 

The program’s fate could hinge on Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state. His department has traditionally been a strong advocate for the refugee program, but Mr. Pompeo is now being advised by two senior aides who are close to Mr. Miller and share his hard-line approach, according to the people briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal internal deliberation about a decision that has yet to be completed. 

A White House official who also did not want to be identified declined to confirm or deny whether deep cuts to the program, including a cap of 25,000, were under consideration. 

But the official implicitly made the case for substantially reducing refugee admissions. A “migration crisis” was gripping the country, the official said, and the administration was instead prioritizing asylum cases in which a person is already in the United States and claims a credible fear of returning home.

If you're white and wealthy, welcome.  If you're not both, the legal immigration target for the Trump regime is "zero".  The plan was always two-fold: end legal immigration from all but a handful of countries, reverse it by deporting most undocumented.  The beneficiaries would always happen to be the "right" immigrants.

Or, the "white" ones.

Last Call For That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Looks like Mueller has another big fat Trump tweet for his files from this morning.

Obstruction of justice?  Never heard of it.

President Donald Trump called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions Wednesday to shut down special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. 

Sessions "should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further," Trump tweeted. "Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!" Trump also called the probe a "terrible situation." 

The demand comes at what looks to be a pivotal point in the probe: Mueller's team is prosecuting former Trump campaign manager Paul Manfort on financial allegations, and some Trump aides believe that Mueller will submit a report soon on his findings as they relate to the president. The Manafort trial began Tuesday.

I mean, wide open in public, "Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now" guys.

Democrats quickly defined the president's tweeted demand to the attorney general as another attempt at obstruction, one of the things Mueller is investigating. 

"This is an attempt to obstruct justice hiding in plain sight," tweeted Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Yes.  Yes it is.  But Republicans in Congress and Trump supporters don't care and won't lift a finger. They won't when Trump eventually tweets that he's firing Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller either.  That day is coming sooner rather than later, judging by Trump's tantrum this morning.  It really won't be long now.

Stay tuned.

Steyer, the Buyer of Higher Ire Fire

It's unfair to compare California billionaire Tom Steyer to the Koch Brothers much deeper than on the surface.  Both are ridiculously rich, and both are spending tens, if not hundreds of millions, on the 2018 midterm elections.  But where the Kochs are investing in a GOP who will give them billions in returns on their business ventures, Steyer is spending on the Democrats to push his ideology, and that ideology is the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump from office.

Tom Steyer has set plans to spend at least $110 million in 2018, making the billionaire investor the largest single source of campaign cash on the left and placing him on a path to create a parallel party infrastructure with polling, analytics and staffing capabilities that stand to shape and define the issues the party runs on in November. 

Steyer is building out an operation that’s bigger than anyone other than the Koch Brothers — and the billionaire and his aides believe the reservoir of non-traditional voters he’s already activated could become the overriding factor in House and other races across the country.

Yet Steyer’s oversized role also stands to position him squarely against Democratic Party leadership, which has shown little appetite this fall for pursuing one of his signature causes: impeachment. 

Unlike the $80 million being spent by Mike Bloomberg, Steyer will put his cash toward building out NextGen America and Need to Impeach, his two growing political organizations, as well as funding clean energy ballot initiatives in Arizona and Nevada. Steyer has already doubled his initial $20 million investment in Need to Impeach to $40 million, and has not ruled out adding more. 

Steyer has also already dropped over $5 million into his For Our Future PAC, and is expecting more outlays on behalf of individual candidates like the $1 million he put behind Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, though likely not in any of the remaining primaries. 

Between the two organizations, he’ll have close to 1,000 people on staff, in addition to over 2,000 volunteers. The Need to Impeach email list alone has already topped 5.5 million, which their research — anyone who signs up with the effort has their information run through a series of voter files and other databases — shows includes a very exact 697,780 infrequent voters in the 63 most competitive House districts. 

“Our list is bigger than the NRA’s — and we’re going to make sure that it votes that way in 2018,” said Kevin Mack, lead strategist for Need to Impeach.

It's not just party leaders who are wary of Steyer, he has plenty of enemies among the DSA set, who see him as exactly the 0.00001% elite that the Democrats must avoid in order to not surrender their souls and actually do things for the people.  It's a fair and pragmatic criticism to say that Steyer could put his money towards fighting for Medicaid expansion at the state level, for instance, rather than impeachment.

In just the last decade, Steyer skyrocketed to become the Democratic Party’s biggest donor, only to leave that behind to invest instead in his own organizations and causes, to the irritation of party leaders — particularly those who worry that he’ll hurt them politically by talking up impeachment. That pushback seems to encourage him, while also encouraging talk that he’s interested in a 2020 presidential run, though he tends to push back on that by pointing out that many people first interpreted his spending in this cycle as the prelude to a 2018 campaign for California governor or senator. 

Most of those voters, based on their analyses, skew older and female, while the NextGen America effort is focused on younger voters in 11 states which are likely to be important both in 2018 and 2020. 

Those voters and others, according to new internal polling and focus group data commissioned by Steyer and described by people familiar with its findings, are very eager to hear Democratic candidates talking more about impeaching President Donald Trump: just 32 percent of Democrats said that they wanted their candidates to avoid the topic, while 59 percent said that they didn’t want Republicans dictating the terms of the campaign “so of course Democrats should talk about impeaching Trump if the Democrats win big in November.”

This however is also a very pragmatic point.  If talk of impeachment gets young Democrats out to vote who otherwise would have not voted, I'm 110% okay with the prospect.

And for the record, the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump is still not happening.  Impeachment is possible.  Removal will not happen...unless the GOP Senate takes a large enough hit in November that it becomes politically impossible not to.

So yes, motivating voters now on impeachment later is something I'm fine with Steyer doing.