Last Call For One Hell Of A Week

I have to say, between the Roger Stone indictment all but pointing the finger at Trump for ordering Stone to work with WikiLeaks to get more DNC hacked emails, and the collapse of his leverage on the government shutdown this afternoon, Friday has basically topped off the Worst Week For Trump So Far™.

I'm not going to go as far as to say Trump is broken, he's not, but he just took two right crosses to the jaw, and he's wobbling on his feet.  He's had an abysmal week, and it shows.

As far as the Roger Stone indictment and why it's important, we go back to two Washington Monthy pieces from November 2017, first, Martin Longman on WikiLeaks being a Russian intel clearing house.

But it’s the naked way that WikiLeaks was acting as a Kremlin front that I think is the most important news here. There’s an implied understanding in these messages between the two parties. There’s no sense of caution on the WikiLeaks end that they might be presumptuous about Donald Jr.’s willingness to push the Kremlin line or that Donald Sr. might be offended by the suggestion that he delegitimize the election for Russia’s benefit even though it would clearly hurt his own country. There’s a conspiracists’ bond between them as they discuss the desirability of throwing people off their scent by working together to leak damaging information in a preemptive way (the classic “limited hangout.”)

A limited hangout or partial hangout is, according to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti, “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

Admittedly, there’s no direct admission in these communications that the leaked emails were obtained by Russian hackers, nor do they come right out and say that they’re discussing a Russian agenda. But, collectively, these messages are incredibly strong evidence of Wikileaks being a Russian front organization, or at least that they have been so strongly coopted that they might as well be run from Moscow.
The evidence of Russian hacking has been coming in from other sources, including George Papadopoulos, who was informed that Russia had obtained hacked material long before any of it was actually released. What remained a question was whether Wikileaks was a witting or unwitting participant in Russia’s game. In my opinion, these Twitter messages remove any doubt about that. Wikileaks was acting in a way that was completely indistinguishable from how a Russian intelligence agency would act. And they weren’t making any effort to disguise this from the Trump campaign.

This completes the case, in a sense, because it not only connects the dots between Russia and Wikileaks, but it makes clear that the Trump campaign knew how closely the two were working together. The only remaining defense relies on the stupidity and naivety of the Trump team, but they’ve been caught in so many lies now that it will be hard for them to be believed if they try to argue that they just didn’t know who they were dealing with.

The other piece is from Nancy LaTourneau on Stone and Assange's connection to Randy Credico...and Bernie Sanders.

It could be that Credico was like other extremist liberals who continue to support Wikileaks and are simply consumed with a rabid hatred of anyone named Clinton. But it is also worth keeping in mind something that was reported in the Steele dossier.

Unlike with Jill Stein, I see nothing that suggests that Bernie Sanders or anyone in his campaign knew about, much less condoned any of this. But it remains an open question whether Credico was simply one of those activists that the Russians hoped to target, or if his association with the likes of Roger Stone and Julian Assange—combined with what Steele uncovered—suggests a lot more than that.

The Stone indictment is absolute bad news for Trump, for certain.

What I'm afraid of though is that this becomes the point where Trump decides that if he's going to go down, he's taking America with him, and earlier this afternoon Secretary of State Mike Pompeo showed his cards on what Trump could do to throw the country and the world into chaos.

Elliott Abrams, a controversial neoconservative figure who was entangled in the Iran-Contra affair, has been named as a Trump administration special envoy overseeing policy toward Venezuela, which has been rocked by a leadership crisis.

Abrams’ appointment, announced Friday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is something of a surprise — President Donald Trump nixed his 2017 bid to be deputy secretary of state after learning that Abrams had criticized him.

Abrams will now be one of several special envoys Pompeo has brought on board to tackle thorny issues. He takes on his role at an unusually volatile time in U.S.-Venezuelan relations.

Earlier this week, Trump announced he no longer recognized the legitimacy of the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro and said the U.S. now considers opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s “Interim president.” But Maduro is refusing to leave power and has declared that Venezuela will cut off diplomatic ties with the United States.

“This crisis in Venezuela is deep and difficult and dangerous, and I can’t wait to get to work on it,” Abrams said in brief remarks to reporters.

Abrams, who served in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, is a well-known and somewhat controversial figure in U.S. foreign policy circles.

He has often expressed hawkish views and is fiercely pro-Israel, but he also has written and spoken eloquently about the need to support human rights around the world.

If there are two people who can get un into a shooting war in Venezuela, it's John Bolton's Mustache and Elliott Goddamn Abrams.

And they can absolutely do that.

Just a thought.

Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

As the Trump Shutdown reaches the 35-day mark, we've finally reached a major tipping point as several major US airports are now in "ground stop" mode, causing massive flight delays due to lack of air traffic controller staff.

Federal officials temporarily restricted flights Friday into and out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport, another example of the toll that the partial government shutdown — in its 35th day — is taking on the nation’s airports.

“We have experienced a slight increase in sick leave at two facilities,” a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. “We’ve mitigated the impact by augmenting staffing, rerouting traffic and increasing spacing between aircraft when needed. The results have been minimal impacts to efficiency while maintaining consistent levels of safety in the national airspace system."

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday that President Trump had been briefed on the situation.

"We are in regular contact with officials at the Department of Transportation and the FAA,” she said.

The FAA fiasco immediately turned into a deal to temporarily reopen the government as Trump realized he has to reopen the government, and that Pelosi has won this round.

President Trump on Friday announced a deal with congressional leaders to temporarily reopen the government while talks continue on his demand for border wall money, a move expected to bring an end to the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

The pact, announced by Trump from the Rose Garden at the White House, would reopen shuttered government departments for three weeks while leaving the issue of $5.7 billion for the U.S.-Mexico border wall to further talks.

The outcome was a win for Democrats and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had insisted on no negotiations until the government was reopened.

Trump said that a congressional conference committee would spent the next three weeks working in a bipartisan fashion to come up with a border security package. He made it clear that he expects wall funding to be a prominent part of that.

“No border security plan can never work without a physical barrier. It just doesn’t happen,” Trump said in his remarks.

Trump said he was asking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to put legislation on the floor immediately to implement the deal.

If approved by Congress, the deal would allow federal employees to return to work. But it sets up another fight in coming weeks over the same issues at the heart of the impasse.

No wall funding, and no leverage to get it, but it does mean this comes as the Trump regime is now apparently preparing to go ahead and break the self-created Feb. 15 impasse with an emergency powers declaration and skipping Congress entirely.

The White House is preparing a draft proclamation for President Donald Trump to declare a national emergency along the southern border and has identified more than $7 billion in potential funds for his signature border wall should he go that route, according to internal documents reviewed by CNN. 

Trump has not ruled out using his authority to declare a national emergency and direct the Defense Department to construct a border wall as Congress and the White House fight over a deal to end the government shutdown. But while Trump's advisers remain divided on the issue, the White House has been moving forward with alternative plans that would bypass Congress. 

"The massive amount of aliens who unlawfully enter the United States each day is a direct threat to the safety and security of our nation and constitutes a national emergency," a draft of a presidential proclamation reads. 

"Now, therefore, I, Donald J. Trump, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C 1601, et seq.), hereby declare that a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States," the draft adds. 

The draft was updated as recently as last week, a US government official told CNN.

According to options being considered, the administration could pull: $681 million from Treasury forfeiture funds, $3.6 billion in military construction, $3 billion in Pentagon civil works funds, and $200 million in Department of Homeland Security funds, the official said. 

As lawmakers discussed a short-term measure to fund the government Thursday, Trump again raised the prospect of other ways to fund a border wall without congressional approval. 

"I have other alternatives if I have to and I'll use those alternatives if I have to," he told reporters. 

"A lot of people who wants this to happen. The military wants this to happen. This is a virtual invasion of our country," Trump said. 

The Defense Department referred a request for comment from CNN to the White House.

So the emergency declaration has reached the leakable draft document stage at least.  What this means isn't clear, Congress does have to sign off on any emergency declaration eventually, but Trump figures he can move the money, declare victory, and then...we don't know, does he shut down the government again then?  Does he militarize the border?  It all gets really crazy after that point.

I don't know if Trump will actually do it, he was scared off once before, but if it's gotten this far along in the draft process, my guess is that this is a trial balloon heading into the weekend and possible action on Monday.

But even if he does declare an emergency, why then would he agree to keep open the government?  He clearly doesn't care about people suffering given his past actions on policy, and he clearly doesn't care about the economic consequences given the same history of policy actions.  Since the cruelty is the point, why wouldn't he choose to continue it and demand more/different concessions from Pelosi?

.@realDonaldTrump did not “cave” nor “surrendered”. What he’s doing right now is a standard tactics in torture. They torture you, then they give you a break to see if you will start to cooperate. If not, the torture continues. https://t.co/itwQlzpzju

— Ksenija Pavlovic McAteer (@ksenijapavlovic) January 25, 2019

We'll see what happens here, but anyone who believes Trump getting funding for his wall through this end run next month means he'll keep open the government is in for a surprise, should he go that route, and I actually think it makes an emergency declaration more likely as a result.  He's setting us up for Round 2 next month, but at least he gets his Super Bowl weekend in the meantime. Whether or not Pelosi wins that round, well, we'll see.  Hostage taking is much more effective when you're willing to shoot some hostages.

And of course an emergency declaration means he'll start claiming more and more executive power.  That how this always works.

It's Mueller Time, Stone Cold Edition

Long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone has been predicting his indictment by Robert Mueller for a while now, and in a glorious return to Mueller Fridays, the hammer finally dropped.

Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump, was charged as part of the special counsel investigation over his communications with WikiLeaks, the organization behind the release of thousands of stolen Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign, in an indictment unsealed Friday.

Mr. Stone was charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering, according to the special counsel’s office.

F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Stone before dawn on Friday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and he was expected to appear in a federal courthouse there later in the morning. F.B.I. agents were also seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone’s apartment in Harlem.

The indictment is the first in months by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with Trump campaign associates. Citing details in emails and other forms of communications, the indictment suggests Mr. Trump’s campaign knew about additional stolen emails before they were released and asked Mr. Stone to find out about them.

Mr. Stone’s lawyer, Grant Smith, dismissed the charges, calling them “ridiculous,” and said, “this is all about a minor charge about lying to Congress about something that was apparently found later.”

Mr. Stone, a self-described dirty trickster, began his career as a campaign aide for Richard M. Nixon and has a tattoo of Nixon on his back. He has spent decades plying the political dark arts including scandal-mongering to help influence American election campaigns, and has long maintained that he had no connection to Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. He sometimes seemed to taunt American law enforcement agencies, daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian election interference.

According to the indictment, between June and July of 2016, Mr. Stone told “senior Trump campaign officials” about the stolen emails in WikiLeaks’ possession that could be damaging to Mrs. Clinton. On July 22, WikiLeaks released its first batch of Democratic emails. After that, according to the indictment, the Trump campaign sought more.

“A senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton campaign,” the indictment said, referring to WikiLeaks. The indictment did not make clear who directed the senior campaign official to reach out to Mr. Stone, though it left open the possibility that it was Mr. Trump.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sought to broadly distance Mr. Trump from the charges. The charges brought against Mr. Stone have nothing to do with the president,” she told CNN. Asked whether he directed a campaign aide to contact Mr. Stone about the WikiLeaks emails, she repeated that the charges did not involve the president.

The full indictment is here.

Needless to say, the indictment straight up accuses Stone of knowing WikiLeaks had the stolen DNC emails and was going to drop them online, Stone was Trump's contact to WikiLeaks to get more of them, and that Stone was directed to do so by the Trump campaign.  Marcy Wheeler reminds us the "high-ranking Trump campaign official" who asked Stone about more emails was Steve Bannon but for now, we don't know who ordered Stone to contact WikiLeaks in July 2016, although Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman then, so why not name him since he's already in the bag?  My guess is as with the NY Times article, the person is Trump himself, and that's deadly for him.

The "high-ranking campaign official" is Bannon (who was Campaign Manager at the time).

NYT covered these exchanges here:https://t.co/55yZlDFi6D pic.twitter.com/jzyWFkNheu

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 25, 2019

The bigger problem for Trump is that obstruction of justice charge, too.  This is as close as we've come to a case for impeachment against Trump yet.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• Both Republican and Democratic Senate bills to reopen the government failed to pass the Senate on Thursday, senators from both parties are still looking to make a deal.
• With US diplomatic personnel being told to leave Venezuela by President Nicolas Maduro, the Trump regime has ordered all non-emergency government employees out of the country.
• The Trump regime will begin returning asylum seekers to Mexico starting Friday, all non-Mexican asylum seekers will eventually be transferred to Mexico while awaiting processing.
• Poultry giant Tyson Foods is donating nearly 700,000 meals to federal workers furloughed as the shutdown enters its sixth week.
• SpaceX has performed a rocket test firing ahead of a scheduled February commercial crew spaceflight demonstration mission.

Last Call For The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Racism isn't a by-product of the GOP, it's the point of the party, especially in Florida.

Florida’s top elections official abruptly resigned Thursday after a newspaper obtained pictures of him in blackface dressed as a Hurricane Katrina victim at a 2005 party.

Secretary of State Michael Ertel, who had been on the job less than three weeks, resigned just hours after he testified about election lawsuits before a state legislative committee.

The Tallahassee Democrat obtained pictures taken at a Halloween party 14 years ago that show Ertel dressed in blackface while wearing earrings, a New Orleans Saints bandanna and fake breasts under a purple T-shirt with “Katrina Victim” written on it. The photos were taken two months after the deadly storm ravaged the Gulf Coast region and eight months after Ertel was appointed Seminole County supervisor of elections. The newspaper hasn’t said how it got the photos or identified the source.

Ertel was the Seminole elections supervisor until new Gov. Ron DeSantis picked him last month to take over the department that oversees elections.

DeSantis said Ertel regretted dressing up in blackface, but he said that he was right to step down after the pictures emerged.

“I want people to be able to lead and not have any of these things swirling around,” said DeSantis, who was in Marianna to discuss hurricane relief efforts for areas hit hard by Hurricane Michael in October.

Bye.

Three weeks on the job and this pops up.  Frankly, this should have been revealed last decade and Ertel's career ended then, but hey, now's good too.

Of course I expect he'll be fine with a nice sinecure somewhere in Right-Wing Noise Land, most likely a Trump Regime position somewhere.

But there was no way Ertel was going to survive as the state's top election officials with Ron DeSantis's racist campaign and current efforts to re-disenfranchise a million-plus black Florida residents fresh on everyone's mind.

Still, not only is the cruelty the point, so is the racism.

A Collegiate DREAM In New York

With the Republicans disguised as Democrats no longer blocking New York's state Senate, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo with no place to hide and no place to run, the Empire State is finally on it way towards long overdue liberal policies like we've seen in California over the years.

Supporters erupted in applause and tears Wednesday as New York lawmakers passed their own version of the DREAM Act. 

The measure shares the same name -- but is different from -- the DREAM Act that's failed to pass in Washington for years. 

Unlike the proposed federal measure, which would give conditional green cards to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, New York's version is more narrowly focused on another battleground in the immigration debate: college tuition. 

The Jose Peralta New York State DREAM Act: 

• Makes state tuition assistance programs available to undocumented immigrants who attended high school in New York for at least two years and graduated or obtained an equivalency diploma. 

• Creates a "DREAM Fund" -- funded by private contributions -- to give scholarships to the children of immigrants. 

The measure passed the New York State Senate 40-20 and the New York State Assembly 90-37. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to sign it into law. 

Immigrant rights advocates praised the measure as a sign of successful organizing efforts at the state level. Its passage comes as so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, find themselves in limbo during a political stalemate in Washington. 

New York state lawmakers who voted to pass the measure said it's particularly important at a time when federal authorities have increasingly targeted immigrant communities.

It couldn't have come at a better time too, with Donald Trump getting a constant reminder that in the state he lives in, basically everyone hates his ass.

 

Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

The support pillars for Donald Trump's wall as the longest shutdown in US history drags on are definitely beginning to crack.

A strong majority of Americans blame President Donald Trump for the record-long government shutdown and reject his primary rationale for a border wall, according to a new poll that shows the turmoil in Washington is dragging his approval rating to its lowest level in more than a year.

Overall, 34 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance in a survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s down from 42 percent a month earlier and nears the lowest mark of his two-year presidency. The president’s approval among Republicans remains close to 80 percent, but his standing with independents is among its lowest points of his time in office.

“Trump is responsible for this,” said poll respondent Lloyd Rabalais, a federal contractor from Slidell, Louisiana, who’s not affiliated with either political party.

The 47-year-old has been furloughed for more than a month. He said he’d need to start drawing on his retirement savings next week to pay his bills if the shutdown continues.

“I do support a wall, but not the way he’s handling it,” Rabalais added. “Trump guaranteed everybody that Mexico would pay for the wall. Now he’s holding American workers like me hostage.”

The drop in approval comes as Trump begins the third year of his presidency under the weight of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, an international trade war that’s straining the global economy and new revelations about his push for a real estate deal in Russia during his 2016 campaign.

Trump has similarly abysmal numbers in the latest CBS poll as well.

Seven in 10 Americans don't think the issue of a border wall is worth a government shutdown, which they say is now having a negative impact on the country. But partisans don't want their own side to budge: 65 percent of Republicans say President Trump should refuse a budget unless it includes wall funding, and 69 percent of Democrats think congressional Democrats should keep refusing to fund it.

Among Americans overall, and including independents, more want to see Mr. Trump give up wall funding than prefer the congressional Democrats agree to wall funding. Comparably more Americans feel House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is handling negotiations better than the president is so far.
Republicans are more divided than Democrats are on whether the shutdown is worth it.

Pelosi is seen as doing a better job than Mr. Trump on handling the negotiations over the shutdown. Partisans divide on this, while independents give the edge to Pelosi.

Overall, two-thirds of the country now say Republicans should agree to fund the government without any money for the wall, according to CBS.  That's a fatal position for the GOP to be in, and Mitch McConnell knows it.  Trump's approval rating according to CBS has dropped to 36% and falling. It's gotten so bad that Americans are remembering things like "general strikes" exist.

Something's going to give, and soon.

StupidiNews!

• Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine says he will "absolutely" sign the state's unconstitutional "heartbeat" abortion ban bill, making the Buckeye State the most populous state to effectively ban abortion. 
• Five are dead after a mass shooting and hostage situation at a bank branch in central Florida, police have a 21-year-old white male suspect in custody.
• Senate Democrats are asking the federal government to continue to pay health insurance premiums for furloughed workers, premium bills will be due as soon as this week for some employees.
• Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst say that she was sexually assaulted in college, and that her husband Gail physically abused her as she has now filed for divorce.
• Google spent a record $21 million on lobbying lawmakers in 2018, up $3 million from last year, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all increased lobbying payments last year.

Last Call For The Drums of War, Con't

The Trump regime is moving today on a major coup d'etat against Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro.

President Nicolas Maduro on Wednesday faced the gravest challenge to his authority since assuming power in 2013, as the leader of the U.S.-backed opposition claimed the legitimate mantle of leadership, and President Trump and other world leaders promptly recognized him as Venezuela’s interim and rightful head of state.

A defiant Maduro responded by announcing a break in “diplomatic and political relations” with the United States, and ordering American diplomats to leave the country within 72 hours.

The high stakes move set up a potential diplomatic crisis as Washington weighed how to respond to a demand by a leader it nows sees as illegitimate. Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader now recognized by Washington as Venezuela’s true interim ruler, called on any diplomats expelled by Maduro to remain.

A senior Trump administration official told reporters that Washington is not rejecting any options, whether political, economic or even military.

“When we say all options are on the table, it means all options,” the official said.

Later, Trump was pointedly asked if military force was being considered.

“We’re not considering anything but all options on the table,” he said. “All options, always, all options are on the table.”

As the international campaign against him grew, Maduro, the anointed successor of socialist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, was confronting a new protagonist in the form of Guaidó. Before a cheering throng, the 35-year-old industrial engineer and recently named head of the country’s National Assembly, took the long-awaited step of declaring himself the nation’s “president in charge.”

“We will stay on the street until Venezuela is liberated!” Guaidó told the crowd in Caracas.

The dramatic developments came as anti-Maduro protests drew hundreds of thousands of people into Venezuelan streets in what the newly re-energized opposition called a sustained campaign to drive Maduro from office. After months of mounting U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, the move by the Trump administration to immediately shift recognition to Guaidó amounted to the strongest statement so far against what it called a “disastrous dictatorship.” Yet the U.S. failed to outline its next concrete steps, other than to say all economic, political and even military options are being considered.

So while our own government is broken, we're busy plotting possible military coups against Venezuela.  Sure, that's normal.

Trump is going to torch the place before he's ever allowed to be investigated.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

BuzzFeed News isn't exactly hiding because of the controversy over last week's Cohen story, it dropped this damning Trump Tower Moscow project piece yesterday.

The plan was dazzling: a glass skyscraper that would stretch higher than any other building in Europe, offering ultra-luxury residences and hotel rooms and bearing a famous name. Trump Tower Moscow, conceived as a partnership between Donald Trump’s company and a Russian real estate developer, looked likely to yield profits in excess of $300 million.

The tower was never built, but it has become a focal point of the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Trump’s relationship with Russia in the lead-up to his presidency.

The president and his representatives have dismissed the project as little more than a notion — a rough plan led by Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his associate Felix Sater, of which Trump and his family said they were only loosely aware as the election campaign gathered pace.

On Monday, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said “the proposal was in the earliest stage,” and he went on to tell the New Yorker that “no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file.”

However, hundreds of pages of business documents, emails, text messages, and architectural plans, obtained by BuzzFeed News over a year of reporting, tell a very different story. Trump Tower Moscow was a richly imagined vision of upscale splendor on the banks of the Moscow River.

Trump had for 30 years tried to extend his real estate empire to Moscow. He even wrote about it in his book The Art of the Deal. But he never found the right opportunity — until 2013, when he visited Russia to host the Miss Universe pageant. “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next,” he tweeted after the event.

Two years later, a vision had emerged. Trump Tower Moscow was to be much more than just another upscale apartment building. It was to be a vast — and vastly lucrative — undertaking that would elevate the Russian capital’s skyline and extend the perimeter of the New York developer’s influence.

By September 2015, a New York architect had completed plans for a bold glass obelisk 100 stories high, to be topped by a gleaming, cut-diamond–like shape emblazoned on multiple sides with the Trump logo.

“The building design you sent over is very interesting,” the Russian real estate developer Andrey Rozov wrote to Cohen in September 2015, “and will be an architectural and luxury triumph. I believe the tallest building in Europe should be in Moscow, and I am prepared to build it.”

The Trump Tower Moscow project was designed to be the tallest in Europe, we knew exactly where it was to be built, on the Moscow River just 2 miles from the Kremlin itself, we know Trump signed a letter of intent to build the tower, and we know that the tower's luxury penthouse was to be a gift to Vladimir Putin himself.

So when both Rudy Giulinai and Donald Trump Jr. went on TV to lie about this and call it Cohen's project, the reality is that Trump has wanted this building for decades.

And he did everything he could to make it happen.

The Kids Are Not Alright, Con't

Jaw Willis at GQ points out that the MAGA boys at Covington Catholic knew all along they were going to get away with what they did on Friday, to the point of having Donald Trump weigh in on their defense, because systemic white privilege means never having to be sorry.

From the moment Nick Sandmann planted himself in front of Nathan Phillips, surrounded by dancing, whooping Covington Catholic students who found the elderly drummer's very existence to be at once amusing and worthy of their scorn, the only thing more inevitable than the initial outrage was the tsunami of counter-outrage directed at anyone who had the audacity to be mad that MAGA-hat-wearing teenagers would mock a Vietnam War veteran. The campaign, which laundered Sandmann's statement through the usual sequence of right-win media outlets, ended as all defenses of bigotry cloaked as even-handed appeals to civility do: with a pronouncement of judgment from the man who made his hat famous.

The speed with which Sandmann was able to marshal his posse of defenders, it seems, was not purely a product of the moral weight of his position. According to the Louisville Courier Journal, as video of the boys' leering faces raced across the Internet, Sandmann's family retained the services of RunSwitch PR, a Louisville-based media relations firm. (One of its founding partners is a longtime Republican operative, and currently serves as a conservative op-ed writer for the paper.) A spokesperson explained that the company is now "working with the family to ensure an accurate recounting of events."

None of the excuses made on behalf of these kids are capable of withstanding the slightest bit of intellectually-honest scrutiny. The presence of a few Black Israelites—a group that any resident of a major city learned long ago to ignore—has no bearing on whether it is acceptable for white kids to chant nationalist slogans at, of all people, a Native man. (Assertions to the contrary also betray a troubling tendency to conflate members of minority groups, as if all brown people are indistinguishable threats.) Nor do any of the purported "extended clips," disseminated by conservative journalists as if they were mini-Zapruder films, exonerate Sandmann and his friends. Some of them even serve as more damning indictments of the students' conduct.

Nevertheless, the Covington boys have already secured many of the hand-wringing statements of remorse they sought—especially from the pundit class, for whom enduring bad-faith accusations of "BIASED" and "FAKE NEWS" is more humiliating than kowtowing to the people who would make them. As usual, no one in America is more entitled to a presumption of innocence than white people.

Among the privileged, eliciting this sort of both-sides apologia is a tried-and-true method of evading responsibility for their actions. Also consider, though, the role of talking heads like Tucker Carlson, who reflexively crafted exculpatory narratives of their own and disseminated them to an online army of culture warriors. Consider the influence of Republican politicians, for whom defending anyone who shares their worldview—and obeying marching orders issued by the aforementioned talking heads—is now so important that their usual performative respect for troops disappeared altogether. Consider the invitations the kids have already received to visit President Trump at the White House this week, and the TODAY Show interview that will air first thing Wednesday. Consider the fact that this family was able to hire a professional crisis management team to fight this battle, and that they even knew such a thing existed in the first place.

And yes, you read this right, the consequences of their actions, thanks to the parents of this asshole immediately contacting a GOP PR firm, the payoff for being a racist sack of garbage to a Native American vet in a viral video in America in 2019 is the reward of a White house invitation and a Today Show softball interview with Savannah Guthrie.

Congrats, Generation Z.  Put on your MAGA hats and break out those Go Pro cameras and iPhones, because you're all going to be famous for white supremacy.  Just go out there and shoot and maim and harm us, because the lesson here is you'll never have to pay the piper for it.

Until, of course, the day you do.

StupidiNews!

• Legendary Yankees closer Mariano Rivera became the first player in MLB history with a unanimous election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Tuesday.
• The Trump regime is expected to appeal a recent federal court ruling against including the question of citizenship on the 2020 Census directly to the Supreme Court.
• Lawmakers in Hong Kong will present legislation this week that makes disrespecting China's national anthem a criminal offense.
• US federal courts will run out of operating money on February 1 if the government shutdown isn't resolved in the next week.
• Google will be shutting down its Hangouts app in October, replacing it with a new application similar to competitor Slack.

Last Call For Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

The Trump regime's delegitimization of the free press continues, with Trump announcing on Twitter today that the month-long shutdown gap since the last White House press briefing will continue for the foreseeable future.

President Trump said Tuesday that he directed White House press secretary Sarah Sanders “not to bother” with press briefings because he believes that reporters are rude to her and that most members of the media will not cover the administration fairly.

Press briefings, which used to be a near-daily occurrence, have become a rarity in the Trump White House. Sanders has not provided an on-camera briefing for more than a month, including the duration of the partial government shutdown.

“The reason Sarah Sanders does not go to the ‘podium’ much anymore is that the press covers her so rudely & inaccurately, in particular certain members of the press,” Trump said on Twitter. “I told her not to bother, the word gets out anyway! Most will never cover us fairly & hence, the term, Fake News!”

Trump’s tweet came shortly after White House spokesman Hogan Gidley was asked about the subject during a live interview on Fox News.

Gidley said the briefings had not permanently ended.

“It’s not that they ever stopped, but sometimes we need to come to the podium to communicate things and sometimes we don’t,” Gidley said, adding that Sanders would “come back when she finds a reason to do that.”

Gidley cited Trump’s frequent public appearances as one reason the briefings have diminished in number.

Sanders last appeared at the White House podium Dec. 18.

She and other White House officials have spoken to reporters in more-informal gaggles on the White House driveway several times since then. Most often, those sessions occur after television interviews conducted from the White House grounds.

Don't expect any more White House press briefings, frankly.  You will know what this regime tells you that you can know, when the regime chooses to tell you.  Most certainly, don't expect the press to ever be able to ask questions of Sanders or Trump in the future.

I expect that Trump will threaten to close the White House press room before too long.  It will become the new normal, a one-sided affair, and I bet we'll see pundits weighing in with brilliant observations about how in the internet age, we certainly no long need press briefings and questions from journalists.

Everything will now be Twitter bleating, online gaslighting, and endless rallies.

President Donald Trump is preparing for two different State of the Union speeches – one a more traditional address delivered to Congress in the House chamber or some other location in D.C., the other prepared for a political rally at a location outside of Washington, D.C. that has yet to be determined, according to multiple sources familiar with the planning.

Sources told ABC News that the president was previously planning two separate versions of the State of the Union – one version if the government was still shut down and another if the government was open.

However, now the planning has evolved, assuming the government shutdown could drag on past next Tuesday – the expected delivery date of the address. If the president decides to deliver a speech in rally form, it would mark the first rally style event the president has attended since the partial shutdown began.

Count on this happening anyway regardless of the status of the shutdown.  The new normal of a permanently crippled federal government, one that only works for the rich and for corporations, is what we are trapped in until we get rid of not just Trump from the White House, but from the entire GOP.

And first to go needs to be Mitch McConnell next year.  Martin Longman:

Most reporting on McConnell’s thinking portrays him as worried primarily about himself. He’s up for election again in 2020 and he’s very unpopular in his home state of Kentucky. Over the last several years, he has usually ranked as the least popular senator in the country with his own constituents. In the latest Morning Consult poll, only Jeff Flake and Claire McCaskill had higher disapproval numbers, and neither of them survived the last election cycle. The thinking goes, then, that McConnell simply cannot afford to buck the president.

There’s definitely some truth to that, but it’s also important to think about McConnell’s concern for the Republican Party’s majority in the Senate. He does not want hurt the reelection prospects of his colleagues because it could send him back into the minority. So, he has very little interest in passing a bill that Trump will criticize and veto. He suffered that fate once already before Christmas, and he’s not keen to experience a repeat. It’s also key to McConnell’s current thinking that Trump had signed off on the deal last December before suddenly reversing himself once he received criticism from people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. He doesn’t have any reason to take Trump’s word that he’ll stick with any deal that is negotiated.

The best way of looking at this is that McConnell is angry with the president. He was double-crossed. He wasn’t consulted. He doesn’t believe in the wall. He doesn’t believe that Trump’s strategy will work. He doesn’t want to take ownership of a deal that the president will characterize as insufficient or weak. He doesn’t even want to appear with the president in front of the cameras.

I’d say his strategy is basically to let Trump keep banging his head against his wall until he breaks. And when Trump admits he can’t get what he wants, only then will McConnell jump into the fray to help him limit the damage.

By taking the position that he won’t take up a bill the president won’t sign, McConnell is giving Trump a chance to break Nancy Pelosi’s will and ability to keep her caucus united, and that’s as much as he’s willing to give the president at this time.

There may come a time before too long that McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy need to seriously consider a veto override. The precipitating event may be that something really critical breaks due to lack of funding, like airport security or the courts. It could be that public opinion turns very sharply against them and constituent pressure becomes unbearable. It could be that something breaks in the Russia investigation, either coming from Mueller or from the congressional hearings that are about to gear up in the House. If Trump’s credibility drops suddenly and drastically, the congressional Republicans may conclude that they can’t allow a shutdown to continue on top of everything else.
McConnell wants to avoid that outcome, but he can’t continue his wait-and-see strategy forever if nothing changes. He might want Pelosi and the Democrats to break, but I bet he’d be just as satisfied to see the president capitulate. To him, Trump is like a child who won’t listen to adult advice and can only learn from the personal and painful experience of predictable failure.

Anyone waiting on Mitch McConnell to take a leadership role to end the shutdown is likely to be disappointed. He’s got his candy and his hundred-dollar bills, and he’s just going to wait this one out as long as he can.

Something will break, though. And I don’t think it will be Nancy Pelosi.

Without Mitch, Trump wouldn't have been able to do a tenth as much damage to the country.

Courting Disaster

Welcome to the Kavanaugh days of the Roberts Court, and expect the damage caused by his appointment to resonate for decades to come.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed President Trump’s broad restrictions on transgender people serving in the military to go into effect while the legal battle continues in lower courts.

The justices lifted nationwide injunctions that had kept the administration’s policy from being implemented.

It reversed an Obama-administration rule that would have opened the military to transgender men and women, and instead barred those who identify with a gender different from the one assigned at birth and who are seeking to transition.

The court’s five conservatives--Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh--allowed the restrictions to go into effect while the court decides to whether to consider the merits of the case.

The liberal justices--Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan--would have kept the injunctions in place.

Trump surprised even his own military advisers in July 2017 when he announced a sweeping ban on transgender people’s military service via Twitter. He cited what he viewed as the “tremendous medical costs and disruption.” The administration’s order reversed President Barack Obama’s policy of allowing transgender men and women to serve openly and receive funding for sex-reassignment surgery.

Attorneys for active-duty service members went to court to block the policy shift, which could subject current transgender service members to discharge and deny them certain medical care.

The court rulings were met with another policy revision from then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who issued a plan to bar those from the military who identify with a gender different from their birth gender and who are seeking to transition. Mattis’s plan makes exceptions, for instance, for about 900 transgender individuals who are already serving openly and for others who would serve in accordance with their birth gender.

While several lower courts have blocked the policy, the changes were persuasive to a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which became the first appeals court to review the policy.

“The government took substantial steps to cure the procedural deficiencies” previously identified by a lower court, the panel said in a short order. “Although the Mattis Plan continues to bar many transgender persons from joining or serving in the military, the record indicates that the plan allows some transgender persons” previously barred to join and serve.

The policy is not a “blanket ban,” the court concluded, because “not all transgender persons seek to transition to their preferred gender or have gender dysphoria.”

The rollback of LGBTQ rights under the Roberts Court and Trump Regime will continue along with the rollback of women's rights and civil rights., and even if Donald Trump resigned today, the carnage from another decade of the current bloc of Bush/Trump justices on SCOTUS will make America a very dangerous place for anyone who ins't a straight, white, Christian male.

(Fund) Raising Some Major Alarms

Republicans love to copy what Democrats are doing right on political fundraising and campaigning, and then they cheat to make their version more successful while hamstringing the blue side.  The latest scheme is the GOP's answer to Act Blue and other grassroots funding groups, rolled into what Republicans hope is a multi-billion dollar fundraising juggernaut called "Patriot Pass".

President Donald Trump’s political team and top Republican officials have reached a landmark agreement to reshape the party’s fundraising apparatus and close the financial gap that devastated them in the midterms.

With the deal, Republicans hope to create a rival to ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising behemoth that plowed over $700 million in small-dollar donations into Democratic coffers in the 2018 campaign.

Republicans have had no comparable centralized platform to cultivate small dollars. Since the election, officials including White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have privately insisted the party needed to come up with an answer.

Following weeks of closed-door discussions, Republicans have agreed to create a new platform dubbed Patriot Pass, which will be used to cultivate and process online donations. The GOP — whose jungle-like ecosystem of vendors has long fought bitterly over contracts and dollars — has struggled in the past to create such a unified system.

The accord, revealed for the first time to POLITICO by officials at the center of the effort, has received the explicit blessing of party leaders. Under the arrangement, Data Trust, the Republican National Committee’s designated clearinghouse of voter information, will form a joint venture with Revv, a donation processor used by the Trump campaign. The two entities will form the nucleus of Patriot Pass.

As part of the agreement, Victory Passport, a small-dollar platform used widely by Republican congressional candidates, is expected to eventually shutter and encourage its clients to use the new platform.

The far-reaching consolidation reflects the urgency confronting Republicans, who concede their widening small-donor deficit reached a breaking point in 2018. Fired-up liberal donors funneled cash into House and Senate races through ActBlue, a centralized and easy-to-use hub of Democratic giving that allows users to enter their credit card information and contribute to their candidate of choice with a click.

After watching dozens of their candidates get massively out-raised, Republicans are looking to Patriot Pass to close the gap. The new tool is is expected to launch next month. While party officials concede that catching up to or surpassing the 14-year-old ActBlue won’t happen immediately, they contend they can level the playing field through a platform that can mimic ActBlue’s technology.

“The Democrats clearly in congressional races — not at the presidential level but in congressional races in 2018 — had an advantage in small-dollar donors. And so you say, ‘Why is that? There was enthusiasm in both parties.’ And it’s because they had the mechanism to harness and add rocket fuel to that energy,” said Mike Shields, a Data Trust senior adviser.

This story should be setting off gargantuan alarm bells.

Of course the real issue is that we know Republican voter data operations are deeply compromised by Russia, and a massive database of small dollar donors are exactly the kind of leverage Putin wants over the GOP, now that the NRA is a smoking ruin as a money-laundering clearing house and under Robert Mueller's watchful eye.

House Democrats should keep a very careful eye on Patriot Pass, because I guarantee you that it's going to be the basis for some serious Trump 2020 fundraising shenanigans, and I'm sure we'll find out a few years from now just how detailed the slush fund machine was.  If you wanted a vehicle to put Russian mob cash in not just Trump's pocket but in hundreds of GOP campaigns in 2020, this is exactly what I would come up with in order to do it.

Count on this being dirty as a Moscow sewer.