Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The mass deportation era that I've been predicting since Trump's election is almost upon us, and Trump is shifting preparations into high gear with plans to appoint a White House "immigration czar"...our old friend, Kris Kobach.

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering adding a “border czar” to his administration, and the individual said to be at the top of the list of potential candidates is Kris Kobach—a Republican who helped author one of the harshest anti-immigration laws in recent history.

“In this administration, it does not surprise me at all. He exemplifies the view of this administration, which is contrary to American history because immigration is very much the story of success in this country,” Joyce White Vance, a former federal prosecutor, told Newsweek on Tuesday.

“Kobach is anti-immigration in the most mean-spirited way possible. And that’s clearly the policy that this administration has chosen to adopt towards immigrants,” Vance added.

According to an Associated Press report on April 1, the White House is looking for someone to spearhead the president’s immigration initiatives amid a surge in migrants crossing the southern border. On the shortlist of possible appointees is Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, and Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia.

While both men are immigration hardliners, Kobach once lent a hand in the creation of Alabama HB 56. The 2011 law is seen as one of the strictest anti-immigration policies in the nation and was once heralded by state lawmakers as an initiative for people to “deport themselves.”

Remember Alabama's "Papers, Please" law?  Kobach helped write it.

The law, officially titled the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, was aimed at curbing illegal immigration. Its net effect was to make the state inhospitable to undocumented immigrants by essentially creating new immigration-related crimes.

Under HB 56, renting a house or giving a job to an “illegal” became a crime. It required state police officers to investigate or detain people based on a “suspicion” that they may be undocumented. Educators were also told to collect information regarding the immigration status of the students and their parents.

“That, of course, tamped down on school participation and school attendance,” Vance said. “If you’re a 7- or 8-year-old kid missing a year of school while that litigation went on, that’s a huge game-changer for the rest of your life. But that was what it was intended to do.”

Vance was serving as a U.S. attorney during HB 56’s passage and successfully challenged key provisions of the law in court in United States v. Alabama. The Obama administration essentially argued that the state could not create its own immigration law that is contrary to federal policy as it would be a violation of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

The law has continued to unravel as many of its most substantial provisions have been blocked in court.

Kobach would be a disaster.  So would Cuccinelli.  Kobach in fact really, really wants to round up the undocumented (and their families) and put them in deportation camps.  Sorry, "asylum seeker processing areas".

But the guy you really have to watch out for is Stephen Miller.

The White House is exploring all executive authorities in existing law that will allow an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration and legal immigration fraud, senior adviser to the president Stephen Miller told The Daily Caller in an exclusive telephone interview.

“There’s going to be an aggressive effort to utilize every existing authority in statute,” Miller announced, explaining that several authorities exist in immigration laws passed by Congress throughout history, including the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Miller noted that the White House is “systematically reviewing all authorities that are already on the books, both in terms of cracking down on illegal immigration and […] the abuse of our legal immigration system.” The targeted abuse actions include illegal immigrants who overstay temporary visas, “combatting or addressing legal benefit seeking in the legal immigration system.”

Noting that there are approximately 1 million illegal aliens in the United States with final removal orders that still remain at large — in some cases for several years — Miller gave one example of the type of executive action the administration can take. The presidential adviser noted that existing law has a statute that allows for a “significant financial penalty” for every single day that an alien resides in the country after being ordered removed.
“This law has been on the books for a very long time and has not been utilized. That’s the example of the kind of legal authority that already exists that is the kind of thing we can deploy to restore integrity to the immigration system.”

If you thought concentration camps for undocumented was fun, wait until we have beggar's prison camps for the families who are US citizens who can't afford to pay Miller's fines for their undocumented fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

I'm telling you guys that this is coming.  Trump's big re-election campaign is going to be "Deport them all" and should America grant him a second term, the round-ups are going to come.  Hell, they'll start before that.

The End Of The Never Trumpers

The NY Times has finally realized that the "principled conservative opposition" that materialized to scold Trump was always a ruse, and there's no better example of that then the doomed "Never Trump" movement inside the GOP that disintegrated as soon as he got his Supreme Court picks.  They were always Trump, just not as willing to take to his extreme measures in order to win.  Nowadays there is only Trump.

As Mr. Trump has prepared to embark on a difficult fight for re-election, a small but ferocious operation within his campaign has helped install loyal allies atop the most significant state parties and urged them to speak up loudly to discourage conservative criticism of Mr. Trump. The campaign has dispatched aides to state party conclaves, Republican executive committee meetings and fund-raising dinners, all with the aim of ensuring the delegates at next year’s convention in Charlotte, N.C., are utterly committed to Mr. Trump.

To Joe Gruters, who was co-chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida and now leads the state party, the local G.O.P. is effectively a regional arm of the president’s re-election effort.

“I’ve had probably 10 conversations with the Trump team about the delegate selection process in Florida,” Mr. Gruters said, adding of a potential Republican primary battle, “The base of the party loves our president, and if anybody runs against him, they are going to get absolutely smashed.”

State and local Republican organizations typically operate below the radar of national politics, but they can be vital to the success of a presidential candidate. Party chairmen and their deputies are tasked with everything from raising money to deploying volunteers to knock on doors, and in many states they help choose delegates for the nominating convention.

For Mr. Trump, who prevailed in 2016 as an outsider with little connection to his party’s electoral apparatus, the ability to control the levers of Republican politics at the state level could make the difference in a close election or a contested primary. It also leaves other Republicans with precious little room to oppose Mr. Trump on his policy preferences or administrative whims — on matters from health care to the Mexican border — for fear of retribution from within the party.

Mr. Trump’s aides have focused most intently on heading off any dissent at the Charlotte convention: To that end, two of Mr. Trump’s top campaign aides, Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, have worked quietly but methodically in a series of states where control of the local party was up for grabs. They have boosted Mr. Trump’s allies even in deep-blue states like Massachusetts, and worked to make peace between competing pro-Trump factions in more competitive states such as Colorado.

The devotion to Mr. Trump was on clear display Saturday outside Denver, where the state party gathered to elect a new chairman. Though Mr. Trump’s unpopularity helped drive Colorado Republicans to deep losses last fall, there was no sign of unrest: Mr. Trump’s name was emblazoned on lapel pins and a flag toted by one candidate for the chairmanship, and his slogan — “Make America Great Again” — was printed on the red hat from which the candidates drew lots to determine their speaking order.

Mr. Trump himself stayed out of the race, and campaign aides sent the White House a short memo last month urging the president not to pick sides between allies after Representative Ken Buck, a deeply conservative candidate, lobbied administration officials for support.

But when Mr. Buck claimed victory in the race for chairman, he described his mission in terms of unflinching loyalty to the president.

“The key is that we make sure that the voters of Colorado understand the great job the president has done,” Mr. Buck said. “That is what my job is.”

You're either with Trump, or you're an "enemy of the people".  And folks are lining up to be on the side with the orange fascist at the helm.  If somebody's actually expecting John Kasich or Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney to show up and "save" the GOP from Trump, it'll never happen.

The Republican Party is the Trump Party and it always has been.

We have to save ourselves.

Clearance Sale At The White House

Bothe the NY Times and Washington Post are reporting that a White House whistleblower came  forth to House Democrats last month in order to report that more than two dozen denials of security clearances were overturned by top Trump regime officials and that the two of the people initially denied security clearances for national security reasons are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.  The NY Times story:

A whistle-blower working inside the White House has told a House committee that senior Trump administration officials granted security clearances to at least 25 individuals whose applications had been denied by career employees for “disqualifying issues” that could put national security at risk, the committee’s Democratic staff said Monday. 

The whistle-blower, Tricia Newbold, a manager in the White House’s Personnel Security Office, told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in a private interview last month that the 25 applicants included two current senior White House officials, in addition to contractors and other employees working for the office of the president, the staff said in a memo it released publicly. 

The memo does not identify any of the 25 people. But one of the senior White House officials appears to be Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. 

NBC News reported in January that Carl Kline, who until recently served as the head of the personnel security division and was Ms. Newbold’s boss, had overruled a decision by career security officials concerned about granting Mr. Kushner a clearance.

The New York Times reported in February that President Trump had ordered his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, to grant a clearance last year to Mr. Kushner. The president had earlier said he had no role in the clearance. 

Democrats on the oversight panel are also demanding information from the White House about the process of granting a clearance to Ivanka Trump, among others. Ms. Trump’s final clearance was granted shortly after Mr. Kushner’s. In an interview in February with ABC News, Ms. Trump insisted her father had no hand in either her clearance or her husband’s.

Ms. Newbold told the committee’s staff members that she and other career officials had denied the 25 applications for a variety of reasons, including “foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use and criminal conduct,” the memo said. 

The denials by the career employees were overturned, she said, by officials with more seniority who, by her account, did not follow the normal procedures meant to mitigate security risks and generally adhered to by other administrations.

The Washington Post story focuses more on Newbold, and gives us a major clue as to a third current WH official.

A White House whistleblower told lawmakers that more than two dozen denials for security clearances have been overturned during the Trump administration, calling Congress her “last hope” for addressing what she considers improper conduct that has left the nation’s secrets exposed. 

Tricia Newbold, a longtime White House security adviser, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that she and her colleagues issued “dozens” of denials for security clearance applications that were later approved despite their concerns about blackmail, foreign influence or other red flags, according to panel documents released Monday. 

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security” — and was retaliated against for doing so. 

Newbold’s allegations intensify pressure on the White House over its handling of security clearances, a controversy that burst into public view last year with the revelation that dozens of staffers had temporary approvals to access sensitive government information while they awaited clearance approval. 

Among them was presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who President Trump ultimately demanded be granted a permanent top-secret clearance, despite the concerns of intelligence officials. 

Newbold alleged that 25 individuals were given clearances or access to national security information since 2018 despite concerns about ties to foreign influence, conflicts of interests, questionable or criminal conduct, financial problems, or drug abuse.

That group includes “two current senior White House officials,” according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee. 

The panel did not identify the senior White House officials but asked the White House to immediately provide documents related to the security clearances of nine officials, including Kushner, the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and national security adviser John Bolton. 

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), the committee chairman, said in a letter to the White House Counsel’s Office that his panel would vote on Tuesday to subpoena Carl Kline, who served as personnel security director at the White House during the first two years of the administration — the committee’s first compulsory move aimed at the White House. 

Newbold alleged that Kline, then her direct manager, overruled her clearance denials and then retaliated against her when she objected.

Yep, our third contestant appears to be John Bolton's Mustache.

And the Clearance Sale continues.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump now says that Democrats must "fix" immigration issues with the southern border using legislation or he will close the border as soon as this weekend.
• Two black Baptist churches have been torched in the last few days in St. Landry's Parish, Louisiana, police are telling black churches to be cautious as they are still looking for suspects.
• Meeting a promise of an April 2 deadline, Democrats have issued subpoenas for the unredacted version of the full Mueller report from the Department of Justice.
• Former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot has won Chicago's mayoral runoff election, she will be the Second City's first openly gay black woman Mayor.
• Google is teaming up with Walmart so Google Assistant can order groceries using your voice.

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Because the white nationalist in the White House doesn't consider white supremacist groups to be an actual threat (after all, they're allies, and why would he care if they shot up a few mosques or synagogues, they're not Trump voters anyway) the Department of Homeland Security has now completely disbanded the intelligence task force unit looking into white supremacists groups in the US.

The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism, The Daily Beast has learned. Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism—including white supremacist terrorism—is growing.

In the wake of this move, officials said the number of analytic reports produced by DHS about domestic terrorism, including the threat from white supremacists, has dropped significantly. People in and close to the department said this has generated significant concern at headquarters.

“It’s especially problematic given the growth in right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism we are seeing in the U.S. and abroad,” one former intelligence official told The Daily Beast.

The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.

Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.

“We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland,” said one DHS official.

Former officials pointed to a spate of domestic terror attacks in recent years as evidence that DHS erred by shuttering this branch. From the massacre that left 11 people dead at a Pittsburgh synagogue to a shooting targeting Republican members of Congress in June 2018 to bomb threats that a deranged Trump fandirected at prominent Democrats and CNN, violent attacks informed by homegrown hatred have left Americans increasingly terrorized.

Meanwhile, the DHS has been tracking Black Lives Matter activists for years, and still hasn't done a thing about the mysterious deaths of six Ferguson, Missouri black men tied to Black Lives Matter.

If nobody's there to report it was going to happen, nobody can take note that Trump should be responsible for his own deadly rhetoric.

The Party Of Corruption, Con't

If you're wondering how the NC GOP was so corrupt that it would allow Mark Harris to nearly get away with stealing an election, it's because NC GOP party chair and former Congressman Robin Hayes is a corrupt as they come, and today the piper paid him a visit.

A federal grand jury has indicted multiple people in connection with an ongoing investigation involving donations made to the North Carolina Republican Party.

NCGOP Chairman Robin Hayes, who spent a decade in Congress representing a district that stretched from the Charlotte area to Fayetteville, surrendered himself to authorities and made a first appearance at the US Courthouse in Charlotte on Monday.

The charges center around a wealthy Durham businessman named Greg Lindberg, who has been under the microscope of federal investigators for white collar crimes related to his business empire and, later, for contributions he made to politicians in North Carolina.

Lindberg was also indicted and made a first appearance in court. Two other people who worked for Lindberg, John Gray and John Palermo, also appeared in court in connection two the indictments.

Lindberg made sizeable contributions to both political parties, campaign finance records show, including a six-figure contribution to the North Carolina Democratic Party and nearly $2 million to the North Carolina Republican Party.

A portion of Lindberg’s contribution to the NCGOP—$240,000 –was then forwarded to North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey, who is also a Republican.

In October, NCGOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse confirmed to WBTV that the party sent Causey the money but said it was legal because, he said, the party steered the money to Causey after Lindberg made the contribution.

In March, WBTV reported that Causey made a secret recording of a meeting between Lindberg, an associate, Causey and Hayes.

During the meeting, multiple sources familiar with the recording told WBTV, Lindberg and Hayes reached an agreement for the NCGOP to pass $240,000 of Lindberg’s contribution to Causey’s campaign.

An attorney for Lindberg has not responded to messages from WBTV seeking comment.

Lindberg was the NCGOP's personal slush fund manager, in other words.  And it looks like he's taking Hayes with him.  Hayes's charges include wire fraud, false statements, and bribery as he was taking cash in order to then direct money with federally funded programs to benefit donors like Lindberg, and then aiding and abetting a criminal conspiracy to tie all that together in defrauding the NC Insurance Commission.

Stay tuned.  A lot of people are going down over this back home.

As The Vote Goes In Ohio

Ohio could be the next big state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact if voters get to decide on it this fall.

Ohioans could vote this fall on a measure to award the presidency to the candidate who wins the national popular vote — regardless of which candidate wins the Buckeye State.

The proposed constitutional amendment, if approved, would bypass the electoral college by apparently authorizing Ohio’s membership in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

But several more states still must approve the measure for it to potentially impact the 2020 presidential race between Republican incumbent Donald Trump and a Democratic challenger.

Since 2006, the District of Columbia and 13 states with 184 electoral votes have enacted a popular-vote measure into law. States representing 86 more electoral votes are needed to reach the majority of 270 Electoral College votes to guarantee the most-popular candidate becomes president. Ohio has 18 winner-take-all electoral votes.

It would bring the total closer. If states with pending legislation to join the compact like Florida, Georgia, NC, and another state or two join along with Ohio (like Indiana, Minnesota, Arizona or SC) that will put the total number of electoral votes in the Compact over 270, and if those are the states involved, Clinton would have won in 2016 just based on Florida, NC, Georgia, and Ohio.

How far this will get before Republicans tie it up in legal duct tape, I have no clue.  But it's got a far better shot than abolishing the electoral college, which would take a full Constitutional amendment to overcome.

StupidiNews!

• A concrete railing bridge section fell on interstate traffic in Chattanooga, Tennessee, injuring one person and closing Interstates 75 and 24 for several hours on Monday.
• The Trump regime is blocking the delivery of F-35 jets and equipment to NATO ally Turkey in retaliation for Ankara's purchase of Russian missile defense systems.
• Boeing now says it won't be able to deliver planned software fixes for grounded 737 Max passenger planes until "sometime this month" instead of next week.
• Senate Democrats blocked a GOP disaster relief bill that didn't include House-approved money for Puerto Rico, setting up yet another funding showdown for the Trump regime.
• Flight management software for multiple major airlines shut down Monday for several hours this morning, the software glitches caused hundreds of flight delays across the country.

Last Call For Another Supreme Disappointment

The US Supreme Court handed down yet another 5-4 decision today that essentially destroys 50 years of progress on stopping the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment's "cruel and unusual punishment" clause as according to Judge Neil Gorsuch and the other four conservatives, states can essentially execute people in whatever fashion they want.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Bucklew v. Precythe, which it handed down Monday on a party-line vote, is at once the most significant Eighth Amendment decision of the last several decades and the cruelest in at least as much time.

Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion tosses out a basic assumption that animated the Court’s understanding of what constitutes a “cruel and unusual” punishment for more than half a century. In the process, he writes that the state of Missouri may effectively torture a man to death — so long as it does not gratuitously inflict pain for the sheer purpose of inflicting pain.

And, on top of all of that, Gorsuch would conscript death penalty defense attorneys — men and women who often gave up lucrative legal careers to protect the lives of their clients — into the ghoulish task of laying out the method that will be used to kill those clients.

It’s a breathtaking sign of just how much the Supreme Court’s new majority is willing to change — and how quickly they are willing to impose that change on the rest of us.

Oh, but it gets worse.

Looming beneath the surface, moreover, is an even more ominous sign for anyone who hopes that this Supreme Court will not replace decades of established law with the Federalist Society’s wildest fantasies. In several recent oral arguments, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh appeared unexpectedly sympathetic to liberal litigants.

Bucklew was one of these cases, where Kavanaugh browbeated a lawyer defending Missouri’s plans to potentially inflict tremendous pain during an upcoming execution. “Are you saying even if the method creates gruesome and brutal pain you can still do it because there’s no alternative?” the newest member of the court asked at one point.

And yet, Kavanaugh did not simply join Gorsuch’s opinion, he wrote a separate opinion suggesting that maybe death row inmates could be executed by firing squad.

Monday’s decision in Bucklew, in other words, is not just a sweeping rewrite of one of the Bill of Rights’ core provisions. It may prove to be a very real window into the mind of Kavanaugh — and it suggests that, whatever noises Kavanaugh makes during a hearing, he will ultimately be a reliable vote for whatever outcome the Court’s conservative bloc prefers.

The ruling puts the burden of finding a more humane method of execution on the death row inmate, and unless it meets the stringent test of being easy and quick for the state to carry out, which the state gets to solely determine, then the state can reject it and use whatever method it wants to.

And please remember, all of the other conservatives signed off on this monstrous ruling, including Mr. Ball-And-Strikes Chief Justice Roberts himself.  Hell is empty and at least five of the devils are on the bench.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Ben Wittes from Lawfare takes to The Atlantic to remind us that he too is a Republican, and believes that William Barr will deliver on his promise of transparency.

Here’s a radical idea: For the next two weeks, let’s give Attorney General William Barr the benefit of the doubt.

I understand why so many people are suspicious of Barr and are lining up to denounce him—and there may well come a day, and it might come soon, when I will get in line and join them.

Barr’s initial letter summarizing the top-line conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation allowed President Donald Trump to claim exoneration and vilify those who had called for the investigation, even as it managed not to answer any substantive questions about L’Affaire Russe. What’s more, the letter put the attorney general’s personal stamp on the exoneration of the president for obstruction of justice, an outcome that is apparently not what Mueller himself intended. It is not clear to me why Barr needed to do this, and it certainly had the effect of helping the president seize control of the narrative. So I understand why many people are suspicious.

Yet I am still inclined to give Barr the benefit of the doubt on the release of the Mueller report, if only in a kind of “trust but verify” sort of way. The reason, in short, is that Barr has promised numerous times to show his work. He has promised to do so in the short term. The equities he has insisted on protecting are, in my view, reasonable ones. And he has taken in his most recent letter an appropriate, even gutsy, stand on executive privilege with respect to the White House. He has, in short, described a reasonable process by which Congress and the public should shortly get access to Mueller’s findings. I am inclined to assume him serious about this until he fails to deliver on what he has promised. There will be plenty of time to criticize his failures if and when they materialize.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

Barr has said since his confirmation hearings that he is committed to maximum public access to Mueller’s findings consistent with the law. Since Mueller delivered his report, he has stood by this and said he means to expeditiously review a 400-page document and release as much as he can. His time frame has clarified over the past week, from soon to “weeks not months” to “mid-April, if not sooner.” Congressional Democrats are demanding the report by Tuesday. This difference is not material. If the Justice Department releases Mueller’s report in a capacious and reasonable fashion in mid-April, that is a perfectly fine outcome.

Barr has also laid out what material he believes he must redact from the document. On some of these matters, he is simply correct. For example, Barr says he means to remove grand-jury material; it is actually unlawful, criminal even, to disclose grand-jury material without the authorization of the court. In the short term, there is no way to give this material to Congress, let alone make it public; it would require substantial litigation to do so.

Moreover, Barr says he means to redact “material the intelligence community identifies as potentially compromising sensitive sources and methods.” Note that he is not saying he will redact all classified material. But it is quite irresponsible to demand that the attorney general dump in the public domain sensitive intelligence matters in a fashion that could burn collection capabilities or human sources. There is no way the attorney general is going to release a 400-page document summarizing a counterintelligence investigation without a careful review for national-security information. And going through a lengthy document with a lot of information from different sources in a review for both national-security and grand-jury material takes time—legitimately. Getting it done in a few short weeks would require having a team working on it around the clock.

Barr also says he will redact “material that could affect other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other Department offices.” This strikes me as reasonable as well. Mueller has kicked a variety of matters back to the Justice Department. Do we really want Barr to screw up those investigations by prematurely releasing the department’s analysis of them? We didn’t want Mueller to do this. I don’t want Barr to, either. This category of redaction is potentially subject to abuse, but I am not going to assume preemptively that it will be abused.

Finally, Barr says he will redact “information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.” Depending on how one reads the words unduly and peripheral, this could either be a reasonable effort to protect drive-by reputational harm to people quite removed from the core public interest in this matter or it could be a loophole big enough to drive a truck through that could protect, say, the president’s kids. So again, could this be a mechanism to black out large segments of the report? Yes. But I see no reason to assume that this is what Barr wants to do, given his more general public commitments to maximum transparency in this matter.

One important area in which Barr has said publicly that he won’t be doing any redactions is the area of executive privilege. This is actually a big deal. The White House made noises about reviewing the document for supposedly privileged material. But on this point, Barr has publicly, if somewhat backhandedly, taken a stand. In his letter on Friday, Barr wrote that “although the President would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review.” 

If Wittes is right, then Barr would indeed do the honorable thing and we'd get to see virtually all of the report.

The problem is of course that William Barr decided to work for Donald Trump.

I do not believe for a second he is honorable.

Senator Batboy's Guide To Health Care

I have to admit, whoever is writing the Trump Show that we're all stuck in presently keeps making such beautifully obscene villain casting choices that even Hollywood is jealous.  Take this week's example where our old friend Rick Scott, recently upgraded from Governor to Senator by many, many Florida Men, is now the Trump regime's pointman on health care.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott is taking the lead on Republican health care policy as the Trump administration tries once again to end Obamacare. 

President Trump named Scott and fellow GOP U.S. Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana as his point people on Capitol Hill at a question-and-answer session at the White House. 

"They are going to come up with something really spectacular," Trump told reporters Thursday. 

Scott’s new role is a long way from his political origins in 2009 and 2010, when as one of the earliest critics of Obamacare, he launched ads arguing that pre-existing condition protections would cause premiums to skyrocket.

Scott also was the CEO of the hospital company Columbia/HCA in the 1990s, who resigned four months after a federal inquiry into the company was made public. The company was later fined $1.7 billion in 2000 and 2007 for what was then the largest case of Medicare fraud in history.

And yet somehow he was able to parlay billions in Medicare fraud into a lucrative political career long before Trump was ever elected, just another argument in favor of the theory that the GOP is the problem and Trump is the symptom. Rick Scott should be serving his second decade in prison going on his third.  Instead, he's serving in the US Senate.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what's wrong with America.

Scott goes on to say that he wants to lower prescription drug prices, but the catch is that prices can't be higher than other "industrialized nations" and of course, Scott gets to define what that means.

It sounds great, but of course Scott is a professional conman, fraudster, and grifter.  What his real plan happens to be is one the Dems will reject on the fine print in both the House and Senate so the GOP can run attack ads.  Pretty sick April Fools' joke if you ask me.

It's Dems' own fault if they can't see this trap a mile away.

StupidiNews!

• Former VP Joe Biden has responded to allegations that he made Nevada politician Lucy Flores "uneasy" in 2014 when he kissed the back of her head, Biden says he did not act "inappropriately".
• The White House wants to create a $100 billion slush fund to bankroll Trump's pet projects, the Trump regime wants to use the tactic to do an end run around sequestration spending caps.
• Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's ruling AK Party has lost local elections in Istanbul after losing in Ankara, the losses represent a major blow to his power base and future as President. 
• As the UK Parliament takes over Brexit proceedings on Monday as the government of PM Theresa May spirals out of control, the Tories are making plans for possible snap general elections.
• New research finds that preventable outbreaks of childhood diseases cost tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money every year across the country.

Last Call For Border Line Insanity, Con't

Donald Trump has threatened to close the southern border with Mexico several times in the last year over what he sees as President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's "failure" to stop undocumented immigration, but this time he really really means it you guys.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday that President Donald Trump is serious about possibly closing the U.S.-Mexico border this week.

“It certainly isn’t a bluff. You can take the president seriously," she said on "Fox News Sunday," adding, Congress "can fix this."

"Congress can fix the problem of immigration that they’ve failed to fix. This president is looking at the metrics," she said, adding the U.S. has "never seen a surge" in immigration "like this."

On Friday, Trump said “there’s a very good likelihood” he would close the southern border this week.

"Mexico is going to have to do something, otherwise I’m closing the border," Trump said.

"I’ll just close the border," he added. "When you close the border, also you will stop a lot of the drugs from coming in."

She also defended the president's decision to cut off aid to the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Trump has claimed the governments of those countries had "set up" migrant caravans for entry into the United States.

"We need to send a message," Conway said.

It's a bluff and everyone knows it.  Closing the border with Mexico would cost the country billions in trade dollars a day and Republicans in Congress aren't about to put up with that.  Trump has already blown a hole in the side of the US economy with his tariffs.  Closing the border with Mexico would only make things worse.

And speaking of making things worse...

Taking drastic action over illegal immigration, President Donald Trump moved Saturday to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose citizens are fleeing north and overwhelming U.S. resources at the southern border.

The State Department notified Congress that it would look to suspend 2017 and 2018 payments to the trio of nations, which have been home to some of the migrant caravans that have marched through Mexico to the U.S. border.

Amplified by conservative media, Trump has turned the caravans into the symbol of what he says are the dangers of illegal immigration — a central theme of his midterm campaigning last fall. With the special counsel’s Russia probe seemingly behind him, Trump has revived his warnings of the caravans’ presence.

Trump also has returned to a previous threat he never carried out — closing the border with Mexico. He brought up that possibility on Friday and revisited it in tweets Saturday, blaming Democrats and Mexico for problems at the border and beyond despite warnings that a closed border could create economic havoc on both sides.

“It would be so easy to fix our weak and very stupid Democrat inspired immigration laws,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “In less than one hour, and then a vote, the problem would be solved. But the Dems don’t care about the crime, they don’t want any victory for Trump and the Republicans, even if good for USA!′

If Republicans wanted to fix immigration, they could have done it at any time when they controlled the House, Senate, and White House in 2017 and 2018.  They chose not to.

But it's the Democrats' fault?

Please.

The Crown Prince, The King Of Amazon, And The Orange Jester

So it turns out that Jeff Bezos's affair wasn't just blabbed by his mistress's brother to the National Enquirer after all, but instead it was all part of a Saudi operation to destroy Bezos for the Washington Post's coverage of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman's ordering of the murder of Post reporter and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. This information comes directly from Bezos's lead investigator on the matter, Gavin de Becker, who took to The Daily Beast to spill the beans.

I’m writing this today because it’s exactly what the Enquirer scheme was intended to prevent me from doing. Their contract also contained terms that would have inhibited both me and Bezos from initiating a report to law enforcement.

Things didn’t work out as they hoped.

When the terms for avoiding publication of personal photos were presented to Jeff Bezos, he responded immediately: “No thank you.” Within hours, he wrote an essay describing his reasons for rejecting AMI’s threatening proposal. Then he posted it all on Medium, including AMI’s actual emails and their salacious descriptions of private photos. (After the Medium post, AMI put out a limp statement saying it “believed fervently that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story of Mr. Bezos.”)

The issues Bezos raised in his Medium post have nothing whatsoever to do with Michael Sanchez, any more than revealing the name of a low-level Watergate burglar sheds light on the architects of the Watergate cover-up. Bezos was not expressing concerns about the Enquirer’s original story; he was focused on what he called “extortion and blackmail.”

Next, Bezos directed me to “spend whatever is needed” to learn who may have been complicit in the scheme, and why they did it.

That investigation is now complete. As has been reported elsewhere, my results have been turned over to federal officials. Since it is now out of my hands, I intend today’s writing to be my last public statement on the matter. Further, to respect officials pursuing this case, I won’t disclose details from our investigation. I am, however, comfortable confirming one key fact:

Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.
We did not reach our conclusions lightly. The inquiry included a broad array of resources: investigative interviews with current and former AMI executives and sources, extensive discussions with top Middle East experts in the intelligence community, leading cyber security experts who have tracked Saudi spyware, discussions with current and former advisers to President Trump, Saudi whistleblowers, people who personally know the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (also known as MBS), people who work with his close associate Saud al-Qahtani, Saudi dissidents, and other targets of Saudi action, including writer/activist Iyad el-Baghdadi.

Experts with whom we consulted confirmed New York Times reports on the Saudi capability to “collect vast amounts of previously inaccessible data from smartphones in the air without leaving a trace—including phone calls, texts, emails”—and confirmed that hacking was a key part of the Saudi’s “extensive surveillance efforts that ultimately led to the killing of [Washington Post] journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

Some Americans will be surprised to learn that the Saudi government has been very intent on harming Jeff Bezos since last October, when the Post began its relentless coverage of Khashoggi’s murder. The Saudi campaign against Bezos has already been reported by CNN International, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, and others.

Saudi Arabia attacks people in many ways, obviously, including through their elaborate social media program that uses sophisticated technology and paid surrogates to create artificially trending hashtags. To give you an idea of how this program has infected the U.S., the New York Times reported that the Saudis even had an operative inside Twitter, which fired the suspect employee, and later advised select activists and others that “your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors.”

In October, the Saudi government unleashed its cyber army on Bezos (and later me). Their multi-pronged campaign included public calls for boycotts against Amazon.com and its Saudi subsidiary, Souq.com. Just three examples among thousands:

“We as Saudis will never accept to be attacked by the Washington Post in the morning, only to buy products from Amazon and Souq.com by night! Strange that all three companies are owned by the same Jew who attacks us by day, and sells us products by night!”
“Our weapon is to boycott… because the owner of the newspaper is the same as their owner.”

“We're after you - the Jew, worshipper of money, will go bankrupt by the will of God at the hands of Saudi Arabia... the owner of Amazon and Souq is the owner of the Washington Post is the spiteful Jew who insults us every day.”
Bezos is not Jewish, but you get the point.

We studied the well-documented and close relationship between MBS and AMI chairman, David Pecker. That alliance includes David Pecker bringing MBS intermediary Kacy Grine to a private White House meeting with President Trump and Jared Kushner. Mr. Pecker has also traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with the Crown Prince. Though we don’t know what was discussed in those private meetings, AMI’s actions afterwards are telling. To coincide with MBS’ March 2018 U.S. tour, AMI created a 100-page, ad-free, glossy magazine called The New Kingdom. Since MBS wasn’t yet a notorious figure in the West (this was before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi), AMI’s magazine introduced him to Americans as “the most influential Arab leader—transforming the world at 32,” and “improving lives of his people & hopes for peace.”

The Associated Press reported that AMI sent an advance digital copy of their laudatory magazine to the Saudi Embassy three weeks before printing and distributing 200,000 issues. (Despite AP’s substantial forensic evidence, the kingdom denied it received the magazine’s content in advance. While we’re on denials, the kingdom says Saudi Arabia had nothing to with the Bezos matter. The kingdom also says MBS had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.)

When AMI publicly insisted that nobody outside of their executives and editors “had any influence on this publication or its content,” I guess they meant other than Kacy Grine, the very same MBS-intermediary Pecker had brought to The White House. I say that because AMI soon had to disclose to the Department of Justice National Security Division that their mystery magazine included content written by Grine, and that they also gave him the whole working draft for advance review, and that he suggested changes, and that they implemented his changes, and that he provided better photographs of MBS. With friends like AMI, you don’t need… publicists.

My firm has done many investigations into Enquirer misconduct, including one that became the subject of a 60 Minutesinvestigative piece way back in 1990. Before then, tabloids had been seen as almost funny publications, mixing celebrity gossip with space aliens and Elvis sightings. But when the Enquirer’s on-again-off-again relationship with the truth percolated into politics, it wasn’t so funny anymore.

Though relatively benign at first (“Al Gore’s Diet Is Making Him Stupid”), the Trump/Pecker relationship has metastasized: In effect, the Enquirer became an enforcement arm of the Trump presidential campaign, and presidency, as the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York laid out in its case against Michael Cohen, who has pleaded guilty. The U.S. Attorney has done the country a service by levying extensive controls on AMI, David Pecker, and his deputy Dylan Howard, through a non-prosecution agreement that requires them to commit no other crimes for three years, and requires everyone at AMI to attend annual training on federal election laws. I’m guessing that’s not how they used to spend their time.

If de Becker's information is solid -- and there's every reason to believe it is -- then we have a foreign operation against a US citizen in order to wreck his life in revenge for his newspaper publishing the truth about the Saudi Crown Prince's murderous ways.

And if you think the Trump Justice Department is going to lift a finger to investigate this, I have my own newspaper to sell you.  Hell, there's even odds that Trump knew about this beforehand and tacitly gave his permission.  Trump despises Jeff Bezos for the same Washington Post that prints the truth about Trump.

Again, this is what autocrats do.  I think there may have even been a quid pro quo here, Trump covers MBS on Khashoggi's murder (and you notice that months later our relationship with the Saudis hasn't changed one bit) and in return, MBS exposes Bezos's affair, which did destroy his marriage and his soon-to-be ex-wife Mackenzie is walking away with $70 billion of Bezos's fortune.

You tell me who won in this mess, because it sure looks like to me that MBS and Trump are getting away with this.

Sunday Long Read: A Volunteer Detective

Barack Obama was arguably the best President in recent history when it came to Native issues.  He actually gave a damn about a section of America that is ignored to the point of criminal neglect under Donald Trump.  The death of Olivia Kerry Lone Bear rocked the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, and it took an amateur sleuth named Lissa Yellowbird-Chase to find her body, when the police had completely given up.

On a blazing hot day in late July, Lissa Yellowbird-Chase drove her black SUV, license plate "SEARCH", to a muddy landing on Lake Sakakawea. It was a remote entrance to the water on the northern edge of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota - not much more than a rickety dock at the end of an uneven gravel road.

Hitched to the back of Yellowbird-Chase's truck was a 14-foot boat with a half-broken motor and a set of fishing sonar. By her own admission, she was not a particularly skilled or experienced boater, nor an expert in sonar. But she had a plan.

Along with a couple of volunteers from her group, the Sahnish Scouts of North Dakota, they would motor along the shoreline of the bay, scanning the lakebed for anomalies, moving further and further away from the shore with each pass. They would keep going until Yellowbird-Chase satisfied the nagging feeling she'd had about this spot for months.

"I don't know what it was - I was drawn to that place," she recalled later. "I actually stood in that bay last fall."

Nine months earlier, in the autumn of 2017, a young mother of five named Olivia Kerri Lone Bear vanished from New Town, a tiny oil-boom city on the Fort Berthold Reservation. The 32-year-old was last seen on 24 October, at the wheel of a teal-coloured Chevy Silverado pick-up truck that she often borrowed from a friend. She was a caretaker for her father, and the following day, he found her wallet and mobile phone at his home.

Since then, the Lone Bear family had been searching for Olivia in vain. Yellowbird-Chase joined the effort along with the Sahnish Scouts, a group she founded in 2015 to search and recover missing people in Indian Country - though she had been doing the work on her own since about 2011.

"PLEASE SHARE," she posted on Facebook five days after Olivia disappeared, alongside a missing poster with telephone numbers for the Lone Bear family and her own personal mobile number. "You can remain anonymous."

In the weeks that followed, large groups of volunteers fanned out across the 1-million acre reservation on foot, and on all-terrain vehicles. Her family took over a tribal government building and established a search headquarters with a tipline, which they manned every day for months. Reported sightings came from as far away as California and Arizona.

But once the tundra-like North Dakota winter set in, all search efforts - aside from keeping the phone line open - had to be suspended until spring. The lake froze over, sealing itself under a thick crust of ice.

By July, when Yellowbird-Chase pushed out in her boat, summer was in its full height, and the waters were wide open.

She tried not to get excited when, a few hundred feet from the shore, her sonar picked up a rectangular object on what should have been the blank, featureless lakebed. In the early 1950s, the US Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River and created Lake Sakakawea, flooding farmland that belonged to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, and swallowing towns whole. The anomaly she saw on the screen could be nothing more than an old building foundation or a chimney, she thought.

till, she took a photo and texted it to Keith Cormican, a technical diver and certified underwater sonar operator in Wisconsin. While Yellowbird-Chase was a sonar novice, she considered Cormican her "mentor" - his organisation Bruce's Legacy has located and recovered 27 drowning victims since 2013.

"I knew she had a vehicle," he recalled.

He texted back that she should keep taking scans at different times of day, to catch shadows coming off the object that would give it better definition.

After days of obsessively motoring back and forth over the same spot, and struggling with their broken motor, Yellowbird-Chase texted a new image to Corey Bristol, the then-chief deputy of the Mountrail County Sheriff's Office. It was a Saturday, and Bristol was 70 miles away, spending his day off with his father. But when he looked down at his phone and saw a pixellated image featuring what looked like a tiny Tonka truck at the centre, he jumped in his car and accelerated back towards New Town.

"We definitely wanted to find out what was down there," he said.

It was indeed Olivia Kerry Lone Bear's body.  The crime has not been solved, because the system in place absolutely favors non-Native suspects, who get regular police proceedings.  But when the victim is Native, a broken and overloaded system takes over and the gathering of evidence and even determining if there's a body can take years.

And the cases die.