Turnout For What?

CNN's Harry Enten recaps the momentous turnout of the 2018 midterms, topping 50% for the first time in a century.

President Donald Trump solved a problem that no other president before him could: Getting people to vote in a midterm election. 

Whether they were voting for or against his agenda, it is now clear that voters turned out in record numbers in 2018. Professor Michael McDonald of the University of Florida, who is a guru of sorts on turnout, estimates that approximately 118 million people turned out to vote. He further calculates that to be 50.1% turnout of the voting eligible population. 

That percentage is stunning when compared to other midterms that have occurred since 18- to 20-year-olds got the right to vote in 1971 through the 26th Amendment. The average turnout in midterms from 1974 to 2014 was just 39.4%. This year's turnout looks to be 11 points higher. 

More than that, the turnout in midterms had previously been fairly consistent. It never dropped below 36.7% or rose above 42%. This year's turnout was 8 points higher than the previous ceiling. 

If we look only at the raw number, remember that turnout in the 2014 midterm was only a little more than 83 million. This year, about 35 million more people turned out to vote.
The turnout is even more amazing is when you expand out the timeframe. The 50.1% turnout is higher than for any midterm in the last 100 years. This despite the fact that many of those elections took place when those under 21 were not eligible to vote. Remember, those younger than 21 are the least likely to vote, so you'd expect that the the turnout rate of eligible voters would have been higher before the youngest were eligible (in years such as 2018). 

Indeed, the turnout in 2018 is actually more comparable to presidential elections than midterms. The 50.1% turnout is closer to the average presidential turnout (56.5%) than midterm turnout (39.4%) since the 26th Amendment was enacted and it nearly exceeds the turnout in the 1988 election (52.8%) and 1996 election (51.7%). 

People got involved, and more importantly, people voted.  Now we look towards 2020, and I'm hoping we have another election with massive turnout.  It's the only way we clean out the pool filter on this mess.

StupidiNews!

• As trade tensions between the US and China continue to rise, Beijing has banned most iPhones from China granting a patent injunction against Apple to cell phone maker Qualcomm.
• The US has imposed economic sanctions on three North Korean officials, including a top political aide to Kim Jong Un.
• The fate of a revised bipartisan criminal justice reform bill remains in limbo as Senate GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to refuse to allow a vote on the legislation.
• After a key Brexit vote was pulled by UK PM Theresa May from a doomed Parliament vote Monday, May's new strategy seems to be running out the clock and forcing a deal before the March 29 deadline.
• Californians have now passed the 500,000 vehicle milestone on electric vehicles since 2010, sales of EVs now account for 7% total in the Golden State.

Last Call For A Baltimore Hate Thing

Donald Trump has bailed on his planned Wednesday visit to a black church in Baltimore because the white supremacists in his base weren't too happy about it.

A planned visit by President Donald Trump to Baltimore on Wednesday has been called off, and a discussion of the administration’s urban revitalization policies will take place at the White House instead. 

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said Monday that the change was for scheduling reasons and that the event would still include people from Baltimore. 

Deere said the president would make remarks “highlighting the administration’s agenda to expand the economic boom to all Americans, especially those in distressed communities — both rural and urban.” 

At the invitation of a Baltimore pastor, Trump had been planning to come to the city to discuss opportunity zones, poor neighborhoods singled out for special tax breaks under Republicans’ rewrite of the federal tax code. 

The Rev. Donte Hickman, the pastor who extended the invitation, said White House officials told him early Monday that changes underway at the White House due to the recently announced departure of Chief of Staff John Kelly meant the visit would no longer be possible for scheduling reasons. 

But, Hickman said, the White House told him that officials want to reschedule a visit to Baltimore in the new year. 

The visit would have brought Trump to one of the most struggling city neighborhoods. The blocks surrounding Hickman’s Southern Baptist Church in Broadway East are home to dozens of vacant houses, though Hickman’s North Chester Street church has sponsored new housing in the neighborhood. That includes an apartment building and community center that was under construction when it was destroyed in a suspected arson during the rioting of April 2015, after the death of Freddie Gray. But the church managed to rebuild the Mary Harvin Senior Center within the next year. 

Hickman said Monday he was disappointed that the president would not be visiting.
“I think this was a major opportunity for the president and for Baltimore,” he said.

Again, the Baltimore visit is exactly what Trump says he wants to highlight for black voters, Christian outreach, community leadership, and rebuilding after the Obama administration.  Weird then that Trump can't bring himself to actually go there.

Why, it's almost like Trump's outreach to black voters is complete bullshit, considering he can't get enough signaling to white supremacists on a constant basis.

Who knew, right?

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The endgame continues as Mueller has now rolled up a major prize: arrested Russian spy Maria Butina appears to be copping a plea deal, and that means she can supply Mueller with Trump's connections to Russia and the NRA.

Maria Butina, an accused Russian spy who nuzzled up to the National Rifle Association before the 2016 election, appears to have reached a plea deal with the Justice Department, according to a new court filing in her criminal case. 

Her attorneys and prosecutors filed a two-page request on Monday for a "change of plea" hearing before a federal judge as soon as Tuesday. "The parties have resolved this matter," the filing in DC federal court said Monday morning. Butina's case was brought by federal prosecutors in DC and not by Robert Mueller's team in the special counsel's office. 

A plea hearing has not yet been set. The notice Monday comes after several weeks of hints that Butina might negotiate an end to her case -- and after bumps in the case where federal prosecutors, at the height of attention on Russia's influence in American politics, accused the former graduate student of infiltrating Republican organizations in order to advance Russian interests. 

Until now, Butina, 30, maintained her innocence and insisted she was simply a foreign student interested in bettering relations between the US and Russia. Butina previously pleaded not guilty to one count of conspiracy and a second count of acting as an agent of a foreign government when she was arrested in July. 

Her case first became public amid a furor of US-Russia developments. She was arrested two days after the Justice Department separately indicted Russian military intelligence for hacking the Democratic Party, and her case became public the same day President Donald Trump met with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and declined to endorse US intelligence findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Butina's not stupid.  She knows that if she ever beat the rap, Putin might snuff her out anyway.  A deal including protection is her only chance, and has been ever since she was picked up.  Vlad doesn't like loose ends.

Still, it means she has something Mueller wants, and it almost certainly has to involve the NRA laundering Russian money to funnel to Trump.

Her lawyers had said her interactions with the NRA and others were typical of an ambitious student anxious to network and eager to build better relations between the United States and her country. They had at one point argued her outreach should be covered by constitutional protections for free speech and noted that she was not accused of attempting to steal U.S. secrets or working with Russian intelligence.

But prosecutors said her goal was to advance the foreign policy aims of the Kremlin and that she was acting at the direction of a Russian government official, Alexander Torshin, a former senator who now serves as deputy director of the Russian central bank.

Butina has been jailed for nearly five months since her July arrest. In that time, her case had been embraced by the Russian government, which had vigorously protested that she was an innocent student whose incarceration was unjust. With the plea deal, Butina could be released in coming months and deported to Russia.

Butina was prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, rather than special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — an indication that Mueller may have determined that her activities did not directly connect to his investigation, which involves scrutinizing any links between Russia and President Trump’s campaign.

Still, Butina intersected with Trump’s campaign several times before the 2016 election. In June 2015, she wrote a column for an American magazine in which she argued that only the election of a Republican president would result in better ties between the United States and Russia. A month later, at a public town hall event in Las Vegas, she was able to ask a question directly to Trump, inquiring about how he viewed sanctions imposed on Russia after its 2014 invasion of Crimea.

“We get along with Putin,” he told Butina, referring to the Russian president. “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”

Butina was then involved with an unsuccessful effort to organize a meeting between Torshin and Trump at an NRA convention in May 2016. Instead, she and Torshin briefly interacted with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, at the event, according to documents turned over to Congress.

Yes, it's true that maybe Putin wants her back, but Butina knows how this game works.  A blown agent who makes plea deals and gets her face plastered all over international newspapers isn't exactly an asset anymore.

The bigger news is that Butina is the link between Russia and the NRA, and Trump: international money laundering on the scale of millions, paid to Trump to benefit both Moscow and the gun lobby.  It's going to get a lot worse for Trump and the NRA from here on out, and everyone knows it.

Lies, Damn Lies, And Trump Lies

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post has finally gotten so fed up with Donald Trump's ridiculous lies that he's literally invented a whole new category of liar just for him in the annals of the paper's fact checking columns.

It was President Trump’s signature campaign promise: he would build a wall along the nation’s southern border and it would be paid for by Mexico.

Shortly after becoming president, Trump dropped the Mexico part, turning to Congress for the funds instead. When that too failed — Congress earlier this year appropriated money for border security that could not be spent on a concrete wall — Trump nevertheless declared victory: “We’ve started building our wall,” he said in a speech on March 29. “I’m so proud of it.”

Despite the facts, which have been cited numerous times by fact checkers, Trump repeated his false assertion on an imaginary wall 86 times in the seven months before the midterm elections, according to a database of false and misleading claims maintained by The Post.

Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.

Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.

To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category – the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.

The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: the claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page.

The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the president immediately qualify for the list. 

Among Trump's Bottomless Pinocchio claims so far: building the wall will stop drugs when the DEA has repeatedly said it won't help (tunnels, subs and planes bring in nearly all drugs, not cars and trucks) that US Steel is building new American plants when it has made no such announcement, and my favorite, that ICE and the Border Patrol have apprehended and deported more MS-13 gang members than actually exist.

I'm not surprised that it took two years for Kessler to finally stop arguing whether or not Trump is lying and lying on purpose, he is, and it looks like finally our media is starting to get it.

Sadly, it's years too late.  The damage to America has already been wrought, and there's far more to come.

StupidiNews!

• China has summoned both Canadian and US ambassadors in Beijing over the Vancouver arrest last week and scheduled deportation to the US of Chinese cell giant Huawei's CFO, Meng Wanzhou.
• Nearly 200,000 are without power in North Carolina as Winter Storm Diego dropped nearly a foot of snow across parts of the Tarheel State.
• French President Emmanuel Macron will address the French people on Monday as weekend anti-government protests rocked Paris and other French cities.
• Donald Trump has named Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to replace outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff head Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford.
• A new paper on Game of Thrones finds the best way to survive in Westeros is to be a noble-born woman willing to change or make new alliances.

Last Call For The New Adult In The Room

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly will be gone by the end of the year, Mike Pence's current Chief of Staff, Nick Ayers, doesn't want the job and Stephen Mnuchin is smart enough to stay at Treasury, so who does that leave?  If the rumblings from the DC access press are right, it's NC GOP Rep. Mark Meadows, of House Freedom Caucus fame.

Over the past 24 hours, President Trump has been privately asking many people who they think should be his new chief of staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge.

What's happening: Trump has asked confidants what they think about the idea of installing Rep. Mark Meadows, the chairman of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, as John Kelly's permanent replacement, according to these three sources. Trump has also mentioned three other candidates besides Meadows, according to a source with direct knowledge. I don't yet have their names.

Nick Ayers, previously considered the favorite, is out of the running to be Kelly's replacement, according to sources with direct knowledge.

"Nick couldn't give POTUS a two-year commitment, so he's going to help him on the outside instead," one of these sources told me. (This news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.)

Ayers is expected to run the pro-Trump outside group America First, according to another source with direct knowledge. Trump will make a decision on Kelly's replacement by the end of the year, the source said.

Again, the issue is Trump believes the Mueller probe will simply blow over and go away because Sean Hannity says it will, and that January will be business as usual.  He should be looking for a way out, not a new Chief of Staff.

We'll see, but at this pointanyone actively looking for a Trump regime job has to be the worst of the worst, and that fits Meadows to a T.

The Religion Of Hate

Evangelical Christians continue to tell American Muslims to go away because they're not American enough.

Conservative pastor commentator E.W. Jackson went on an anti-Islamic tirade on his radio show Wednesday, complaining that Muslims are taking over Congress.

Jackson's remarks were in response to reports that Democrats are attempting to change a rule banning headwear on the floor of the House to accommodate incoming Muslim lawmakers such as Ilhan Omar, who was recently elected in Minnesota.

“The floor of Congress is now going to look like an Islamic republic,” Jackson said. “We are a Judeo-Christian country. We are a nation rooted and grounded in Christianity and that’s that. And anybody that doesn’t like that, go live somewhere else. It’s very simple. Just go live somewhere else. Don’t try to change our country into some sort of Islamic republic or try to base our country on Sharia law.”

Omar and Rep.-elect Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) are set to be the first Muslim women in Congress.

Religious freedom of expression only applies to Christians you know, and Jews (when convenient).

Jackson in May lost a Republican primary to represent Virginia in the Senate and before that was the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in the state in 2013.

During his radio show, he claimed that multiple women will be wearing hijabs on the House floor to honor Omar and not because they are themselves Muslim.

“The fact that we’re electing these people to Congress and electing them to office is just beyond the pale,” he said. “Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe in the freedom of religion, I believe in the First Amendment, but I’ll tell you what, I’m not voting for a Muslim to serve in any office. Me, personally, I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it. Period. I’m not doing it.”

Jackson said he is not Islamaphobic, but simply does not agree with the religion.

“The threat to humanity is not merely radical Islam,” he added. “The threat to humanity is Islam, period. That’s right, I said it and I mean it.”

Pretty sure Congress is better off with more Muslim women and less E.W. Jacksons.

Sunday Long Read: Pocket Full Of Miracles

Our Sunday Long Read this week finds freelance journalist Laurie Penny discovering that hell is not just other people, it is specifically other people trapped on a four-day cruise talking about cryptocurrency, and also John McAfee is there.

Two months ago, an editor from BREAKER called and asked if I wanted to go on a four-day Mediterranean cruise with hundreds of crypto-crazed investors and evangelists. We’ll cover the travel, he said. Write something long about whatever you find, he said. It was 2 a.m. and I was over-caffeinated. I remember explaining that I know almost nothing about either cruises or blockchain, in the way that Sir Ian McKellen, in the criminally underrated series Extras, explains that he is not actually a wizard. Five days later I was at the port of Barcelona, boarding a ship. By which point it was way too late to wonder for the umpteenth time about my life choices.

I knew about bitcoin only as an investment vehicle favored by several essentially sweet nerds close to my heart—and I knew, too, that cryptocurrencies are the pet untraceable funding model of the far-right. I was told there would be an overall “Burning Man theme” to the adventure, guaranteed by the presence of Brock Pierce, the cryptocurrency mogul, former child actor, and one-man art installation about peer pressure. (More about him later.) I was anticipating evenings spent listening to crypto-hippies describe the angel-faced space elves they met when they took DMT. I was expecting to fetch water and painkillers for half-conscious corporate executives with dust in their perfect hair and no idea how to get home. I was expecting to get a bit carried away and end up shouting about the government and chalking poetry all over the walls. I was expecting to hear very rich men talk without blinking about tax planning and sacred geometry. I was expecting corporate-branded swimwear. I was expecting to meet smug Californian polyamorists, about whom smug European polyamorists like me are relentlessly judgy. Reader, all of these things transpired, but by the time they did they were a blessed relief.

Let’s step back a moment. For those of you still idling by the side of the cryptocurrency bandwagon, here’s a brief primer, based on a week’s frantic pre-trip cramming. Blockchain is the technology behind cryptocurrencies, which are peer-to-peer electronic cash systems unregulated by any central authority. The system bitcoin, pioneered by an anonymous genius (or geniuses) going by the handle “Satoshi Nakamoto” in 2008, was the first digital currency. Those who bought bitcoin at the start are now on-paper squidzillionaires. Other, newer currencies like Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash, are emerging—and there are obvious reasons to get behind the idea of decentralizing the financial system. Beyond money, blockchain has lots of exciting potential applications with very few actual users. For instance, in October, artist Kelly Donnelly released the feminist anthem “I Am She” using Ethereum, making it, in her words, the “first unblockable music video ever released … meaning women living in censored regions like Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and Turkey have been able to watch the video.” Sounds good to me.

In the short term, though, that’s not what most big players care about—and the major social change blockchain has brought about so far is that a small number of people have become very rich indeed. As blockchain skeptic David Gerard writes, “the cryptocurrency field is replete with scams and scammers. The technology is used as an excuse to make outlandish near-magical claims. When phrases like ‘a whole new form of money’ or ‘the old rules don’t apply any more’ start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative.”

A huge bitcoin price crash occurs a few hours before we set sail. As I board, I am surprised to find that nobody seems to be particularly worried. CoinsBank, the company organizing the cruise, has left little welcome gift boxes in each of the rooms. They contain painkillers, Alka-Seltzer, several condoms, the world’s flimsiest pregnancy test, and a half-bottle of Jägermeister. It’s the kind of thing you’d leave at the bottom of the chimney for Skeezy Uncle Santa, hoping he’ll stuff a new sex doll under your tree.

The women on this boat are polished and perfect; the men, by contrast, seem strangely cured—not like medicine, but like meat. They are almost all white, between the ages of 30 and 50, and are trying very hard to have the good time they paid thousands for, while remaining professional in a scene where many thought leaders have murky pasts, a tendency to talk like YouTube conspiracy preachers, and/or the habit of appearing in magazines naked and covered in strawberries. That last is 73-year-old John McAfee, who got rich with the anti-virus software McAfee Security before jumping into cryptocurrencies. He is the man most of the acolytes here are keenest to get their picture taken with and is constantly surrounded by private security who do their best to aesthetically out-thug every Armani-suited Russian skinhead on deck. Occasionally he commandeers the grand piano in the guest lounge, and the young live-streamers clamor for the best shot. John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder. I do not interview John McAfee. He interests me less than he scares the shit out of me, though his entourage seems relaxed. They’re already living in the crypto-utopia behind his strange pale-blue eyes.

The only genuinely happy person I meet on this trip is Femi, a forklift driver from Birmingham who wears a Dogecoin T-shirt and proudly shows me videos of him practicing with the samurai sword he bought with his bitcoin stash. I ask him why he’s so proud of his selfie with McAfee, given the guy’s not-unmurdery reputation.

“Well, yeah.” says Femi. Then he grins. “But he’s just a legend, isn’t he? And his wife’s really nice.”

I cannot fault this reasoning. Over the next four days I find myself drifting back to Femi and his unstoppable optimism whenever I get the urge to throw myself overboard.

I don't blame her.  Any truly transformation technology throughout history can be applied to either sex, killing, or theft, and the all-time great social advances, like the internet, are tied to all three.  Crypto is definitely the theft part, judging by the people surrounding it, and it's tiresome to hear people talk about it all the time, but as soon as somebody figures out how to use cryptocurrency for sex and or murder, it'll really take off.

Last Call For The French Connection (To Russia)

Russian social media attacks on French President Emmanuel Macron are stoking violence as protests against the government continue in Paris and other cities.

Emmanuel Macron successfully dodged cyberattacks and fake news reports that were widely blamed on a Kremlin effort to destabilize his 2017 presidential campaign.

Now, with France convulsed by violent protests, the Russians appear to be back – and may be hitting closer to their mark. Among 600 Twitter accounts known to promote Kremlin views, the top hashtag now is #giletsjaunes, the French name for the so-called Yellow Vests protest movement, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a unit of the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. that monitors those accounts and other pro-Kremlin activity.

The Twitter accounts monitored by the alliance usually feature U.S. or British news. But the French protests “have been at or near the top” of their activity for at least a week, says Bret Schafer, the alliance’s Washington-based social media analyst. “That’s a pretty strong indication that there is interest in amplifying the conflict” for audiences outside France, he says.

A major theme of recent tweets is that French law enforcement is on the verge of mutiny. That assertion – which doesn’t appear to be supported by facts – resembles other Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns that have tried to engender mistrust in Western governments and show that liberal democracies are in decline, Schafer says.

Much of the tweeted material comes from Russian state media outlets including the Sputnik news website, the RT television network, and Ruptly, a German-based video news agency that belongs to RT. These outlets are covering the French crisis closely; RT has said that 12 of its journalists have been injured in the protests, far more than any other news organization.

Sputnik and RT have reported in recent days that most French police no longer support Macron and are siding with the protesters. Their sources: representatives of two small police unions that together won less than 4 percent of votes in nationwide union elections this month. Sputnik and RT also have shown a video – widely shared on French social media -- of police in the southwestern town of Pau removing their helmets in what was described as a sign of solidarity with protesters. Local police and journalists on the scene said the description was untrue. They said some officers had briefly removed their helmets to talk with protesters before putting them back on.

Sputnik and RT didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

No reason to ask why Putin's state media outlets are trying to destabilize Macron. A weakened EU helps Putin with his real goal: a fully reconstituted Soviet bloc with a compliant America under his heel.

Of course Putin is moving to cause as much chaos as possible.  He'd love nothing more than to see Paris come under control of someone like Marine Le Pen.  And I honestly don't know if the Macron government will survive much longer.  Between France, the UK May government coming apart due to Brexit, and the German government's changing of the guard, all three of the EU's major leaders may be gone within the next few months.

Putin couldn't be happier.

It's Mueller Time, Review Edition

Over at the Daily Beast, Center for American Progress think tank authors Max Bergmann and Sam Berger go over where we are at the Mueller Moment approaches and conclude that collusion is the crime, not just the obstruction of justice to cover that crime up.

First, Mueller has clearly identified collusion in the efforts of Trump aides and associates to contact WikiLeaks. In a draft plea agreement provided to conservative operative Jerome Corsi, Mueller details how Roger Stone, who the special counsel notes was in frequent contact with Donald Trump and senior campaign officials, directed Corsi to connect with WikiLeaks about the trove of stolen materials it received from Russia. Corsi subsequently communicated WikiLeaks’ release plan back to Stone, and the Trump campaign built its final message around the email release. That is collusion.

Second, we now know that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn have provided evidence to Mueller related to collusion. In Cohen’s sentencing memo, Mueller said that Cohen provided his office with “useful information” on “Russia-related matters core to its investigation.” One of those central elements, according to the Justice Department: “any links and/or coordination” between the Kremlin and Trump campaign figures. Collusion, in other words.

In Flynn’s sentencing memo Mueller said that Flynn’s false statements to the FBI about his calls with the Russian ambassador during the transition were “material” to the investigation into “links or coordination between Russia and individuals associated with the Trump campaign.”

Third, Mueller has found evidence that Trump was compromised by a hostile foreign power during the election. In his plea deal, Cohen revealed that Trump had repeatedly lied to voters about the then-candidate’s financial ties to Russia. While Trump claimed during the campaign to have no business dealings with Russia, he was negotiating a wildly lucrative business deal not simply with Russian businessmen, but also involving with the Kremlin itself. Trump’s team even reportedly tried to bribe Russian President Vladimir Putin by offering him a $50 million penthouse.

Worse, Russia not only knew that Trump was lying, but when investigators first started looking into this deal, the Kremlin helped Trump cover up what really happened. That made Trump doubly compromised: first, because he was eager to get the financial payout and second because Russia had evidence he was lying to the American people—evidence they could have held over Trump by threatening to reveal at any time.

Since the president’s embarrassing performance at the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin—when he kowtowed to a foreign adversary rather than stand up for American interests—there has been open speculation about what leverage the Kremlin has over him. Now we know at least part of the picture, raising the specter of what other information Putin has, and how he is using it to influence Trump’s policy decisions.

Fourth, we know that Trump has engaged in an increasingly brazen attempt to cover up his actions: installing a political crony to head the Department of Justice by potentially illegal means in an effort to shut down the investigation; using his former campaign chairman and convicted criminal Paul Manafort to find out information about Mueller’s investigation; and even appearing to offer Manafort a pardon if he helps him obstruct the Russia probe. These may be components of an obstruction of justice case, but they also provide strongly circumstantial data points as to how serious Trump himself views the allegations of collusion being levelled against him.

Lastly, federal prosecutors have told us Trump broke the law to influence the 2016 election by hiding evidence of his affairs. Trump clearly had no qualms about breaking the law to win an election.

In the face of what Mueller has revealed, there is little question where this is going. Mueller may still be only showing us part of his hand, but it’s a damn good hand. He has signaled to us he’s found collusion. He has shown us that the president is compromised. He has told us that he has gathered information important to his investigation about contacts with people in the Trump Organization, the campaign, the transition, and even the White House. That’s everyone Trump has been connected with since he started running. And given all the redacted information in his filings and all that he’s been told by cooperating witnesses, we can be confident that Mueller will show us even more.

Garrett Graff over at Wired comes to a similar conclusion: that there is no possible exculpatory explanation for what Mueller has already revealed to us through court filings.

The potential innocent explanations for Donald Trump’s behavior over the last two years have been steadily stripped away, piece by piece. Special counsel Robert Mueller and investigative reporters have uncovered and assembled a picture of a presidential campaign and transition seemingly infected by unprecedented deceit and criminality, and in regular—almost obsequious—contact with America’s leading foreign adversary.

A year ago, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic outlined seven possible scenarios about Trump and Russia, arranged from most innocent to most guilty. Fifth on that list was “Russian Intelligence Actively Penetrated the Trump Campaign—And Trump Knew or Should Have Known,” escalating from there to #6 “Kompromat,” and topping out at the once unimaginable #7, “The President of the United States is a Russian Agent.”

After the latest disclosures, we’re steadily into Scenario #5, and can easily imagine #6.

The Cohen and Manafort court documents all provide new details, revelations, and hints of more to come. They’re a reminder, also, that Mueller’s investigation continues alongside an investigation by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York that clearly alleges that Donald Trump participated in a felony, directing Cohen to violate campaign finance laws to cover up extramarital affairs.

Through his previous indictments against Russian military intelligence and the Russian Internet Research Agency, Mueller has laid out a criminal conspiracy and espionage campaign approved, according to US intelligence, by Vladimir Putin himself. More recently, Mueller has begun to hint at the long arm of that intelligence operation, and how it connects to the core of the Trump campaign itself.

In fact, what’s remarkable about the once-unthinkable conclusions emerging from the special counsel’s investigation thus far is how, well, normal Russia’s intelligence operation appears to have been as it targeted Trump’s campaign and the 2016 presidential election. What intelligence professionals would call the assessment and recruitment phases seems to have unfolded with almost textbook precision, with few stumbling blocks and plenty of encouragement from the Trump side.

Mueller’s court filings, when coupled with other investigative reporting, paint a picture of how the Russian government, through various trusted-but-deniable intermediaries, conducted a series of “approaches” over the course of the spring of 2016 to determine, as Wittes says, whether “this is a guy you can do business with.”

The answer, from everyone in Trumpland—from Michael Cohen in January 2016, from George Papadopoulos in spring 2016, from Donald Trump, Jr. in June 2016, from Michael Flynn in December 2016—appears to have been an unequivocal “yes.”

Former federal prosecutor Ken White concurs at The Atlantic.

And that brings us to brief No. 3: Special Counsel Mueller’s separate sentencing brief in Cohen’s lying-to-Congress case. He does not recommend a sentence but informs the court about the nature of Cohen’s assistance to his office. Mueller discloses that Cohen has “taken significant steps to mitigate his criminal conduct” by pleading guilty to lying to Congress and meeting with the special counsel seven times to discuss his own conduct and other “core topics under investigation.” That includes information about multiple cases of contact between other Trump-campaign officials and the Russian government, and about Cohen’s contact with the White House in 2017 and 2018, suggesting an ongoing inquiry into obstruction of justice. Most significant, the special counsel indicates that Cohen “described the circumstances of preparing and circulating his response to the congressional inquiries, while continuing to accept responsibility for the false statements within it.” That statement suggests that the special counsel believes that someone in the Trump administration knew of, and approved in advance, Cohen’s lies to Congress. That’s explosive, and potentially impeachable if Trump himself is implicated.

The president said on Twitter that Friday’s news “totally clears the President. Thank you!” It does not. Manafort and Cohen are in trouble, and so is Trump. The special counsel’s confidence in his ability to prove Manafort a liar appears justified, which leaves Manafort facing what amounts to a life sentence without any cooperation credit. The Southern District’s brief suggests that Cohen’s dreams of probation are not likely to come true. All three briefs show the special counsel and the Southern District closing in on President Trump and his administration. They’re looking into campaign contact with Russia, campaign-finance fraud in connection with paying off an adult actress, and participation in lying to Congress. A Democratic House of Representatives, just days away, strains at the leash to help. The game’s afoot.

Ryan Goodman and Andy Wright at Just Security provide this analysis that the Russian contacts with Trump are pervasive and that Trump has most likely been involved with them for years.

The Special Counsel’s sentencing memorandum for Cohen very deliberately tells the public that Trump himself was caught up in the connections to and embrace with Russia, and some of those actions were in fact the candidate’s idea. The Special Counsel’s memo says that it was Trump’s idea to initiate contact with the Kremlin in the early stages of the campaign, and that he tasked his fixer, Cohen, to begin that process as early as September 2015. This information should now inform how we think about other subsequent events in the Trump-Russia timeline. At least some Russian overtures should be seen as a potential second step (a receptive response) in the two side’s engagement, not the first step (an initial overture or invitation).

This is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Mueller specifically refers to “examples” of Cohen’s and Trump’s actions, indicating these instances are representative of a broader set of cases. Mueller’s brief states that Cohen “corrected other false and misleading statements that he had made concerning his outreach to and contacts with Russian officials during the course of the campaign. For example, in a radio interview ….” And the brief states that: “the defendant provided information about his own contacts with Russian interests during the campaign and discussions with others in the course of making those contacts. For example, and as described above, the defendant provided a detailed account of his involvement and the involvement of others in the Moscow Project …”

As one of us has written previously, a key question is not just whether the Russians interfered in the GOP primary, but whether any collusion with the Trump campaign began back then. Mueller’s sentencing memorandum for Cohen adds significant evidence to suggest that’s what happened. Two of the examples Mueller chooses to include in the document occurred early in the primaries. By September 2015, Cohen publicly suggested a meeting between Putin and Trump after having “conferred with Individual 1 about contacting the Russian government before reaching out to gauge Russia’s interest in such a meeting.” In November 2015, a Russian national who identified themselves as a “trusted person” in the Russian Federation reached out to Cohen proposing such a meeting with Putin and offering the campaign support in the form of “political synergy.” The only reason Cohen declined is because already by thenhe considered Felix Sater, with whom he was arrange the Moscow Trump Tower project, provided sufficient “connections to the Russian government.”

What’s more, these interactions may also shed light on other aspects of the publicly known timeline. First, when senior campaign officials appeared to brush away some overtures by Russian agents (think: Kushner at the time of the NRA convention), it may have been because they considered other established connections with the Kremlin sufficient. Second, these earlier interactions with Trump and Cohen may also shed light on Rob Goldstone’s email to Donald Trump Jr. In the first email on June 3, 2016, Goldstone’s message appeared to pick up mid-conversation and assume Trump Jr. already knew about Kremlin efforts to help Trump get elected. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Goldstone wrote.

And Paul Waldman at the Washington Post suggests that the endgame for Trump is now upon us.

One of the remarkable things about the discussion we've been having lately is that the president still seems to think that he can be saved from whatever this investigation uncovers. He just announced that William Barr will be his next attorney general, and the New York Times reported that in private, "Mr. Trump has also repeatedly asked whether the next pick would recuse himself from overseeing the special counsel investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Russia in its interference in the 2016 election." It's as though he thinks this investigation is in its early stages and can be quashed by a properly loyal underling.

But at this point it doesn't matter. It's far too late. Trump's former aides have cooperated, they've conducted their interviews with the special counsel, they're being sentenced, the documents have been reviewed, the connections have been traced, and the full picture is soon to be revealed.

This scandal can’t be hidden away. Republicans in Congress can’t save Trump, his attorney general can’t save him, and no amount of desperate tweets can save him. Accountability is on its way, and it’s arriving very soon.

I continue to say that the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump will be a political matter, not a legal one.  The only way Trump is forced from office is that like with Nixon, the political situation becomes untenable for him.  Robert Mueller can lay down as much of the case as he wants to, but the reality is unless there are 67 United States senators willing to remove Trump, nothing matters.

We are not at that point.

Yet.

Caught Dead To Rights

Mother Jones reporter Mike Spies catches the NRA in what definitely looks like illegal advertising coordination with the Trump campaign, to the tune of $30 million in in-kind advertising.

The National Rifle Association spent $30 million to help elect Donald Trump—more than any other independent conservative group. Most of that sum went toward television advertising, but a political message loses its power if it fails to reach the right audience at the right time. For the complex and consequential task of placing ads in key markets across the nation in 2016, the NRA turned to a media strategy firm called Red Eagle Media.

One element of Red Eagle’s work for the NRA involved purchasing a slate of 52 ad slots on WVEC, the ABC affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia, in late October 2016. The ads targeted adults aged 35 to 64 and aired on local news programs and syndicated shows like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. In paperwork filed with the Federal Communications Commission, Red Eagle described them as “anti-Hillary” and “pro-Trump.”

The Trump campaign pursued a strikingly similar advertising strategy. Shortly after the Red Eagle purchase, as Election Day loomed, it bought 33 ads on the same station, set to air during the same week. The ads, which the campaign purchased through a firm called American Media & Advocacy Group (AMAG), were aimed at precisely the same demographic as the NRA spots, and often ran during the same shows, bombarding Norfolk viewers with complementary messages.

The two purchases may have looked coincidental; Red Eagle and AMAG appear at first glance to be separate firms. But each is closely connected to a major conservative media-consulting firm called National Media Research, Planning and Placement. In fact, the three outfits are so intertwined that both the NRA’s and the Trump campaign’s ad buys were authorized by the same person: National Media’s chief financial officer, Jon Ferrell.

“This is very strong evidence, if not proof, of illegal coordination,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission. “This is the heat of the general election, and the same person is acting as an agent for the NRA and the Trump campaign.”

Reporting by The Trace, which has teamed up with Mother Jones to investigate the NRA’s political activity, shows that the NRA and the Trump campaign employed the same operation—at times, the exact same people—to craft and execute their advertising strategies for the 2016 presidential election. The investigation, which involved a review of more than 1,000 pages of Federal Communications Commission and Federal Election Commission documents, found multiple instances in which National Media, through its affiliates Red Eagle and AMAG, executed ad buys for Trump and the NRA that seemed coordinated to enhance each other.

The NRA and the Trump campaign both bought similar message ads at the same time in the same television markets, approved by the same person, and it happened multiple times throughout the 2016 campaign season.  Pretty much illegal campaign coordination 101 here, an open and shut case.

And considering how badly the NRA is doing in its finances, with Mueller's team breathing down their necks over Maria Butina, well, you can bet things are only going to get worse for the NRA.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Liar Liar Edition

So turns out Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are a really, really, really bad liars.  And now, we know what the two of them were lying about.

Federal prosecutors on Friday accused Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, of lying to them about his contacts with Trump administration officials and other issues, including his interactions with Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a Russian tied to Moscow’s intelligence services.

After signing a plea agreement in September, Mr. Manafort “stated he had no direct or indirect communications with anyone in the administration while they were in the administration and that he never asked anyone to try to communicate a message to anyone in the administration on any subject matter,” prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, wrote in a memo to Judge Amy Berman Jackson of United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

But, they said, Mr. Manafort hid information from them about his contacts with Trump administration officials, telling “multiple discernible lies — these were not instances of mere memory lapses.”

They also accused Mr. Manafort of lying about a $125,000 transfer of funds.

Mr. Mueller’s team has left open the possibility that it could file new charges for lying against Mr. Manafort. Mr. Manafort’s lawyers say he believes he was honest during his interviews with them.

Mr. Mueller’s office also filed a recommendation for the sentencing of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, alongside a scathing attack from prosecutors in Manhattan who rejected Mr. Cohen’s request to avoid a prison term and accused him of using his power and influence “for deceptive ends.”

The prosecutors sought about four years in prison for Mr. Cohen when he is sentenced next week for lying to Congress about the extent of Mr. Trump’s business dealings in Moscow, as well as for campaign finance violations and other charges.

The Manafort stuff is bad enough, but the real fun is Cohen. The Cohen filing by federal prosecutors in New York, also out today, is of particular interest because once again, it indicates that Donald Trump committed a felony.

Mr. Cohen, 52, is to be sentenced in Manhattan next week for two separate guilty pleas: one for campaign finance violations and financial crimes charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, and the other for lying to Congress in the Russia inquiry, filed by the Office of the Special Counsel in Washington.

Prosecutors in Manhattan said the crimes Mr. Cohen had committed marked “a pattern of deception that permeated his professional life,” and though he was seeking a sentence of no jail time for providing assistance to the government, he did not deserve much leniency.

In a lengthy memo to the judge, William H. Pauley III, prosecutors wrote that Mr. Cohen was motivated by “personal greed” and had a “rose-colored view of the seriousness of the crimes.”

They once again emphasized that Mr. Cohen had implicated the president in his guilty plea, writing that Mr. Cohen “played a central role” in a scheme to purchase the silence of two women who claimed to have affairs with Mr. Trump, so they would not speak publicly during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” the prosecutors wrote. “Individual-1” is how Mr. Trump is referred to in the document.

Mr. Cohen’s actions “struck a blow to one of the core goals of the federal campaign finance laws: transparency,” the prosecutors wrote, adding that he “sought to influence the election from the shadows.”

Cohen also copped to dealing with the Russians on Trump's behalf to arrange a meeting with Putin as early as November 2015.

In November 2015, as discussions about a possible Trump Tower Moscow project were gaining momentum, Mr. Cohen told prosecutors he was approached by a Russian claiming to be a “‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation,” who offered “synergy on a government level” with the Trump campaign.

The individual, who was not named, pushed for a meeting between Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Such a meeting, he said, could have a “‘phenomenal’ impact ‘not only in political but in a business dimension as well.’”

BuzzFeed News reports the unnamed Russian individual is Russian bodybuilder Dmitri Klokov, who was introduced to Cohen by Ivanka Trump in a story they broke back in June.

Amid intense scrutiny of contacts between Donald Trump's inner circle and representatives of Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump's name has barely come up. But during the campaign, she connected her father’s personal lawyer with a Russian athlete who offered to introduce Donald Trump to Putin to facilitate a 100-story Trump tower in Moscow, according to emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News and four sources with knowledge of the matter.

There is no evidence that Ivanka Trump’s contact with the athlete — the former Olympic weightlifter Dmitry Klokov — was illegal or that it had anything to do with the election. Nor is it clear that Klokov could even have introduced Trump to the Russian president. But congressional investigators have reviewed emails and questioned witnesses about the interaction, according to two of the sources, and so has special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, according to the other two.

The contacts reveal that even as her father was campaigning to become president of the United States, Ivanka Trump connected Michael Cohen with a Russian who offered to arrange a meeting with one of the US’s adversaries — in order to help close a business deal that could have made the Trump family millions.

These interactions also shed new light on Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer and fixer, who is under criminal investigation and who played a key role in many of Donald Trump’s biggest deals — including the audacious effort to build Europe’s tallest tower in the Russian capital.

Ahh, but now we know from today's filing that the Klokov meeting absolutely did have to do with the election, and of course the Trump Tower Moscow project, which Cohen has now admitted to lying about.  And from the Cohen filing by Mueller, we know Cohen cooperated on matters involving "discrete Russia-related matters" and the Trump Organization, namely Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr. and how they relate to the Russia mess.

This is far from over, of course.  Again, the big takeaway is Cohen in the filing saying he committed major campaign finance violations by paying hush money to two of Trump's mistresses, and that he did it with and at the direction of "individual-1" who of course is Donald Trump, and that the Trump Organization issued fraudulent invoices to Cohen for the payments.

That's conspiracy to commit a felony, guys.

Stay tuned.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

While we're waiting on the big Mueller info dump this evening involving Michael Cohen's plea deal and Paul Manafort's non-compliance in his deal, we now have a pretty good idea of what Donald Trump's last straw moment was with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, as it appears Kelly is singing along with Mueller's tune as well.

White House chief of staff John Kelly was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller's team in recent months, three people with knowledge of the matter told CNN.

Kelly responded to a narrow set of questions from special counsel investigators after White House lawyers initially objected to Mueller's request to do the interview earlier this summer, the sources said. Kelly is widely expected to leave his position in the coming days and is no longer on speaking terms with President Donald Trump, CNN reported earlier Friday. 

Kelly is the latest high-ranking White House official known to provide information for Mueller's investigation, though his interview marks a departure of sorts since Kelly didn't join the White House until July 2017. Most of the dozens of other interviews have been with people who were associated with the Trump campaign, were part of the transition or served in the early part of the administration.

The Mueller questions to Kelly centered on a narrow set of issues in the investigation of potential obstruction of justice, chiefly Kelly's recollection of an episode that took place after new reporting emerged about how the President had tried to fire Mueller. The President was angry at then-White House counsel Don McGahn about what had been reported by The New York Times. McGahn had refused to publicly deny the reporting. The special counsel wanted to try to corroborate McGahn's version of events. 

The White House counsel's office had initially fought the Mueller request. One source familiar with the matter said that Emmett Flood wanted to make sure "ground rules" were negotiated.

If Kelly is answering questions about the attempted firing of Robert Mueller as an obstruction of justice issue, then Trump knows he's dead meat, and Kelly is a fired man walking, and everyone knows it.

Stay tuned.  More on the Mueller info dump later.

The Adults In The Room Are Grounded

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is out of time and Donald Trump is out of patience as it appears Kelly is the next regime staffer staked out on the tracks for the careening Trump train to run over on the way off the cliff.

John Kelly is expected to resign as White House chief of staff in the coming days, two sources familiar with the situation unfolding in the West Wing tell CNN. 

Seventeen months in, Kelly and President Donald Trump have reached a stalemate in their relationship and it is no longer seen as tenable by either party. Though Trump asked Kelly over the summer to stay on as chief of staff for two more years, the two have stopped speaking in recent days. 

Trump is actively discussing a replacement plan, though a person involved in the process said nothing is final right now and ultimately nothing is final until Trump announces it. Potential replacements include Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff, who is still seen as a leading contender. 

The expected departure would end a tumultuous tenure for Kelly, who was brought on to bring order to the White House but whose time as chief of staff has often been marked by the same infighting and controversy that has largely defined Trump's presidency from its beginning. Many of the storms in which Kelly became embroiled were by his own making. 

CNN reported last month that Trump was considering potential replacements for several senior positions in his administration as part of a post-midterms staff shakeup. 

News of Kelly's imminent departure was first reported by Axios.

Yes, Kelly has been "fired" before, so many times it feels like he should be managing the Yankees in the 80's, so who knows if this one actually sticks.  Still, it feels like this time is the one where Trump actually does tell Kelly to hit the bricks.

Of course, Trump is also expected to announce replacements for UN Ambassador and Attorney General today as well, along with new WH legal counsel Pat Cipollone replacing Don McGahn starting Monday, so we'll see if the new "adults" fare better than the old ones.

Spoilers: they won't.