Sorry for the long radio silence. I was derailed by family emergency, but now I’m back and trying to catch up on what I missed. Getting back into the news cycle reminds me that there are:

• 10 federal criminal investigations,
• 8 state and local investigations, and
• 11 congressional investigations

into Trump, his family and business, and his associates. It reminds me that indictments continue to come down, trials are coming up, and Trump continues to interfere with witness testimony in ongoing investigations. And it reminds me that we’re still separating families at the border, and keeping kids separated from the U.S. families instead of releasing them into their custody.

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending June 23…

Russia:

1. The House Judiciary Committee questions Hope Hicks, who, under White House orders, refuses to answer any questions about conduct during the presidential transition and about the White House, including minutia, like where her office was located and other publicly available information.

• • Trump accuses House Democrats of putting Hicks “through hell.” For one day of questioning? Really? I refer you to Hillary’s 11-hour hearing.
  • You can read her testimony here.

2. Felix Sater is scheduled to testify to the House Intelligence Committee about the Trump Tower Moscow project, but he doesn’t show up. So the committee issues him a subpoena.

• • Sater worked with Michael Cohen on the Trump Tower project (he actually worked on two different Trump Tower Moscow projects).
  • Sater says he’s been sick and slept through his alarm. He also says he’ll answer every single question.

3. Prosecutors accuse Roger Stone of violating his gag order (yet again) through social media posts.
4. A top aide to former White House Counsel Don McGahn is scheduled to testify to Congress, but the White House is expected to block her from doing so. Annie Donaldson has a special agreement to provide written answers since she’s pregnant.

Legal Fallout:

1. Federal authorities are investigating Deutsche Bank yet again, this time for violating laws against money laundering. The investigation includes the bank’s handling of suspicious activity reports, and also covers several other banks.
2. A federal court unseals text messages used as evidence between Paul Manafort and Sean Hannity, revealing a tight and ongoing relationship between the two. There’s legal advice, flattery, and persecution complexes throughout. They show Hannity was giving Manafort news time and credibility all along. Take a look – it’s an interesting read.
3. Jeffrey Rosen, the top deputy to Attorney General William Barr, intervenes for Paul Manafort to prevent him from being moved to Rikers, where most federal inmates facing state charges are held. He’ll await trial at a federal prison instead.
4. The Office of Special Counsel (not to be confused with Mueller’s office) just found that Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act multiple times in multiple ways. This week, another watchdog group files a complaint against Ivanka for violating the act.

Courts/Justice:

1. The Supreme Court rules that you can be tried at both the state and federal levels for the same crimes, and that it doesn’t conflict with the double jeopardy clause in the Constitution, which prevents you from being tried for the same thing twice.

• • This is relevant right now with the idea of pardons being floated by Trump and his associates. Trump can only pardon at the federal level, and this ruling allows states to pick up investigations into crimes that otherwise could’ve been pardoned.

2. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court rules that the lame duck special session called by outgoing state Republican legislators was constitutional, so the bills they passed in a last-ditch effort to limit the powers of the new Democratic governor will take effect.

Healthcare:

1. While warming up the crowd at his Dad’s re-election campaign kickoff rally, Donald Trump, Jr., makes fun of Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden for his cancer “moon shot” (Biden’s promise to cure cancer).
2. And then Trump promises he’ll cure cancer and AIDS if he gets re-elected. He promises he’ll “come up with the cures to many, many problems, to many, many diseases.” It’s worth noting that he’d have to reverse several of his policies to do this.
3. Once again, Trump takes credit for a veteran’s health care bill that Obama signed into law five years ago, the Veterans Choice program.
4. A federal appeals courts rules that Trump’s gag rule on women’s reproductive health can take effect immediately across the country. Now any medical facility that provides abortions or referrals to abortions can’t receive Title X funding.
5. After a few weeks of the state of Missouri forcing doctors to perform unnecessary and invasive medical procedures prior to performing an abortion, doctors fight back and say they won’t do it. So Missouri refuses to renew the license for the state’s last abortion provider. However, a judge’s order allows the facility to remain open.
6. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program tracks consumer claims of harm from vaccinations. Out of 126 million vaccinations over the past 12 years, 284 people have made claims of damage, and about half of those claims were dismissed. That’s about a .00011% chance of harm of any kind.

International:

1. In another example of poor vetting, Patrick Shanahan resigns and withdraws from the confirmation process for Secretary of Defense. His background check showed his family to be involved in multiple counts of domestic violence, with the violence coming from him, his wife, and his son.
2. The White House then announces that Trump will nominate Army Secretary Mark Esper to be Secretary of Defense.
3. A UN investigator of the Jamal Khashoggi murder says we need to sanction and freeze assets of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. She says we’re not doing enough in the face of credible evidence that MbS was involved in the killing. Her report gives new details that spread the blame beyond the 11 currently on trial.
4. The Republican-led Senate passes three measure blocking the sale of $8.1 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia. Trump will likely veto this, because he wants to sell them the weapons regardless of their guilt in the Khashoggi case.
5. Trump and Republicans have long complained that the JCPOA (Iran deal) wasn’t working. Looking back, Iran never came close to breaking the deal before Trump broke our promise to the JCPOA; but now that we’ve pulled out, Iran is on schedule to pass the JCPOA-defined limits on their uranium stockpile within the next week.

• • Iran says they won’t let that happen if Europe promises to fight Trump’s economic sanctions against Iran.

6. Trump says he’ll send 1,000 more U.S. troops to the Middle East because of what he calls hostile behavior by Iran and its proxies. The Pentagon backs that up.
7. Trump tweets about new sanctions added against Iran, but it turns out there weren’t any. But then later sanctions were announced, so maybe it was just a timing thing.
8. Following recent attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) says we should launch a retaliatory strike against Iran.
9. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggests that Iran has ties to Al Qaeda. He wants to use this to justify allowing the Trump administration to start a war with Iran (using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force).
10. Tucker Carlson, of all people, compares Pompeo’s assertion that Iran attacked the tankers to when Colin Powell claimed erroneously that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
11. Iran’s military claims responsibility for shooting down an American drone. Iran says the drone violated its territorial airspace, but the U.S. claims it was in international airspace.
12. Trump approves a military attack against Iran in retaliation for the drone. But then he pulls back at the last minute, because (according to the White House) he had just learned that 150 people might die. I’m sure we all realize that a casualty report is given long before a strike is approved.

• • There’s some dispute over whether the planes were actually already in the air by the time Trump rescinded the order. He claims they weren’t, but military officials say they were.

13. Trump sent Iran a warning via Oman to warn them that an attack was imminent.
14. Fox & Friends say it was weak to rescind the order to attack.
15. Putin says military conflict with Iran would be a catastrophe, and that he believes Iran is complying with the JCPOA. He says this just hours before Trump calls off the retaliatory strike.
16. The White House didn’t notify the succession to the presidency of the plans to strike Iran (specifically Nancy Pelosi, who’s second in line behind Mike Pence).

Family Separation:

1. Here’s the winner of the week’s gaslighting award. In an interview with Telemundo, Trump tells us that Obama is responsible for the family separation and Trump is the one who’s fixing it and bringing families together. Seriously. He really said this.

• • In 2018, Jeff Sessions announced the zero tolerance policy in a press conference. In the interview, Trump defends the zero tolerance policy while claiming he’s bringing families together.

• • The program was only ended because the ACLU and other activist groups sued the DHS.
  • The only reason any families were unified at all is that the ACLU and other activist groups sued for it.
  • They are still separating families at the borders! How else do you think we ended up with toddlers in a detainment camp for unaccompanied minors? In fairness, some are the children of minor girls, but not all of them are.
  • More debunking can be found here and here and here and here. I could go on, but I shouldn’t have to.

2. Immigration lawyers visit a child detention center at the border and interview children who were dirty and sick, living in overcrowded rooms, and sleeping on concrete floors. They had to force the facility to send four toddlers with fevers, coughs, vomiting, and diarrhea to the hospital.

• • The lawyers noticed one little girl had a bracelet with a phone number and “U.S. parent” written on it. They dialed the phone number and found her parents. No one had even bothered to try the number before that.
  • And just a reminder, we’re all paying $750 per day to the businesses that run the private prisons that house each and every one of these children who could be released to family in the U.S.

3. A federal attorney sets off a shitstorm by arguing in front of incredulous circuit court judges that children in detainment camps are being held in safe and sanitary conditions with no soap, no diapers, no toothpaste, and only a hard concrete floor to sleep on.
4. And then Alexandria Ocasio Cortez sets off a new shitstorm by calling detainment centers “concentration camps” (which by definition, they are; and holocaust experts agree and agree).
5. After all this, the Trump administration moves some of the children out of the overcrowded detention centers, but they run out of places to move them to, so some end up returning.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. Trump announces that ICE will remove millions of undocumented immigrants over the weekend, spreading panic through immigrant neighborhoods. He then reduces that estimate to thousands of immigrants, with ICE ultimately cancelling the raids altogether because, according to Acting ICE Director Mark Morgan, “someone” leaked information about the raids.

• • Trump says he’ll delay the raids for two weeks so Congress can work out a solution. I’m not sure what solution he’s looking for here.
  • Pelosi called Trump two days before the planned raid to ask him to halt the operation.

2. BTW, the number of migrant families crossing the southern border is decreasing again, as is the number of arrests. Even though ICE is increasing deportations, they’re still deporting fewer than in the first years under Obama.
3. Mitch McConnell says that we paid for the sin of slavery by fighting the Civil War, by passing civil rights legislation, and ultimately by electing a black president. He needs to review the generational effects of having property confiscated, running freeways and railways through neighborhoods, being denied the same loans and assistance that are given to white people, forced segregation, and white flight. But, sure. A black president. That makes up for ALL that Jim Crow shit.
4. The Trump administration announces that they’re permanently cutting off aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador; the three countries where most of our asylum seekers come from. The administration says they’ll resume aid when they see these countries taking concrete steps to stop people from leaving those countries for the U.S.

• • Let’s just file that one under “What could possibly go wrong?”

5. In 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the Central Park Five to be put to death. The Central Park Five were erroneously found guilty of the brutal beating and rape of the central park jogger, but they were exonerated in 2002 after someone else confessed and DNA tests proved it.

• • The five were all 16 or under at the time, and were all convicted on coerced confessions. Four are black and one is Latino.
  • Trump refuses to apologize for taking out the ad, saying you have people on both sides of that. How can there be a good person on the side of wrongful imprisonment?
  • When the city of New York settled with the five for $41 million, Trump called the settlement a disgrace. Watch “When They See Us” on Netflix to understand this whole thing fully.

6. Journalist E. Jean Carroll releases an excerpt of her new book where she accuses Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf dressing room in the 1990s. Trump denies it, using a defense he’s used before, “she’s not my type.” He also says he doesn’t know Carroll, though photos of them together have surfaced.

Climate:

1. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announces the Trump administration’s replacement for Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The new plan ends rules put in place by the Obama administration to combat climate change, including:

• • Scaling back tailpipe emission standards.
  • Removing state targets for reducing carbon emissions.
  • Removing regulations for carbon emissions from coal-powered plants.
  • Limiting the federal government’s ability to set carbon emission standards.

2. Wheeler says the new plan might lead to new coal plants opening in the U.S. He also says that carbon emissions dropped by 14% between 2005 and 2017, but neglects to mention that they started to rise again in 2018.
3. An EPA report last year claimed that this plan would result in 300 to 1,500 more deaths annually due to climate-related illnesses.
4. At least seven State Attorney Generals say they’ll try to block the Clean Power Plan changes in court.
5. Meanwhile, back in real science, the Arctic permafrost isn’t so permanent under climate change. Scientists find that it’s thawing 70 years earlier than they had predicted.
6. Air quality in the U.S. has been improving over the past few decades, but the past two years both saw more unhealthy air days than the average from 2013 through 2016.
7. A federal court rules that an environmental review must be performed for Cadiz Inc. to build a pipeline designed to remove water from the Mojave Trails National Park aquifer for city usage. The judge says Trump’s waiver of the review is illegal.

• • Cadiz claimed they could remove the water under an obscure law waiving environmental review if the water is used for railroad purposes. They claimed that some of the water would be used to power a steam engine.
  • Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration rejected that argument and ordered a review. The Trump administration reversed that decision after David Barnhardt was appointed to be Deputy Interior Secretary (he’s now Interior Secretary). Barnhardt was a lobbyist for Cadiz. Draining the swamp, right?

8. The Department of Agriculture has been burying federal studies that show the impacts of climate change. The studies by the Agricultural Research Service are peer-reviewed. Some of their findings include:

• • Rice loses vitamins in an environment containing too much carbon.
  • Climate change exacerbates allergies.
  • Climate change will reduce the quality of grasses used to feed livestock.

9. 70 medical and public health organizations call climate change a health emergency, and produce policy recommendations that are in conflict with Trump’s policies.
10. Mike Pence says that the Trump administration will always follow the science on climate change. Huh? See all the above. He also refuses to acknowledge that climate change is a legitimate national threat (which the military has long been saying).

Budget/Economy:

1. Mexico becomes the first country to ratify the updated NAFTA (or as Trump calls it, the USMCA).
2. A bipartisan group of Congressional leaders meet to discuss deals to prevent automatic budget cuts this fall. If they don’t reach an agreement, $125 billion will be cut from Pentagon and domestic spending.
3. Earlier this year Trump talked about firing Jerome Powell over interest rates, and the White House looking into demoting him. The day before the Fed announces its interest rate decision this week, Trump publicly says he’ll wait to see what Powell does before demoting him. That threat isn’t even thinly veiled. History 101: The Fed supposed to be completely independent from the executive branch.

Elections:

1. Trump kicks off his re-election campaign in Orlando, FL. Not surprisingly, he gave a campaign speech that was crazy AF, so much so I can’t even track all the lies (I’ll let PBS do it for me). Also, he really, really hates Democrats.
2. Roy Moore announces, with little Republican support, that he’ll run for Senate in Alabama again to win Democrat Doug Jones’ seat.
3. The Supreme Court rules against Virginia’s Republican-led House of Delegates, keeping in place the redrawn district lines that fixed the previous lines gerrymandered by the GOP. SCOTUS upholds a lower court’s ruling that the GOP lines were racially gerrymandered. Sadly, SCOTUS once more avoided ruling on the constitutionality of gerrymandering by ruling that the House didn’t have cause to sue.

Miscellaneous:

1. The father of one of the Sandy Hook victims wins a defamation lawsuit against the author of “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.” The publisher also pulls the books and apologizes to settle a claim against them. The publisher, Dave Gahary, says his conversations with the father have led him to believe that people actually did die. I’m speechless.

• • Just a reminder that these families have been harassed by Sandy Hook deniers ever since it happened, sometimes moving to get away from it but it never works. That’s why they’ve launched a slew of lawsuits against the offenders, including Alex Jones. And it finally seems to be working.
  • In a separate case against Alex Jones, a Connecticut judge sanctions Jones for a “despicable” tirade against the attorney’s representing Sandy Hook families. Jones accuses them of placing malware on his computer that, in turn, planted child pornography on InfoWars servers. WOW. The child pornography was discovered when InfoWars turned over evidence to the court.

2. Trump appears to threaten a journalist with imprisonment over a photograph of a letter from Kim Jong Un.
3. Someone leaks vetting documents from the Trump transition team to Axios. Some of that vetting was outsourced to the Republican National Committee. Here are a few highlights (file them under “Drain That Swamp!”):

• • Trump announced many of his nominees without a full FBI background check or a vetting from the Office of Government Ethics.
  • There’s an entire section of allegations of former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s coziness with big energy companies.
  • Multiple sections on former Health and Human services Secretary Tom Price criticize his management ability and his House Budget Committee leadership (calling it dysfunctional and divisive).
  • Mick Mulvaney said that Trump is not a very good person, among other things.
  • Rudy Giuliani has a whole separate document about his business ties and foreign entanglements.
  • The transition team flagged General David Petraeus because he’s opposed to torture.
  • Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, has Russia ties that go deep.
  • Kris Kobach, who later headed Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity, has ties to white supremacist groups.
  • Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley once said that Trump is everything we “teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.”
  • Seema Verma, appointed to Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was at one time advising Indiana on how to spend Medicaid funds while at the same time representing a client that received those very funds.
  • Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has both business and family conflicts of interest.
  • Ryan Zinke once called Trump “undefendable.”
  • Rick Perry called Trumpism “a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition.”
  • People doing the vetting say they didn’t even know what job they were vetting people for.

Polls:

1. The number of Democrats who want to begin impeachment hearings rose from 59% in April to 67% this week. This just tells me that enough people have still not read the report.